But the frustration of the settlers did not last very long. As revealed in The Law in These Parts, an engrossing new Israeli documentary making its American debut at the Sundance Film Festival, just hours after the ruling was handed down, Ariel Sharon, a keen supporter of the settlement project who was then Israel’s Minister of Agriculture, organized a meeting to discuss how to circumvent it. Alexander Ramati, then a legal advisor to the West Bank military command, raised his hand to tell Sharon about an Ottoman concept known as “Mawat land.” The Ottomans, who had controlled Palestine until World War I, had used the term to designate land far enough from any neighboring village that a crowing rooster perched on its edge could not be heard. Under Ottoman law, if such land was not cultivated for three years it was “mawat”—dead —and reverted to the empire. “With or without your rooster, be at my office at 8:00 in the morning,” Sharon told Ramati, who was soon crisscrossing the West Bank in the cockpit of a helicopter, identifying tens of thousands of uninhabited acres that could be labeled “state land” and made available to settlers, notwithstanding the Geneva Convention’s prohibition on moving civilians into occupied territory. In the years that followed, a string of new settlements was built on this territory, eventually prompting another challenge before the Israeli High Court. This time, the Court denied the challenge, ruling that settlement construction was permissible while Israel served as the temporary custodian of the territory. This provided a legal basis for land expropriation that has since enabled hundreds of thousands of Israelis to relocate to the West Bank.

Surprisingly little is known about the legal apparatus that has enabled and structured the occupation. Filmed in nine days but based on years of archival research,The Law in These Parts aims to expose it. Even before the 1967 Six-Day War, the film reveals, officers in the army’s legal corps drew up guidelines for a separate system of laws that could be applied to territory under IDF control, rules they were convinced could strike a balance between order and justice. But by the time the first Palestinian Intifada erupted in 1987, detention without trial and convictions based on secret evidence had become standard operating procedure in the military courts entrusted with this task. One reason Israel did not simply extend its own laws to the West Bank and Gaza Strip was that doing so would “imply certain things you may not want,” an official in the film explains – in particular, that Palestinians living in the occupied territories were citizens with the same rights as Israelis. (In contrast, Jewish settlers in places like Hebron were spared the military justice system and granted access to civilian courts in Israel.) Director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, an Israeli known for his meticulously researched documentaries, initially planned to make these Palestinians the film’s protagonists. Instead, the documentary focuses on the handful of Israeli legal officials who, working largely in the shadows, set the ground rules for an occupation now in its forty-fifth year.

The architects of this parallel justice system believed that what they were designing was enlightened and progressive, a sentiment some viewers of the film may initially be inclined to share. At the insistence of Meir Shamgar, an elderly man with an august bearing who served as Israel’s Military Advocate General from 1963 to 1968, it was agreed soon after the Six-Day War that Palestinians could appeal cases to Israel’s High Court of Justice. Shamgar, who later served as the High Court’s president, notes that international law did not require Israel to grant Palestinians such access and expresses considerable pride in this. “I hope other countries will emulate the practice,” he says.

Shark de Mayo/thelawfilm.com
A scene from The Law in These Parts

Like all the people interviewed in the film, Shamgar is seated in a black leather chair set behind a desk that is mounted on a stage, an arrangement that makes it easy to imagine him in court, with the gavel – and the power to mete out judgment – in his hands. In the film, of course, this power actually rests with Alexandrowicz, a deft interviewer who patiently draws out his subjects but is not shy about airing his opinions – as, for example, after an exchange with Shamgar about a High Court case in which a Palestinian living near Hebron challenged the expropriation of so-called “state land.” It was Shamgar who presided over the case and who ruled that while international law barred Israel from assuming ownership of the territory, building temporary outposts was permissible. Half-a-million Israelis now live in these “temporary” settlements, notes Alexandrowicz. “Look, I don’t think this is connected to Supreme Court rulings,” says Shamgar, attributing what happened to politics. But Alexandrowicz points out that international law “clearly forbids transferring population from the occupying state to the occupied area.” He asks Shamgar, “Why didn’t the court see this as something it needed to stand up against?” Shamgar glances to the side, a trace of exasperation ruffling his face. “That is a question after the fact,” he says.

“Justice Shamgar doesn’t see the connection between Supreme Court rulings and our settlements in the occupied territories,” Alexandrowicz then says in a voiceover. “But I, the person documenting, see a connection, and I present the rulings and events as I understand them. Because in the world of the film, I rule on what reality is.” As the statement suggests, The Law in These Parts makes no claim to being objective: as the narrative unfolds, it becomes increasingly apparent that the film is putting its subjects on trial before the audience. In another scene, Alexandrowicz interviews a former military judge about a case involving a Palestinian arrested without being told what he’d done wrong. To protect Israel’s sources in the territories, Palestinians often could be shown only a “paraphrase” of the charges against them, the judge explains. And what if the security forces made unreliable accusations? “As a rule, I didn’t doubt what they said,” says the judge. This revealing admission was extracted from an interview that lasted more than three hours. “The viewer is only hearing a ‘paraphrase’ of my interview,” says Alexandrowicz. Here as elsewhere, he slyly anticipates (and thus potentially defuses) the charge that his view is biased, while implicitly raising the same question about the supposedly neutral officials who held sway in courtrooms where the disparity in power, and the absence of objectivity, was far more glaring.

Alexandrowicz’s unsparing inquiry is targeted at Israelis and foreign observers, who trumpet the achievements of Israel’s democracy and the High Court’s willingness to restrain abuses even at the occasional expense of security. The Law in These Parts does not deny that the High Court has successfully put a stop to some abuses in the territories—most notably in a 1999 ruling that barred various methods of physical interrogation (shaking, hooding, and shackling detainees) practiced for years with impunity. Like the 1979 decision on settlements, it infuriated some Israelis on the right, particularly since it came a few years after a wave of suicide bombings. On other occasions, the High Court has issued rulings—requiring, for example, that Israel re-route its security barrier to expropriate less Palestinian land—that the army has refused to enforce. But the film disquietingly suggests that these occasional displays of independence may only serve to foster the illusion of justice even as separate laws for settlers, house demolitions, restrictions on free movement and a host of other unjust policies obtained “a legal seal of approval,” as Ilan Katz, who served as Deputy Military Advocate General from 2000 to 2003, puts it in the film. The Knesset could easily have passed a law barring Palestinians from petitioning the High Court, notes Katz. Why didn’t it? “Because many times the Supreme Court is convenient for the security forces,” he says.

The Law in These Parts appeared in Israel during a period in which many of the organs of an independent civil society – including the civil court system – have been under attack. The repressive climate may explain why the film has generated enormous interest in Israel, screening in more than 100 locations and receiving the prize for best documentary at the 2011 Jerusalem Film Festival. Of course, the warm reception also underscores a paradox: while many Israelis seem open and even sympathetic to critical examinations of the occupation, no political constituency has emerged to challenge the creeping colonization of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which has continued to advance under the Netanyahu government. The film’s subjects have been more sparing with their praise – with one notable exception, a former military judge named Jonathan Livny who has attended some screenings and spoken admiringly about it. At one point in the film, Livny is openly critical of the military courts: “As a military judge, you don’t just represent justice,” he says. “You represent the authorities of the occupation, vis-à-vis a population that sees you as the enemy… It’s an unnatural situation. As long as it’s only temporary, fine. But when it goes on for 40 years? How can the system function? How can it be just?”

It is the closest any of the film’s subjects come to admitting to a troubled conscience, and it made me wonder whether the experience of being cross-examined in the studio had forced Livny to grapple with the compromises he’d made. “Yes,” he told me when I reached him recently by phone, “it’s become an educational moment in my life. It enabled me to sit for three hours and really look inwardly and go through a process of understanding and come to grips, through the questioning, with my emotions, my feelings, with trying to understand the role I played.” I asked him if he ever looked back and thought he should have followed the lead of the hundreds of Israeli soldiers who refused to serve in the occupied territories. “Never,” he said. “Because I realized that if I wouldn’t do it and somebody else would be in my place, that person would not even have the qualms that I showed.” Many of his colleagues viewed the settlements favorably, he told me. Some even lived in them. Few understood Arabic, which he spoke fluently. Still, he said, he regarded the system in which he’d served as a place where cultivating respect for the rule of law was impossible. “It is a kangaroo court.”

We spoke in early January, a week after Israel’s High Court ruled on a petition challenging the right of Israeli companies to mine in eight quarries situated across the Green Line. The materials are sold overwhelmingly to Israelis —“looting the West Bank,” in the words of Dror Etkes, a researcher formerly with the organization Yesh Din, which submitted the complaint—in seemingly clear violation of a provision of the Hague Convention requiring an occupying power to serve only as the “administrator” of such resources. The High Court rejected the challenge, ruling that the occupation has gone on for so long that the situation has acquired certain “unique characteristics.” About this, at least, Ra’anan Alexandrowicz might agree.

1.

Early in July, a group of young Israelis gathered in a small apartment in Tel Aviv to talk about the difficulties of finding affordable places to live in the city. They had come at the invitation of Daphni Leef, a video editor who was about to be evicted from the apartment and who had recently posted an “event” on Facebook summoning people fed up with the housing situation to pitch tents on the streets in protest. Inside Leef’s living room, there was enthusiasm for the idea, but no one expected a big turnout. “We didn’t expect it to last longer than a weekend,” Stav Shafir, a student who was there, told me recently. “I wrote an e-mail to my friends asking them to come, just so that we wouldn’t feel lonely.”

Oded Balilty/AP Images

An Israeli family in a camp set up as part of a protest against the high cost of housing, Tel Aviv, Israel, July 23, 2011

Daphni and her fellow protesters did not feel lonely for long. The first night the tents were pitched—July 14—about 150 people showed up. Within a few days, a sea of tents had spread across the pedestrian walkway bisecting Rothschild Boulevard, a busy street lined with art galleries and cafés. The squatters inside the growing encampment were dismissed at first as spoiled kids from Tel Aviv—”this isn’t a real protest, it’s people eating sushi and smoking nargilahs,” complained David Amar, the mayor of Nesher, a town in northern Israel. Yet similar encampments soon sprang up in places such as Be’er Sheva, a working-class city in the Negev, and Holon, a poorer town south of Tel Aviv.

On July 25, after tens of thousands of Israelis rallied to demand cheaper housing, the newspaper Haaretz announced that the demonstrations had “reached a peak.” Two weeks later, the peak was eclipsed, as an estimated 300,000 people demonstrated in cities across the country, blocking traffic and unfurling a giant banner in Tel Aviv that proclaimed “Egypt is here!”

What some termed the “Israeli summer” bore less resemblance to the so-called Arab Spring than to the economic unrest that has convulsed cities such as Athens and Barcelona recently. “We want a welfare state!” chanted members of a movement that soon had the backing of unions, women’s groups, parents upset about the exorbitant cost of day care, and medical workers on strike over low wages in public hospitals short of resources. The eruption of popular disenchantment and call for a “more just, humane Israel” spelled out in a manifesto released by some of the protesters made the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu suddenly look a lot less stable, not least since the man at its helm has long been a staunch advocate of the laissez-faire economic policies the demonstrators angrily assailed.

By the third week of August, when I met Stav Shafir, the social protests had finally been pushed out of the headlines by news of a terrorist attack in southern Israel that left eight Israelis dead. The violence and ensuing diplomatic crisis with Egypt, which recalled its ambassador after five Egyptian security officers were accidentally killed during an Israeli retaliatory mission, prompted some to demand that the protesters fold up their tents and go home. “Security matters are once again the most pressing issue,” said Likud Knesset member Ayoub Kara—and much to Netanyahu’s relief, some of the protesters believed him. Yet on September 3, an estimated 450,000 Israelis flooded the streets yet again, linking arms and chanting “The people demand social justice!”—which had become the movement’s rallying cry. It was the largest protest in Israeli history.

Some of the tents on Rothschild Boulevard were folded up a few days later, when inspectors dispatched by the Tel Aviv Municipality arrived in the middle of the night to remove them. A judge subsequently issued an injunction stopping the evacuation until the court could discuss the matter. In early October, municipal workers accompanied by border patrolmen and police came back to finish the clearance operation. This time, a court rejected a last-minute appeal from some of the protesters to stave off the tents’ removal, and soon there were no more tents on Rothschild Boulevard.

Although it is too soon to say how the mass demonstrations this summer may alter Israel’s politics, one thing they have already done is challenge the optimistic portrait of the Israeli economy drawn by some analysts in recent years. “Israel has become an astonishing success story,” wrote David Brooks of The New York Times in January 2010, hailing the country’s emergence as a dynamic high-tech center. Brooks based his argument not on conversations with Israelis but on the findings in Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, a book published in 2009 by Dan Senor, a Fox News contributor, and Saul Singer, a columnist at the Jerusalem Post. According to the book, which became a New York Times best seller and was cited by Netanyahu in a speech before the Jewish Federations of North America that year, a spirit of risk-taking improvisation fostered in the army and strengthened by adversity has turned Israel into “the greatest concentration of innovation and entrepreneurship in the world today.”

Israel’s high-tech industry is indeed booming: as Senor and Singer note, more Israeli companies are listed on the NASDAQ than from all the nations in continental Europe combined. Propelled by the export of software and other high-tech products, the economy grew an impressive 5.2 percent last year. But fewer than 10 percent of Israelis work in the high-tech sector. And as suggested by the level of support for the protests this summer, which ranged in polls between 75 and 88 percent, a miracle is not how most Israelis would describe what has happened to their economy in recent years. In the discussion groups that took place every night inside the tent encampments, participants traded stories about struggling to meet their expenses even as they heard ministers boast that the economy was flourishing.

Many complained that the unbridled capitalism embraced by their leaders mainly benefits those at the top, a perception borne out by some findings that do not appear in Start-Up Nation. According to a 2010 report published by the OECD, Israel has the fifth-highest level of inequality in the thirty-four-nation organization. It has the highest poverty rate of any OECD country, and ranks twenty-fifth among developed countries in health care investment.

To Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, where the unemployment rate is 45 percent, Israelis distressed about these facts may still seem enormously privileged. And compared to the average Gazan—or for that matter the average Israeli a couple of generations ago—they are. As Paul Rivlin notes in his survey of Israeli economic history, The Israeli Economy from the Foundation of the State through the 21st Century, after declaring independence in 1948 Israel had to ration basic goods under a strict austerity program. It struggled to absorb hundreds of thousands of new immigrants, who were packed into often squalid transit camps.

But in the decades that followed conditions improved, thanks in part to the inflow of capital from abroad (reparations from Germany, the sale of State of Israel bonds) but also to public investment in infrastructure and education, the development of new industries, and the cultivation of various institutions with openly collectivist aims: cooperative farms and kibbutzim in the agricultural sector, and the Histadrut, a federation of trade unions that also ran the nation’s largest health fund and numerous industrial enterprises. Like the Labor Party that governed Israel between 1948 and 1977, these institutions were always more open to Ashkenazi Jews of European origin than Mizrahi Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, to say nothing of Arabs. But in a nation founded by socialists where roughly 70 percent of the workforce was unionized, an egalitarian ethos prevailed that made Israel among the least stratified countries in the world.

“When I started my sociology studies at Hebrew University in 1961, we were taught that the difference between the income of an executive and a production worker was 2.7, and we were proud of it,” Shlomo Swirski, the academic director of the Adva Center on social equality, a research institute based in Tel Aviv, told me. “Now, a senior executive earns 90 to 95 times what a production worker earns.” A turning point came in 1985, when hyperinflation caused by oil shocks and excessive spending (much of it on military outlays) prompted the adoption of a stabilization plan that entailed deep cuts in government expenditures.

The plan worked, helping to tame inflation and to establish a new ideology that called for privatizing state enterprises, lowering corporate taxes, and shrinking the public sector. Without much domestic opposition or attention from the foreign press, Israel’s highly egalitarian social democratic system gradually gave way to a more entrepreneurial American-style one, a trend accelerated by Netanyahu, a graduate of MIT’s Sloan School of Management who, in 2003, while serving as finance minister, lowered income and corporate taxes while slashing social services.

“Netanyahu cut everything—rent subsidies, assistance to low-income families, child allowances, income maintenances, sharp cuts,” recalled Leah Achdut, an economist who was then deputy head of the National Insurance Institute, which oversees many of Israel’s public welfare programs. By 2003, she told me, public spending had already fallen substantially from the unsustainable levels of the mid-1980s—from roughly 70 to roughly 50 percent of GDP—but the country’s economic leaders were not satisfied. “People said it’s not enough, we have to reduce taxes and government more to encourage the private sector,” said Achdut. “Bibi very much believes this—in this respect, he is entirely American.”

2.

“Swinish capitalism” is how the journalist Ari Shavit described the new system in Israel shortly after the social protests began, and seemingly everywhere one looked this summer—”Bibi you hog, give back the state!” proclaimed a sign that captured the prevailing mood—the sentiment was echoed. Much of the outrage was directed at the group of families who now control an estimated 30 percent of the Israeli economy. The shift to a more entrepreneurial model of capitalism was supposed to breathe competition into sectors of the economy once dominated by the state. But instead of free competition, what many Israelis feel they have gotten is cartel-like oligopolies that control everything from the banking industry to supermarket chains, which pass along inflated costs to consumers who are captive to them.

It is widely believed that, as in Russia, the privatizing of former state enterprises has been greased by cronyism, a form of influence-peddling documented in a film called The Shakshuka System that was screened one night on Rothschild Boulevard. An Israeli version of Roger and Me, the film follows the producer, Miki Rosenthal, around as he poses awkward questions to tight-lipped officials about the sale of state assets at bargain prices to the Ofer family, whose holdings range from shipping to chemicals to natural gas. Some of the officials who refuse to talk to him (and who helped arrange the deals) end up landing jobs with the Ofers.

Such revelations have not been common in the Israeli media in recent years, which is not surprising in light of how many news outlets the country’s richest families now own. While Miki Rosenthal was making his film, the Ofer family purchased a controlling interest in Channel 2, where he was working. Rosenthal soon learned his contract was not being renewed. No commercial network in Israel would broadcast his documentary. It eventually aired on a state-owned channel, along with a counter-video produced by the Ofers.

Inside the tents I visited this summer, I heard much criticism of the undue influence wielded by tycoons. Anger at another influential group that has managed to distort Israel’s economic priorities—Jewish settlers—was notably more muted. The leaders of the movement calling for “social justice” did not draw attention to the daily injustices taking place across the Green Line, in part to avoid alienating potential supporters on the Israeli center and right. At demonstrations, many people told me that the polarizing issues that too often divided the country—the settlements, the occupation—had no connection to the economic protest under way.

The problem, of course, is that there is a connection, as was underscored when forty-two Knesset members and Cabinet ministers sent a letter to Netanyahu urging him to ease the housing crisis by increasing settlement construction in the West Bank. This is indeed what Israel did in the early 1990s, luring newly arriving immigrants across the Green Line with tax benefits and cheap housing while the rest of society was burdened with the hidden costs of the occupation: bypass roads, armored transportation, infrastructure, security.

The calamitous toll the settlement project has taken on Palestinians—stolen land, pilfered water, divided cities—is well known. The burden borne by Israelis, though less familiar and certainly less extreme, has also been immense. In his recent study The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation, Shir Hever, a researcher at the Jerusalem-based Alternative Information Center, estimates that 381 billion Israeli shekels—roughly $100 billion—was spent in the occupied territories between 1970 and 2008, money that could have gone to education, health care, or building more affordable housing in Tel Aviv. Such costs are unfamiliar to many Israelis in part because allocations to the settlements are not specified in state budgets.

Were expenditures on settlements more explicitly recognized, the protesters who took to the streets this summer could potentially achieve something the left has failed to do: convince mainstream Israelis that the occupation is unsustainable. They have already heightened popular awareness of how national priorities are skewed by the military, which consumes one fifth of Israel’s annual budget, an expense that is rarely challenged in Israel. More questions started being raised after the mass demonstrations began. The newspaper Ma’ariv published a story in August about the “lost billions” funneled to the Defense Ministry this year without any oversight or supervision, under a secret agreement with the prime minister’s office. “These lost billions…must be returned to their rightful owners—the average Israeli who works hard for a living,” wrote the journalist Ben Caspit.

3.

Conspicuously absent from the protests this summer were some Israelis who don’t work hard for a living: members of the ultra-Orthodox community. Like Jewish settlers, they are the beneficiaries of government subsidies reserved for politically protected theological pursuits—in their case, full-time Torah study funded by the state in accordance with the wishes of Shas, a religious party that controls a crucial bloc of Knesset seats and secures the benefits on their behalf. Among ultra-Orthodox men, the rate of nonemployment has soared as a result, from 21 percent in 1979 to 65 percent today.

It’s hard not to wonder after the events of this summer how much longer this will be tolerated by Israel’s secular middle class, a part of the population that until recently was viewed as too cynical or disengaged to make its presence felt in the political arena, much less on the streets. “No one could imagine how quickly indifference would turn into involvement,” Tami Zandberg, a city councilwoman who attended many of the demonstrations, told me. Certainly not the Western press, which was curiously silent about a social movement of unprecedented magnitude in a country where minor incidents often make headline news. The sparse coverage of the protests left many Israelis feeling that the outside world pays attention to them only when a bus explodes in Jerusalem or a house is bulldozed in the West Bank.

Yet Western news outlets weren’t alone in not knowing what to make of Israel’s suddenly mobilized middle class. Equally uncertain were many of the country’s poorer citizens, including the roughly one in five Israeli citizens who are Arab. As Ilan Peleg and Dov Waxman document in their new book, Israel’s Palestinians, the poverty rate among Arab-Israelis rose from 35 percent in 1990 to 50–55 percent in recent years, owing partly to the low rate of participation in the work force by Arab women, but also to pervasive discrimination and limited employment opportunities.

No group in Israel stood to benefit more from the emergence of a movement dedicated to social justice. But the Israeli Arabs had good reason to wonder whether the vision guiding the protesters this summer included them, which is why some hesitated to participate. “Many say we shouldn’t join this struggle because it’s the Israeli middle class and we’re not part of the Israeli middle class,” Shahin Nasser told me. A journalist from an Arab neighborhood of Haifa called Wadi Nisnas, Nasser was among the founders of a tent encampment established in the community despite such misgivings. He saw the protests as “an opportunity to raise our voices,” he told me when I visited one night, which is why he’d been paying visits to encampments in Haifa’s Jewish neighborhoods. “I want them to know what it’s like for Arabs here.” I asked him if he thought people were listening. “Yes,” he said, “they are very open.”

The openness was not always on display. At a tent on Rothschild Boulevard one night, I heard a man denounce some Muslim women from neighboring Jaffa who had been invited to talk about the problems in their community (the man, who spoke in Arabic, was an Iraqi Jew). One of the women later told me she’d walked the length of Rothschild Boulevard shortly after the protests began, and come away feeling that there was no place for her there. Yet by mid-August, it was no longer unusual to hear of an Arab speaker talking of injustice at a demonstration and receiving a rousing ovation from a predominantly Jewish crowd. At one protest, poor Arabs from the Jaffa neighborhood of Ajami marched together with poor Jews from a traditionally pro-Likud neighborhood in south Tel Aviv, something few could have imagined back in June.

The demonstrations this summer have also affected the way politicians talk. In a recent interview with Ma’ariv, Tzipi Livni, the leader of the opposition Kadima party, disparaged the “piggish capitalism” embraced by Netanyahu and said he won’t deliver “real change” to the economy. She was vague about how she would change things herself, but Livni was not alone in believing that the committee appointed in early August by Netanyahu to address the protesters’ demands would deliver little that was new. “The government’s economic policy is that of a free market,” Eyal Gabai, Netanyahu’s outgoing director general, bluntly informed activists who demonstrated outside his home one day in August. “This government will not become a welfare state.”

“Bibi Go Home!” many demonstrators chanted this summer, a slogan that predictably drew cheers among the students in Tel Aviv. What is intriguing is that the frustration appeared to extend to working-class towns in Israel that have long tended to support right-wing governments, a pattern dating back to 1977 when Mizrahi Jews, estranged from the Ashkenazi elite that dominated the Labor Party, threw their support behind Menachem Begin. The watershed election that year established a precedent that has yet to be overturned. “The tragedy of Israel is that the poorest people always support the right-wing, which makes their lives miserable economically by reducing welfare, education, housing,” Yehuda Nuriel, a columnist at the newspaper Yediot Ahronot, told me.

A poll conducted by Haaretz in September showed rising support for the Labor Party, whose new leader, Shelly Yachimovich, advocates stronger social welfare policies. Another politician who may benefit from the unrest this summer is Aryeh Deri, an ultra-Orthodox Moroccan Jew who led Shas in the 1990s until he was convicted on corruption charges. Despite his black skullcap and tattered past, Deri is a moderate who, a few months ago, announced his intention to reenter politics by launching a movement that will focus on social issues. Unlike the current leaders of Kadima and the Labor Party, he could potentially appeal not only to the Mizrahi community but also to ultra-Orthodox Jews who realize that finding jobs rather than living on government handouts is in their own best interest. (More than half of the Haredim live below the poverty line and a growing number want to work, as evidenced by the four thousand who turned up at a recent jobs fair in Jerusalem.)

Whether joining the workforce would actually lift them out of poverty is another matter. Wages for most Israelis have stagnated in the past decade, and the ranks of the working poor have grown, thanks in part to the estimated 250,000 migrant laborers from Asia and Africa brought into the country to do menial jobs once performed by Palestinians.

On September 26, the committee formed by Netanyahu in response to the social protests issued a set of recommendations to address inequality that would cost $8 billion over the next five years. The plan, which calls for lowering defense spending, increasing housing subsidies, and providing free education for all children at the age of three (as opposed to the current age of five), was praised by Netanyahu as “a landmark in Israel’s economy and society.” The protesters offered a harsher appraisal, dismissing the proposals as cosmetic reforms that did not go nearly far enough. At a press conference in Tel Aviv, Daphni Leef announced that there would be more demonstrations when the Knesset returned to session in late October.

To judge by the turnout in Tel Aviv on October 15, when several hundred Israelis gathered to express solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Manhattan, and take part in the international Global Day of Action, a second wave of mass demonstrations is unlikely, at least in the short term. The Tel Aviv rally was smaller than the protests that took place in cities such as Rome and Berlin, suggesting a waning of energy and shift to other concerns. The Israeli cabinet approved the $8 billion plan to address inequality, but the news was quickly overshadowed by the deal struck between Hamas and Netanyahu for the release of the abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

Netanyahu surely hopes that by the time elections take place the paramount concern of most Israelis will once again be bitachon—security. But if the protests this summer proved nothing else, it’s that many citizens are no longer waiting for elections to air their grievances or for their leaders to tell them what is important. When Knesset members dropped by the tents this summer to express their (belated) support, the reaction was cool. When the protesters were advised to go home after the violence in August, they refused, not because they didn’t care about security but because the word carried a different meaning to them. “If we don’t have health care, education, housing, a welfare system, we’ll never have security,” Stav Shafir said. “You need to have a strong society to have security, and right now our society is very weak.”

—October 25, 2011

Uriel Sinai/Getty Images-Children at the local school in the village of Ghajar, on Israeli-Lebanese border, which was recaptured during the 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, November 10, 2010

As the story suggests, Egypt’s uprising managed to inspire not only countless young Arabs but also some young Israelis. A contributor to +972, an Israel-based online magazine that features commentary and reporting by mostly young progressives—it is named after the area code shared by Israel and the Palestinian territories—Reider was deeply moved by the courage of the protesters in Cairo and dismayed by the patronizing reaction of many Israelis. “The line the establishment took was that it’s all very nice but they’re going to end up like Iran,” he recalls. “I didn’t take that line because I bothered to read stuff by Egyptians and it quickly became apparent that the Muslim Brotherhood was just one player. It also felt distasteful to me to judge the extraordinary risks Egyptians were taking solely by our profit—by how it would affect Israeli security and the policy of a government I don’t support anyway.”

For observers troubled by Israel’s alarming recent shift to the right, the emergence of Internet-savvy liberal voices like Reider’s may seem heartening. But while such bloggers appear more capable of reaching a younger demographic than Haaretz—the venerable leftist newspaper whose aging readership seems likely to shrink in the years to come—it’s not clear how many of their contemporaries are listening to them. One reason is apathy. Increasingly cynical about politics and the prospects of peace, not a few young Israelis I’ve met in recent years have told me they’ve stopped following the news. When they go online, it’s to chat with friends, not to check out sites like +972.

There are also growing numbers of young Israelis who simply don’t share Reider’s views. Against the 12,000 readers of Kav Hutz were countless others who didn’t question the alarmist tone of their country’s mass-circulation tabloids when the revolt in Egypt began, as NPR discovered when it aired a segment on what Israeli youth thought of the uprising. “For us it is better to have Mubarak,”one young Israeli said. “I kind of feel sad for President Mubarak,” said another.

“For the last two or three years, we’ve been seeing a very consistent trend of younger Israelis becoming increasingly right-wing,” Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion analyst who also contributes to +972, told me. Last year, Scheindlin carried out a survey on behalf of the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative that showed eroding support for democratic values among Israeli youth, at least insofar as the rights of non-Jews go. One question in the survey asked whether there should be “Equal access to state resources, equal opportunities [for] all citizens.” Among Jewish respondents between the ages of 16-29, a mere 43 percent agreed.

Young Israelis also tend to take a hard line on the Palestinian conflict. Having watched their country grow increasingly isolated for prolonging an occupation now in its forty-fourth year, one might expect the younger generation to be pressing for a resolution. But while a small number of young activists have been taking part in regular Friday protests against the expansion of settlements in Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and joining groups like Anarchists Against the Wall, which supports unarmed Palestinian resistance to the occupation, many of their peers oppose making concessions to end the conflict. In October, a poll conducted by New Wave Research asked, “If Palestinians and Israelis reach an agreement… and the Israeli government brings the agreement to a referendum, would you vote for or against?” Among voters over 55, 61 percent—nearly two out of three—said they would support a deal. Among those younger than 35, it was the opposite: only one in three (37 percent) would vote in favor of an agreement.

Such findings seem directly at odds with political attitudes generally, which tend to be more progressive among young people and to become more conservative with age. In a study last year of Americans who entered their teens around the year 2000, for example, the Pew Research Center found that these twenty-somethings voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama and are as a group more liberal, more racially tolerant, less inclined to support aggressive national security policies and more “open to change” than their elders.

One reason tolerance may be less widespread among young Israelis is that they rarely interact with Palestinians or Arab-Israelis. “You don’t see Palestinians on the streets of Israel,” notes Yehuda Shaul, a twenty-eight year-old activist who co-directs the organization Breaking the Silence. “You just don’t see them.” For many young Israelis, their first sustained, daily contact with Palestinians happens during their army service—which, as Breaking the Silence has documented, often exacerbates mutual fear and suspicion. The combat units patrolling the territories are increasingly filled with religious soldiers who share the messianic views of the settlement movement.

The fact that Palestinians in the Gaza Strip chose in 2006 to elect Hamas, whose Charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and foresees Israel’s eventual destruction, hasn’t helped matters. Neither has the collapse of the peace process. Israelis in their late teens and twenties barely remember the hope that greeted the signing of the 1993 Oslo Accords. They do have strong memories of the Second Intifada (2000-2005), when a wave of suicide bombings “managed to obliterate any trust the Israelis had in a political settlement,” as the public opinion analysts Jacob Shamir and Khalil Shikaki observe in their recent study of the violence’s impact. That was followed by Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, which the Israeli right warned would make the country vulnerable and which indeed brought a barrage of Qassam missiles to the border town of Sderot; and the Israeli war with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, in which more than one hundred Israeli soldiers—many of them young—were killed and hundreds more wounded. Throughout this period of escalating bloodshed (much of it at the expense of Gazans and Lebanese, whose perspectives were rarely presented), the popular tabloids and Israel’s leaders converged around the theme of blaming the unraveling of the peace process on Palestinian intransigence. ‘We tried peace and got suicide bombings,’ ‘We left Gaza and got rockets’: these are the slogans young Israelis imbibed as children and teenagers, leading many to view negotiations as dangerous and naïve.

More recently, following the 2008-2009 Gaza War and the deadly raid on a humanitarian aid flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip in May, 2010, actions roundly condemned abroad, Israelis have increasingly emphasized the outside world’s knee-jerk criticism of their government’s conduct. “Young people have been hearing for the last three, four, five years: ‘Everybody hates Israel!’” says Dahlia Scheindlin. “Older people remember the years when people actually liked Israel. They’re more likely to view criticism from the outside as a possibly legitimate critique of Israel’s policies. Young people are basically being told, over and over again, that criticism of Israel is de-legitimization of Israel, because they’re anti-Semites.”

For years Israelis have complained, not without reason, that textbooks used in Palestinian schools have failed to recognize Israel’s existence or to inculcate open-minded attitudes toward Jews among Arab youth. After the terrorist attack earlier this month on a settler family in the West Bank, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to “stop the incitement in schools, textbooks and mosques, and … educate your children for peace, as we are doing.” To judge by the petition signed by 472 high school teachers and sent to the Ministry of Education in December, however, some civics instructors are having trouble instilling the values of peace and tolerance in Israeli children. The subject of the petition was the growing prevalence of bigotry among students, such as an incident where a teenager announced in class that his dream was “to spray Arabs to death,” eliciting applause from his friends. “When we have a discussion in class about equal rights, the class immediately gets out of control,” a civics instructor told the Internet news site Ynet. “The students attack us, the teachers, for being leftist and anti-Semitic, and say that all the Arab citizens who want to destroy Israel should be transferred.”

What the instructor has been hearing from his pupils is, of course, something young Israelis have been hearing more and more from their leaders in places like the floor of the Knesset. Last October, Israel’s Cabinet approved, by a vote of 22 to 8, an amendment that would require non-Jews wishing to become citizens to pledge an oath of loyalty to the country as a Jewish State, much to the delight of ultranationalist Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has long advocated this step. Two months later, dozens of municipal rabbis signed a letter forbidding Jews from leasing or selling apartments to Arabs, a declaration that was widely condemned but that subsequent surveys showed enjoyed a disturbing level of backing.

A striking irony apparent in the survey commissioned by the Kulanana Shared Citizenship Initiative is that young Arabs, who are often portrayed in the Israeli press as implacably hostile to the country’s ideals, support principles such as “mutual respect between all sectors” in higher proportions than their Jewish counterparts (84 versus 75 percent). Significantly more (58 versus 25 percent) also “strongly agree” with Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which states: “All citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, will participate in the life of the state, based on the principle of full, equal citizenship, and appropriate representation in all state institutions.” The country’s founders hoped this language would serve as a set of guiding principles for the state.

“Maybe it’s not a surprise that the minority in any country is very supportive of democratic rights,” says Dahlia Scheindlin. “But it does seem ironic that in the Jewish State, which insists on defining itself as the Jewish democratic state and the only democracy in the Middle East, the Arabs are our most democratic citizens.”

March 21, 2011, 11:30 a.m.

Judt died on August 6 after battling amyotropic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gherig’s disease, for more than a year. He was 62 and, as befit a prolific scholar and public intellectual who never shied away from controversy, he did not go quietly. In a matter of months the NYU lecture was expanded into a book, Ill Fares the Land; a string of evocative essays blending memoir and historical reflection appeared in the New York Review of Books (NYRB); op-eds and interviews were published in numerous publications, from the Guardian to the New York Times to this magazine [“Talking With Tony Judt,” [1] May 17, 2010]. The disease that reduced Judt to a quadriplegic did nothing to diminish the power of his voice, which fused erudition and moral passion in a way that seemed only to deepen as his illness worsened.

Born in London in 1948, Judt grew up in war-shattered Britain in a Jewish household steeped in Marxism, an experience he would later say inured him to sectarian politics. He was a man of the left who belonged to no party or ideological faction: a collection of his essays from the last twenty years, Reappraisals, includes a withering assessment of the historian and unrepentant Communist Eric Hobsbawm, and a pungent attack on American liberals who supported the Iraq War. Judt opposed that war but supported NATO intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, not because he lacked clear principles but because, as he told the British magazine Prospect recently, “I don’t believe that one should have one-size-fits-all moral rules for international political action.”

It was the view of a historian whose judgments were grounded in the messy whirl of human experience rather than the shifting political currents of the day. As he explained in the introduction toReappraisals, Judt feared that we have entered a new “age of forgetting,” in which social safety nets are shredded by politicians with no appreciation for the achievements of the modern state (universal health care, social equality) and no memory of the cataclysms and political derangements wrought by mass insecurity during the twentieth century. The sense that history was ignored and untaught fueled a strain of pessimism in Judt. Yet he never succumbed to the smug fatalism that has led so many academics to talk only among themselves.

To people with narrower minds and allegiances than his, Judt will be remembered solely, and bitterly, for the critical words he penned about Israel, in particular a 2003 essay in the NYRB calling for a one-state solution to the Palestinian conflict. A secular universalist who abandoned Zionism after a passionate flirtation during his youth, Judt’s essay earned him the loathing of the American Jewish establishment and led to predictable accusations that he viewed his heritage with indifference, maybe even embarrassment. As he recently made plain in a moving essay about a distant relative, Toni Avegael, who died in Auschwitz (and after whom he was named), this could scarcely be less true. “Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling,” he wrote. “I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish.”

The author of these words was, to me, not only a source of inspiration but also a friend. We met through the Remarque Forum, a transatlantic colloquium that Judt presided over through the Remarque Institute at NYU, which he directed. As participants in these discussions can attest, although he could be caustic in print, in person Tony was wry, warm, witty. He was also a lover of dialogue who believed the exchange of ideas across borders and cultures was inherently valuable. As in his writing, which was elegant, muscular and astonishingly wide-ranging, Tony spoke in graceful sentences while moving effortlessly across time and space, but he also took an intense interest in what people from different places, shaped by diverse experiences, had to say. The enduring image I hold of him is at the head of a discussion table, moderating a conversation about the role of religion in public life at a ranch in rural Texas, surrounded by guests that included a human rights advocate from western Europe, an African-American minister from San Antonio and a scholar from Turkey. Tony’s sleeves are rolled up, his eyes focused, vigorously engaged in the world he did so much to disturb, enrich and enlighten.

Nasser Ishtayeh/AP Images

Israeli soldiers trying to stop a model of the Mavi Marmara during a protest against Israel’s separation barrier, Bil’in, near Ramallah, June 4, 2010

It was a symbolic reenactment of the bloody confrontation that took place at sea a few days earlier. It was also a sign that, even as the “proximity talks” promoted by the Obama administration founder, some quieter but arguably more noteworthy developments have been taking place in the West Bank. What has attracted the most attention are the efforts of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to build a network of institutions, such as a justice system and police force, that could provide the beginnings of a functioning Palestinian state. Less noticed is that Fayyad and other Palestinian leaders have also begun to lend their support to a campaign of unarmed protests, like last week’s demonstration in Bil’in.

In his speech in Cairo one year ago, President Obama called on Palestinians to “abandon violence,” citing the example of African-Americans who defeated segregation through “a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.” The bloody tactics championed by Palestinian firebrands have often sent the world a different message. But this may be changing. The Israeli scholars Shaul Mishal and Doron Mazza recently warned in Haaretzthat a nonviolent, “white intifada” marked by escalating protests against Israeli settlements in conjunction with boycotts and sanctions could isolate Israel diplomatically and bolster international support for a Palestinian state.

Unarmed protests have been particularly spirited in villages that are near the Israeli security fence. The village of Budrus is another case in point. Though not located on the Green Line, Budrus was directly in the path of the barrier: the planned route ran through the village’s cemetery, and would have divided the town in half while destroying 3,000 olive trees and a good deal of arable farmland. When word of this first spread in 2003, a trim, balding resident named Ayed Morrar organized a meeting and called on the men of the village to peacefully block the bulldozers’ advance. A veteran of the first Palestinian Intifada, Morrar was seeking to revive the spirit that had prevailed at its outset, when young Palestinians like him engaged in civil disobedience to challenge Israeli rule.

As chronicled in Budrus, an absorbing new documentary that will premiere in Washington, D.C. at the Silverdocs Film Festival on June 24, at first it didn’t seem that Ayed Morrar’s efforts could accomplish very much. But then some women in the village, including Morrar’s daughter Iltezam, got involved. Local Hamas and Fatah members put their differences aside to protest together. Activists from foreign countries began showing up. Some time later, to the shock of Budrus’ residents, even some Israelis came to take part. “That’s like a dream,” Morrar, who’d spent years in Israeli prison, remarks in the film when they first appear. The presence of Israeli protesters made the soldiers overseeing the wall’s construction noticeably more reluctant to suppress the demonstrations by force. Eventually, the protestors were able to claim an unlikely victory: the Israeli government decided to reroute the security wall, and 95 percent of the village’s trees and land have been be spared.

Palestinians tend to avoid the term “white intifada,” in part because these local efforts don’t amount to anything like a broad national uprising. Nor is it clear they’re succeeding in other places. In Bil’in, for example, residents thought they had reason to celebrate back in 2007 when Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled unanimously that the security fence’s obtrusive path was not necessary to protect Israeli citizens and should be rerouted. For more than two years, however, the ruling was ignored. Only recently has the army begun to alter the wall’s course. But it has also designated Bil’in and several other villages “closed military zones” in order to prevent Israelis from attending demonstrations.

As Israel learned from the recent flotilla raid, attempting to silence political activists by force can backfire. But this is true only if the use of force rouses popular indignation. In the case of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators, the Israeli public has more typically responded with silence. Stun grenades, tear gas canisters, and rubber bullets are routinely fired at such protesters, sometimes causing serious injury and occasionally death, but rarely generating much of an outcry. Nor has much concern been voiced about the fact that activists spearheading unarmed demonstrations have been arrested on seemingly spurious charges and denied due process.

Israel insists such measures are necessary because the demonstrators, far from nonviolent, engage in incitement and belligerence, and, to judge by the evidence presented in Budrus, the claim has some basis. At one point in the film, Palestinian youths barrage the soldiers stationed nearby with stones. “No guys! Guys, do not throw stones!” Ayed Morrar yells, to no avail. The scene does not evoke Gandhi’s peaceful marches in India. Yet describing the stone throwing in this case as “incitement” seems a tad unfair. When the youths start throwing stones, Israeli troops have already encircled the village and imposed a curfew on it. As stun grenades explode and bullets fly through the air, terrified residents scurry for cover. Morrar, whose demeanor throughout the film is calm and unflappable, looks visibly shaken, clutching a cell-phone and telling a reporter, “It’s like Fallujah—shooting everywhere.”

Reached by phone a few days after Israel’s bungled raid on the Mavi Marmara, Morrar seemed in far better spirits, not least because, in his view, the botched flotilla operation showed how civil disobedience can triumph over violence. (The Netanyahu government, of course, rejects this notion, portraying the ship as a “hate boat” whose passengers were “violent supporters of terrorism.”) He described unarmed struggle as the best way for Palestinians to show that they are “not against Israelis” but simply “against the occupation.” But he did not downplay the obstacles to building a broader non-violent movement. “For both Hamas and Fatah it’s easy enough to find a few people to get involved in an act of armed resistance,” he said. “In a nonviolent struggle they must persuade all the people—the kids, the young, the women, the old people—to work together.”

Such unity has been sorely lacking among Palestinians. And in a region where the allure of armed struggle (to say nothing of the cult of martyrdom) has long had a powerful hold, peaceful resistance will never be an easy sell. At the moment, however, diplomacy doesn’t appear to be yielding much progress, and the thousands of rockets launched by Hamas at Israel have done little to improve the lot of Gazans. Perhaps this is why the protests have continued, and also why, as Morrar informed me, Palestinians officials who used to have nothing good to say about nonviolent demonstrations now go out of their way to be photographed at them. Of course, photo-ops are hardly a measure of genuine commitment, and it would be naïve to think a conflict that has produced such a wellspring of hatred will turn bloodless overnight. But the emergence of an alternative model makes it possible to imagine a different scenario in a part of the world where, as Israelis and Palestinians both know, resorting to force has often been self-defeating.

Grossman, of course, first sounded the call about the folly of the settlements decades ago, in his searing book The Yellow Wind. (More recently, he is among the dozens of prominent Israelis that have signed an open letter to Elie Weisel deploring the evictions in Sheik Jarrah.) Not surprisingly, he voiced support for Obama, hedged only by concern that his administration might back off from its strong stand. “I just hope he continues in the same direction,” he said. When I asked why so few people seemed to share this view, he told me something a bit more surprising: Israeli public opinion is much more on Obama’s side than generally thought.

According to a March 19 poll in the left-leaning daily Haaretz to which Grossman referred me, this is true, with a startling 69 percent of Israelis viewing Obama’s policies toward Israel as “fair and friendly.” Conducted in the wake of the controversy surrounding Israel’s announcement during Vice President Joseph Biden’s visit that 1,600 new housing units will be built in East Jerusalem, the poll sought to determine whether the diplomatic skirmish had led Israelis to see Netanyahu “as a victim of overly strict treatment by the Obama administration.” To the contrary, “more people said Netanyahu’s behavior was irresponsible than said he acted responsibly,” the paper reported. Meanwhile, “a sweeping majority of Israelis think [Obama’s] treatment of this country is friendly and fair.”

But some critics greeted these findings with skepticism. As a breakdown of the poll in the Hebrew edition of Haaretz showed, 18 percent of respondents saw Obama as “friendly” toward Israel. Another 51 percent deemed him “inyani,” a Hebrew word for “matter-of-fact” or “businesslike” that Haaretz interpreted as “fair” (the word it used in its English edition). In an article titled “Haaretz Fiddled with Obama Poll,” the conservative daily Jerusalem Post suggested that this translation served to distort the poll results: those who called Obama “businesslike” might just as easily have been grouped with those who called him “hostile,” yielding a very different outcome. My own sense is that those who described Obama as “inyani” likely hold more ambivalent views than either newspaper suggested; they may represent the large number of Israelis who have lost hope in the peace process (and perhaps feel a certain nostalgia for the Bush era, when the White House’s backing was unqualified), but would still tend to support a US president who was serious about pushing for negotiations.

But if Haaretz overstated its case, it was not the first time the media has oversimplified how Israelis feel about Obama. Consider the assertion by FoxNews.comthat “only four percent of Israelis… think President Obama is a friend of Israel”; or that Obama’s “approval rating in Israel is 4 percent,” as stated in a November 2009 editorial in The New York Times, which lamented that peace negotiations “may be father off than ever” because of Obama’s dismal standing among Israelis. In a speech before the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. last fall, Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the United States, described the lack of trust for Obama among Israelis as “one of the greatest obstacles” to peacemaking.

Yet the poll on which these conclusions are based is considerably more ambiguous than it appears. The 4 percent figure derives from a 2009 Smith Research poll taken on behalf of the Jerusalem Post. What the poll actually found was that 4 percent of Israelis viewed Obama’s policies as more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian. Another 35 percent saw them as neutral; 10 percent expressed no opinion. So what do Israelis really think of Obama?

It’s true that a disturbingly large number of Israelis see him in crudely sinister terms: in the Haaretz poll, 27 percent of respondents said they believe Obama is “anti-Semitic.” I’ve heard more Israelis than I care to recall suggest that he has a special affinity for Muslims, citing his middle name or the fact that he spent part of his childhood in Indonesia. But antipathy toward the US President is not as widespread as some of the Netanyahu government’s spokesmen and supporters would like people to think. According to a survey of 1,000 Israelis conducted by Gerstein | Agne on behalf of the New America Foundation last year, a full 55 percent of Israelis regard Obama as honest and trustworthy, higher than the number who say this about Netanyahu. Moreover, a majority of Israelis described Obama’s election as good for addressing the world’s problems, and 41 percent held a favorable view of him, compared to 37 percent who held an unfavorable view. (Full disclosure: I am a fellow at New America, but was not in any way involved with this poll.)

These numbers are admittedly modest next to those of some of Obama’s predecessors like Bill Clinton, who Israelis adored even as he brokered a peace agreement many opposed. Yet Clinton entered office during the Oslo years, and Israel has changed in ways that would make it difficult for any American leader to speak frankly about issues like East Jerusalem and settlements without being dismissed in some quarters as an enemy. “The threshold of acceptance for criticism is getting higher and higher,” Akiva Eldar, a columnist at Haaretz and the coauthor of Lords of the Land, told me. “Now, in order to be titled ‘friend of Israel’ you need to agree with everything we are doing, or at least to shut up. Since Obama doesn’t shut up, he is not a ‘friend of Israel.’” It doesn’t help matters, Eldar added, that the last ‘friend of Israel’ in the White House set a standard Obama was bound to disappoint. “The message from Bush for eight years was that Israel can have it both ways: you can build settlements, fake a peace process and expect that business as usual will continue with the United States.”

On the other hand, while alienating the Israeli right, it is unclear whether Obama has made much progress in gaining the trust of Palestinians. Though much touted by the US, the “indirect” peace talks, which began last week, have been greeted by lack of enthusiasm and skepticism on both sides, in part because Obama’s break with the “business as usual” approach has struck some analysts as merely cosmetic. “We expect that the American administration would say to Israel: enough is enough,” complained Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti in a recent interview with Foreign Policy.

Even as he tries to restart the peace process, Obama has conspicuously avoided saying much of anything directly to Israelis: no speeches, no exclusive interviews with Israeli journalists, no visits. While such gestures would not endear him any further to the Israeli right, they could certainly influence the large number of Israelis who believe their country cannot afford to alienate the United States and know that it can’t possibly retain its Jewish and democratic character while continuing to annex more and more Palestinian land. This is true not only of the hundreds who’ve been turning out at demonstrations in Sheik Jarrah but also, one suspects, of a great many who told Haaretz that Obama’s approach toward their country has been “businesslike.”

1.

One evening last October, several hundred new recruits to the Shimshon Battalion filed into the vast plaza adjoining the Western Wall in Jerusalem. At a site normally thronged with worshipers, the soldiers gathered to be sworn in to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), surrounded by parents and well-wishers who snapped pictures and recorded the proceedings with handheld video cameras. One of the videos would soon make news, capturing the moment when, instead of proudly reciting the oath of loyalty in which military induction ceremonies traditionally culminate in Israel, two of the recruits unfurled a banner that left the nature of their loyalties unclear. “Shimshon Does Not Evacuate Homesh,” the banner proclaimed.

Homesh is a Jewish settlement whose existence may have slipped the minds of some Israelis, not least since, officially speaking, it doesn’t exist anymore. Situated on a steep hill a few miles northwest of Nablus, the remote, sparsely populated outpost was one of four West Bank settlements from which Israel withdrew in 2005 in connection with the Gaza disengagement plan carried out by Ariel Sharon. Houses were demolished, residents were relocated, and the area surrounding the vacated village was turned into a closed military zone. This hasn’t stopped some messianic Jewish settlers from returning to rebuild it. Again and again in recent years, the IDF has dispatched soldiers to remove them, but the settlers keep coming back, organizing pilgrimages, opening a yeshiva, and turning the ruins of Homesh into a symbol of their spiritual resolve.

The members of the Shimshon Battalion who held up the banner at the induction ceremony were letting their commanders know that, if ordered to dislodge the settlers from Homesh again, they would refuse, out of loyalty to God. The Israeli military wasted no time in dismissing their gesture of defiance as “a disgraceful disciplinary aberration.” Those responsible were sentenced to twenty days in prison, expelled from the brigade, and denounced in a speech before the Israeli Knesset by Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Yet a few weeks later, another sign appeared, this one suspended from the roof of a dining hall on a military base by members of the Nahshon Battalion, which declared, in solidarity, “Nahshon Also Does Not Expel.” Two of the soldiers involved were squad leaders who, earlier that day, had refused an order to block right-wing activists from reaching another West Bank settlement where the Israeli Civil Administration had ordered the demolition of two illegal buildings. This was followed by a third sign, put up at the training base of the Kfir Brigade: “Kfir Does Not Expel Jews.”

Until recently, displays of disobedience in the Israeli army were mainly carried out by so-called “refuseniks” on the left who risked being branded traitors (and sent to prison) to avoid serving in the occupied territories. The refuseniks making noise today come from Israel’s religious right, and they want to preserve the occupation, not end it. “Today, over a quarter of young officers wear skullcaps,” an Israeli general recently told the International Crisis Group, which devoted part of a July 2009 report to the trend. “In the combat units, their presence is two or three times their demographic weight. In the Special Forces it’s even higher.”

Some of these soldiers enter the military after attending pre-army Torah colleges, state-funded preparatory schools where high school graduates enroll for one year of “spiritual fortification” before joining their peers. Others go to places like the Birkat Yosef Hesder Yeshiva, a religious academy funded by the government under a formal arrangement with the Ministry of Defense, where roughly 250 students divide their time between Torah instruction and military service over a five-year period. The first hesder yeshiva opened its doors in 1965: around fifty such institutions are spread across Israel and the West Bank today. Some of the soldiers responsible for the recent sign-waving incidents were graduates of Birkat Yosef.

Last November, I visited Birkat Yosef, which is set on a hillside overlooking the orange-roofed houses of Elon Moreh, a settlement near Nablus. The adjoining valley is where, according to Genesis, Abraham first entered the land of Israel, and where in the 1970s members of Gush Emunim, the movement dedicated to establishing Jewish settlements in the West Bank, began appearing with prayer books in hand. I met the academy’s director, Rabbi Elyakim Levanon, in his office, where he sat beneath a framed photograph of his mentor, the late Rabbi Tzvi Yehuda Kook, the spiritual father of the settlement movement, with whom he studied for sixteen years. I asked him what would happen if the army ever ordered a large-scale removal of Jewish settlers from the West Bank, which he regards as sacred Jewish land. “This will destroy the army,” he said. “The order to do it will destroy the army.” He compared it to being asked to eat nonkosher food. “If a [religious] soldier is told to eat milk and meat, what will he say? ‘Because they’re telling me, I’ll eat it?’ He won’t eat it.”

2.

The Israeli army has long maintained that it is up to commanders, not soldiers or their rabbis, to decide which missions to perform. But the IDF has never been a purely secular institution. As Stuart A. Cohen notes in Israel and Its Army, the desire to integrate religious soldiers into the military led Israel’s secular founders to chart an accommodating path. From the start, army bases were equipped with synagogues; mess halls observed kosher dietary laws. Copies of the Old Testament were given out to soldiers at induction ceremonies, and all troops were required to attend ceremonies such as the blessing of the wine before the Friday evening Sabbath meal. The goal, in part, was to foster cohesion. “Our army will be a united army, without ‘trends,’” David Ben-Gurion insisted. The IDF’s accommodation of religious observances had the added benefit of imbuing military service with spiritual meaning.

Still, for many years religious young people either had an inconspicuous part in the army or avoided being drafted by requesting a deferment available to yeshiva students who wished to pursue full-time Torah instruction. The IDF’s senior levels were dominated by secular Ashkenazi Jews of European extraction and its elite battalions manned disproportionately by soldiers raised on kibbutzim. To some extent, the changes simply mirror how Israel itself has changed. A few decades ago, when becoming an officer was regarded as a means of upward mobility, young Israelis from the secular middle class competed fiercely for spots in the army’s top units. Today, many such young people aspire to be tech workers, patent attorneys, or filmmakers. They live in and around the prosperous commercial center often referred to as the “Tel Aviv bubble,” where few people go around boasting of being officers anymore.

Practically all secular Israelis still fulfill the basic terms of military service required of citizens once they reach the age of eighteen—three years for men, two years for women, followed by reserve duty whose length and frequency varies depending on the unit. But many no longer grow up hoping to serve in elite front-line units or become officers, a trend dating back several decades. New groups—immigrants, religious soldiers—have taken their place. Not only are some 30 percent of officers openly orthodox but an estimated 50 percent of soldiers in officer training colleges are now religious. While many secular recruits from less nationalistic backgrounds have gravitated to noncombat units, their religious counterparts have volunteered for infantry battalions in which they not only serve but also lead. “In a few years, religious soldiers will make up the majority of brigade commanders in all areas,” a “military Torah college head” told the International Crisis Group.

The transformation of the political landscape has accelerated the shift. The nationalism that swept through Orthodox circles after the 1967 Six-Day War created a large pool of highly motivated religious conscripts. Later, the 1982 Lebanon war and the first Palestinian intifada disillusioned many secularists, some of whom went on to become refuseniks. Meanwhile, the hesder yeshivas and, later, pre-army Torah colleges emerged, smoothing the recruitment and advancement of religious soldiers.

As a result of these changes, religious soldiers now “see themselves as leading the army,” said Amos Harel, the military correspondent for Haaretz. Harel told me the story of a recent ceremony for an elite paratroopers’ brigade at which a female soldier rose to sing an anthem, unaware that she was violating a Jewish religious ruling known as kol haisha arve, which holds that listening to the voice of a woman is improper. The religious soldiers in the audience decided to boycott the performance. “I think about one hundred soldiers left, because they refused to listen to or watch a woman singing,” Harel said. At the Shimshon Battalion’s swearing-in ceremony where soldiers held up the protest sign, three different religious leaders delivered sermons during the proceedings, interspersed with spiritual songs, according to Dror Ze’evi, a professor of Middle East studies at Ben-Gurion University, who was there because his son was among the inductees. Ze’evi himself had been inducted into a paratroop brigade a few decades earlier, also at the Western Wall, in a simple service with no preaching. The contrast with his son’s ceremony, he told me, disturbed him.

Overt preaching has cropped up on the battlefield as well. While serving in the Gaza war last January, a reservist I’ll call Avi Shalev (he did not want his real name used) attended a pep talk on his military base by a rabbi who cast the Gaza war as a battle between bnei ha-or—the children of light—and bnei ha-hosheh—the children of darkness. “In Hebrew literature, this is an eschatological war, a messianic war,” Avi, who was himself brought up in the religious education system, told me. His disquiet deepened after he acquainted himself with some of the religious pamphlets strewn around the base. One called for soldiers to show no mercy toward the enemy. Another consisted of a series of questions and answers. “Is it possible to compare today’s Palestinians to the Philistines of the past?” it asked. “A comparison is possible because the Philistines of the past were not natives…. The Palestinians claim they deserve a state here, when in reality there was never a Palestinian or Arab state within the borders of our country.” The pamphlets were inscribed with the insignia of the army rabbinate and the IDF, which Avi said would have troubled him whether or not he agreed with the message. “Every person in the country is supposed to go to the army and in order for that to take place the army has to be a neutral place,” he said.

Avi eventually took his concerns and some copies of the pamphlets to the group called Breaking the Silence, which recently published a collection of soldiers’ testimonies from the Gaza attack—called Operation Cast Lead—that features similar accounts from other reservists. An official in the army’s education department said that the more incendiary rabbis were outsiders. The IDF affirmed in a written statement that its chief rabbi, Avichai Rontzki, did not see or approve any published material that deviated from the “inclusive policy” he set, a characterization that some of the army’s own officers might find curious. Before the war, Rabbi Rontzki expanded the activities of a unit responsible for inculcating soldiers with Jewish values but that some officers complained was engaging in religious proselytizing and political “brainwashing.”¹ Appointed by then Chief of Staff Dan Halutz in 2006 in an effort to appeal to the national-religious community, Rabbi Rontzki lives in the settlement of Itamar. (He wouldn’t be interviewed for this article, and will soon be replaced by Rafi Peretz, a rabbi from a similar background who is regarded as less divisive.)

Some Israeli commentators regard the growing influence of the religious right in the IDF as an ominous development. “Up until this period, the military prided itself on being very just-war oriented—that was the language we spoke,” said Mikhael Manekin, co-director of Breaking the Silence (and himself a former IDF officer). “That’s the military ethical code and I think it’s common to most Western militaries. Now you’re talking about a different voice within the military. And a different voice openly within the military and sometimes prominent in the military.”

3.

Rabbi Moshe Hagar-Lau, a tall, rangy man with a bristly black beard, runs the Beit Yatir pre-army Torah college in the southern Hebron Hills, across the Green Line. In his sparely furnished office, I spotted a familiar picture on the wall, a photograph of Rabbi Yehuda Kook, who he affectionately referred to as “my rabbi.” Pinned up next to Kook’s picture was another photo, however, of the person Rabbi Hagar-Lau called “my commander”—Defense Minister Ehud Barak. “In the army, there is only one commander,” he said, which is why students at his academy were taught to obey orders whether they agreed with them or not.

Rabbi Hagar-Lau led me to the dining room, where lunch was being served. I asked a cluster of students in jeans, T-shirts, and yarmulkes what they would do if given an order to evacuate settlers. One who used to live in Gush Katif, a bloc of seventeen settlements in the Gaza Strip that was dismantled in 2005, told me this would be extremely difficult for him. But he said he would do it. All the others nodded.

Some analysts, including Stuart Cohen, believe that the threat of insubordination is overblown. Back in 2005, before Gush Katif was evacuated, numerous observers predicted that an attempt by the IDF to close such settlements would divide Israel and lead to mass refusal among the several thousand soldiers deployed for the mission. In the end, sixty-three soldiers were punished for disobeying orders, but there was no mass refusal. The event showed how strong the bonds of loyalty and discipline are in the army. Yet as the sociologist and IDF analyst Yagil Levy has shown, the smoothness of the disengagement owed a great deal to the meticulous planning that preceded it. Before a single settler was removed, units with a high percentage of religious conscripts were not allowed to deal directly with the settlers.²

A senior IDF official told me that commanders are being trained to deal with future outbreaks of disobedience. But if a similar withdrawal from the West Bank were planned, Levy does not believe that such a smooth operation could be repeated; in the West Bank, there are far more settlers. For Israel’s religious right, he said, settlements such as Hebron and Elon Moreh are “the real game.” A senior Israeli military officer told the International Crisis Group that he would “rather give back Tel Aviv than Hebron,” which he described as “Jewish land” that “is promised to us by the Bible, by God…. This ideology is the backbone of the army, and so I will not obey such an order.”

During the Gaza disengagement, many settler leaders and rabbis called on soldiers not to disobey because, as they saw it, disobedience would turn the country and the security establishment against them. By contrast, when the Israeli government introduced a plan to dismantle twenty-six illegal settlement outposts in the West Bank last May, a coalition of rabbis based in the settlements advocated refusal. “The holy Torah prohibits taking part in any act of uprooting Jews from any part of our sacred land,” they wrote. After the incidents in which conscripts waved signs, some of the same rabbis met to praise them as “heroes.” An organization on the far right called SOS Israel, which strenuously opposes ceding any part of the Holy Land to non-Jews, held a ceremony in Jerusalem to bestow 20,000-shekel cash prizes on the members of the Shimshon Battalion who started the trend.

Although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned after the sign incidents that challenging the IDF’s hierarchy could “bring about the collapse of the state,” Aryeh Eldad of the National Union party and Tzipi Hotobeli of Likud responded by introducing a bill that would prohibit the army from carrying out any future evacuations; eleven ministers joined as cosponsors. The measure calls for restricting such politically sensitive missions to the police—a force without the manpower or resources to execute them. Although the bill stands little chance of passing, it shows how much the political climate in Israel has shifted to the right since the Gaza disengagement, with a bloc of Knesset members now openly challenging the IDF’s authority to carry out missions in the territories that they believe, perhaps not wrongly, could spark mass mutiny.

Until recently, Ilan Paz, a retired brigadier general who served as head of civil administration in the West Bank, regarded pro-settler disobedience as a minor danger. He no longer feels this way: “I’m less worried about the problem of the soldiers—because with soldiers the army knows how to deal—than with the public support this phenomenon gets from the more right-wing sectors of society, from rabbis, from heads of the yeshivot hesder…from members of the Knesset.” Paz noted the irony of right-wing Israelis—long-standing allies of the settlers—suddenly demanding that the IDF not intervene in political matters related to the occupied territories. “If we don’t find a way to stop this phenomenon, in my opinion it will proliferate, and the army won’t be able to do anything in the territories,” he said.

In December, Defense Minister Ehud Barak ended the IDF’s relationship with the Har Bracha Hesder Yeshiva, whose leader, Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, had published a book distributed to its graduates that unabashedly promoted refusal.³ It was an unprecedented step, a signal from the defense establishment that rabbis preaching insubordination will not go unpunished. Yet the other academies in the program, including the one run by Rabbi Levanon, are still being funded by the government, despite evidence that some of their leaders occasionally preach a similar line. In January, it was revealed that Rabbi Haim Druckman, who heads the committee that oversees hesder yeshivas and is considered a relative moderate, endorsed insubordination in a leaflet distributed in synagogues. At a subsequent meeting with an aide to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Rabbi Druckman insisted that he did not support refusal, but went on to say that there were times when a soldier could not obey an order that violated his conscience, which in his view did not constitute insubordination.

For a generation of national-religious youth who grew up in its aftermath, the Gaza disengagement has become a symbol of shameful acquiescence. Some of them are in the IDF now; others, like Moshe Frumberg, will be soon, unless they or their commanders have second thoughts. A seventeen-year-old settler with six-inch side-curls, Frumberg was recently summoned to a draft center in Jerusalem to undergo an initial round of tests the army conducts for recruits. Before leaving, he and two friends hung a sign at the entrance that declared, “We Won’t Be Drafted to Evacuate Jews!”

Frumberg lives in Havat Gilad, an illegal settlement outpost populated by young people known for their militant views. An admirer of the late Meir Kahane, he told me he’d slash the tires of trucks to prevent settler evacuations. Where was the limit to what he would do, I asked? “There is no limit,” he said. Even among settlers, such views are extreme. But opposition to giving up more land—and a stated willingness to act on this belief—is increasing. While I was in Israel, a television reporter asked new recruits whether they would refuse orders to evacuate settlements. One after another said they would. A poll commissioned in February by the Maagar Mochot, an Israeli research institution, found that 48 percent of Israeli high school students would disobey evacuation orders. Of this group, 81 percent described themselves as religious.

On November 25, Netanyahu announced a ten-month freeze on some settlement construction. Settlers responded by blocking roads to prevent inspectors from handing out orders and, in one case, torching and desecrating a mosque, part of a new strategy to exact a heavy “price tag” for any measure detrimental to their interests.⁴ So fierce a reaction can be viewed as a sign of their fear that, like Ariel Sharon, Netanyahu may betray them. It can also be viewed as the predictable consequence of policies that have led settlers to feel they are entitled to take the law into their own hands. For all the outrage at the freeze, Dror Etkes, a researcher who has observed settlement activity for nearly a decade, told me that a halt in settlement construction has been observed at no more than a dozen West Bank sites and ignored at roughly fifty others. There is, he said, more construction underway across the Green Line today than a year ago.

Back in November, just before the freeze made headlines, Etkes took me to Haresha, a hilltop community near Ramallah that was established more than a decade ago without a legal permit. Today it has a synagogue, a school, an outdoor basketball court, and several houses built on what Etkes said used to be private Palestinian land, which the Israeli Civil Administration now claims is “state land.” A paved road connects houses that have been hooked up to the same electricity grid and water supply that serve other legal and illegal settlements nearby. The Ministry of Housing helped subsidize construction. Orders to demolish the houses have been ignored. At one point, Etkes pulled to a stop in front of a bus station where a poster had been taped up on a glass window. It was a notice alerting residents to the event being held to honor “the loyal soldiers” of the Shimshon Batallion who disrupted their swearing-in ceremony.

JIM HOLLANDER/AP IMAGESDavid Grossman winning an EMET Prize in Jerusalem, 2007

Grossman’s immersion in Aleichem’s fictional universe was so deep that a year later he entered a trivia contest about it hosted by a popular radio quiz show. Soon after, he was hired as a child actor at Kol Israel, the state broadcasting station. “It’s a whole reality expressed only through language,” Grossman has said. “As soon as I started working at the station, I learned how much you can do with the human voice.” While completing his army service years later, Grossman began jotting down poems, songs and confessions in military report logs. He was discovering another use for his voice. Some time later, after an argument with his girlfriend, Michal (who is now his wife), he sat down and wrote his first story, “Donkeys,” about an American soldier who escapes to Austria during the Vietnam War. The experience was transformative. “Writing allows me to explore situations that are impossible for me to explore in my life,” Grossman has said. “Emotionally, I am an extreme person, and writing makes it possible for me to go on.”

Navigating extreme emotions has been a particularly vexing challenge for Grossman of late. Early one morning in August 2006, unexpected visitors roused him from his sleep: they were officers from the Israeli army, come to relay the news that his younger son, Uri, had been killed when a missile struck his tank in southern Lebanon. The incident occurred in the final days of the war against Hezbollah, which began that summer with barely a murmur of dissent in Israel and ended, thirty-three days later, with equally faint popular backing. Grossman, a novelist and longtime peace advocate, had initially supported the war on the grounds that Israel had the right to defend itself against an armed militant group that had attacked it without provocation. But several weeks into the conflict, he appeared at a press conference with the novelists A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz (both of whom had also supported the war) to call for a cease-fire and to protest the Israeli government’s plan to launch a ground invasion. No cease-fire was brokered; the ground invasion commenced. Two days later came the knock on Grossman’s door.

Grossman’s latest collection of essays and speeches, Writing in the Dark, concerns the impact of grief and violence on the body politic and the private imagination. It is not about Uri, however, whom Grossman has refused to discuss publicly, but rather the precarious and necessary place of literature in a disaster zone. As Grossman observes in the opening essay, “The arbitrariness of an external force that violently invades the life of one person, one soul, preoccupies me in almost all my books.”

The burden of arbitrary death, and the looming threat of assault and injury, could easily lead an Israeli writer to tell his fellow citizens what many would most like to hear: that they have been saddled with this burden by their enemies. Yet Grossman doesn’t offer such false consolation. For him, the act of writing is a process of jarring loose assumptions and stripping away emotional defenses through imaginative journeys into places it might otherwise be too painful or too frightening to go. Some years ago, reflecting on a story he was writing that featured a bitter, emotionally unstable protagonist, he described his desire to have the tale surprise him. “More than that, I want it to actually betray me,” he wrote.

To drag me by the hair, absolutely against my will, into the places that are most dangerous and most frightening for me. I want it to destabilize and dissolve all the comfortable defenses of my life. It must deconstruct me, my relations with my children, my wife, and my parents; with my country, with the society I live in, with my language.

When Grossman learned of Uri’s death, he was at work on a novel, his seventh, about a woman whose younger son is sent on a military operation and who has a premonition that the mission will end badly. To avoid being home to receive the news, the woman embarks on a walking tour, crossing Israel by foot while scrawling notes about her son in a journal. The book, Isha Borahat Mibesora (“A Woman Flees Tidings”), was published, in Hebrew, last spring. Grossman completed it only after he had been dragged by the hair into the nightmare his protagonist strains to avoid.

Grossman’s first novel was The Smile of the Lamb, the story of an unlikely bond formed between a Palestinian civilian and an Israeli soldier he has captured and threatened to kill. Told in the voices of four interlocking characters, among them a cynical Israeli army commander too jaded to believe in justice, the action unfolds in a small town in the West Bank, a detail that might not qualify as noteworthy today. It was different in the ferment of 1982, the year Grossman completed the book and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon sparked massive peace demonstrations in Tel Aviv. Among young Israelis, assumptions about the country’s benign regional designs were unraveling. Though Grossman’s debut work of fiction drew mixed reviews–the book’s Palestinian character, a half-blind hunchback named Khilmi who lives in a cave, is mildly cartoonish–he marked himself as the voice of a new generation, one unafraid to wade across a political and imaginative divide. The Smile of the Lamb was the first Israeli novel set in the occupied territories, where becoming jaded about justice was hard to avoid.

In 1986 Grossman published See Under: Love, an ambitious reimagining of the Holocaust that unspools in the mind of a 9-year-old boy named Momik, who wants to learn more about “Over There,” the mysterious world from which his parents and the other adults with numbers tattooed on their arms had fled. The choice of subject might seem familiar: no issue pervades Israeli culture more thoroughly than the Holocaust, with Yad Vashem the first stop for foreign statesmen and brigades of Western tourists. But See Under: Love is set in a different time, when the Holocaust was a source of unspeakable shame in a young nation desperately trying to imbue its citizens with a sense of heroism and national pride. This is the moral universe Momik inhabits, and the same one in which Grossman, who was born in 1954 in Jerusalem, came of age. Grossman’s father, a bus driver, fled his native Poland in 1936. His mother was born in Palestine. Though neither of them had numbers tattooed on their arms, Grossman grew up with a keen awareness of how easily this might have been their fate. Every day announcements of people searching for relatives floated across the radio dial: “Rachel, daughter of Perla and Abraham Seligson from Przemysl, is looking for her little sister Leah’leh, who lived in Warsaw between the years…” The “silence and fragmented whispers” haunted Grossman because, like Momik, he felt he could not understand a part of himself–where he came from, what he was doing in Israel–without grasping what had happened there. “I had to ask these questions of myself,” he says, “and I had to reply in my own words.”

A year after the publication of See Under: Love, Grossman returned to the West Bank, this time as a correspondent for the small newsweekly Koteret Rashit, which had commissioned him to write an article about the occupation. Grossman, who is fluent in Arabic, spent seven weeks roaming around the West Bank. His dispatch filled an entire issue of the magazine and was soon published as a book,Ha-Zeman Ha-Tzahov (“The Yellow Time”). Israelis were shocked by its unflinching portrait of the hatred brewing in the territories and its suggestion that the plight of the Palestinians in some ways mirrored the travails of another exiled people, the Jews. As Grossman listened to an elderly Arab woman rhapsodize about the beautiful vineyard in the village in Israel where she once lived, he was reminded of his grandmother, who had been expelled from Poland. Later, at a military court in Nablus, he watched a Palestinian youth get sentenced for an offense that wasn’t on his charge sheet and was moved to quote Orwell’s essay “Shooting an Elephant”: “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.” Grossman’s narrative was suffused, sometimes to the point of excess, with anguished introspection, leading some to dismiss it as the work of a yafeh nefesh (“beautiful soul”), a bleeding heart. Yet the book became a bestseller in Israel, and by the time it was translated into English and issued under a slightly altered title, The Yellow Wind, the first intifada had broken out, lending the book a prophetic glow.

Grossman hadn’t seen the uprising coming. What he did notice was that serial abuses in the occupied territories corresponded with the serial abuse of language in Israel. Amos Oz once remarked that his excursion into writing political essays after the outbreak of the 1967 Six-Day War was triggered by a “linguistic reservation,” his objection to the use of the word “liberated territories.” (Only people, not mountains or valleys, can be liberated, Oz maintained.) Grossman underwent a similar awakening. At the time he received the assignment from Koteret Rashit, he was working as the anchor of a popular morning news program at Kol Israel. Not infrequently, the job required him to read brief items about violent incidents that had taken place in the West Bank or Gaza Strip–”A local youth was killed during disturbances in the Territories.” Afterward, he would marvel at the “shrewdness” of the sentence:

“disturbances”–as if there were some order or normative state in the Territories that was briefly disturbed; “in the Territories”–we would never expressly say “the Occupied Territories”; “youth”–this youth might have been a three-year-old boy, and of course he never had a name.

Novelists may be uniquely equipped to detect these perversions of language, but this doesn’t necessarily make them astute political observers. Yet as his next book affirmed, Grossman brings to his reporting a related skill: the art of listening. Sleeping on a Wire was built around conversations with Arab-Israeli artists, activists and citizens, a community rarely invited to remark on what kind of society “the Jewish state” should be. Unlike Oz, who composed his political writings at a safe distance from Arabs, Grossman anchored his observations in dialogue with them. The difference is not incidental: unlike many people in the Israeli peace camp, Grossman has never longed for a settlement that will separate Jews and Arabs. In Sleeping on a Wire, through the voices of people like Nazir Yunes, an Arab-Israeli doctor who described being turned away from a swimming pool after his children were overheard speaking Arabic, Grossman showed that the bitterness and frustration about Israel is not limited to Palestinians in the West Bank. He also tested the limits of his tolerance: for all his good will, Grossman found it challenging and unnerving to stand back and let his subjects do the talking. Hearing an Arab intellectual call for street protests in one scene, he felt himself recoil: “He speaks, and something unpleasant is slowly revealed to me…. How real and sincere is my desire for ‘coexistence’ with the Palestinians in Israel?” It was precisely this tension that lent the book its poignancy.

The high cost of concealing what is unpleasant has long preoccupied Grossman, and his willingness to pose questions that discomfit Israel’s Jewish majority has led some people to label him a “post-” or “non-Zionist” Israeli (the critic Jacqueline Rose once described him as a “non-Zionist Zionist” in the London Review of Books). Such labels are misplaced. “The basic inspiration for Zionism was a noble idea,” Grossman told The Paris Review in 2007. Despite his belief that a writer should hold nothing sacred, Grossman is a patriot who will go only so far in criticizing Israel, as was apparent during the recent war in Gaza. In an editorial in Ha’aretz published a few days after the conflict began, Grossman called for a cease-fire but did not question the decision to launch the attack.

Such views inevitably disappoint Israel’s more unqualified critics, some of whom treat Grossman as one more apologist for the Jewish state’s crimes. He would likely take their disappointment as a compliment. The radical element in Grossman’s work lies not in his politics but in his determination to see past the limits of politics: to peel away the labels–”Arab,” “Jew,” “victim,” “terrorist”–that color and distort how Israelis and Palestinians regard each other. In The Yellow Wind, there is an image of a corrupted body: the West Bank is “that kidney-shaped expanse of land” Grossman feels has been transplanted into him “against my wishes.” It is the diagnosis of a universalist who clearly believes the germ of cruelty can infect anyone, the moment one erases another person’s humanity, the moment one begins to speak a “mass language–a language that will consolidate the multitude and spur it on to act in a certain way, formulating justifications for its acts and simplifying the moral and emotional contradictions it may encounter.” In a region overpopulated with hard men and women who view the world through a narrow prism, Grossman is that rare thing: a humanist who considers any form of certainty, not least his own, to be a trap.

Writing in the Dark is less a work of literary criticism or political analysis than an extended rumination on the struggle and the thrill of shaping words into stories and reclaiming their meaning and beauty from the “language defrauders and language rapists.” The book is a response to a question Grossman first explored in See Under: Love, where he imagined what might have happened to him had he been stuck in a concentration camp: “What was the thing inside me that I could hold up against this attempt at erasure?” Grossman’s answer reaches back to his novel Be My Knife (1998), the story of an epistolary love affair between two former classmates who never consummate their physical desires. “Listen,” Yair, who makes his living selling rare books, informs Miriam:

I once read that Our Sages of Blessed Memory had the idea that we have one tiny bone in the body, above the end of the spine–they call it the “Luz.” You can’t kill it, it doesn’t crumble after death and can’t be destroyed by fire.

One suspects it is his Luz that has prevented Grossman from sharing the fate of one of his most endearing creations: the protagonist of his 1991 novel The Book of Intimate Grammar, a 12-year-old boy named Aron Kleinfeld, who is given to daydreaming, comic impersonations and turning words over in his head for the sheer pleasure of their sound. The novel is set on the eve of the Six-Day War, in a nation whose inhabitants speak a new, emancipated language. Yet the more Aron listens to the adults around him–the crude vows to crush the Arabs, the mangled syntax of their sentences–the more alienated he feels. To escape the suffocating atmosphere, he retreats into a cocoon, smuggling damaged words through the doors of the secret hospital he has created to perform surgery on them. All Aron wants is the freedom to invent stories and to dream, which is enough to make him a chronic misfit in a society where boys are supposed to be like his best friend, Gideon, a scout who aspires to be a fighter pilot. In the book’s closing scene, having fallen in love with a classmate named Yaeli–who, naturally, falls for Gideon–Aron escapes from his misery by locking himself inside an abandoned refrigerator in a junkyard.

Like Aron, Grossman belongs to the generation of Israelis who celebrated their bar mitzvahs around the time of the Six-Day War. Like Aron, he was introverted and bookish, sensitive to the suppleness of language, aware of the pollutants that can contaminate it in a society where words are used as blunt instruments. Yet the parallels between novelist and protagonist may be too neat, since in recent years Grossman’s faith in language has wavered. “I have to admit that many times I feel that words can no longer penetrate the screen of horror,” he wrote in the preface to his essay collection Death As a Way of Life (2003), which charts the rise and fall of his hopes for peace in the tumultuous decade after the Oslo Accords. In one of the essays, composed after a string of suicide bombings prompted a further escalation of Israeli attacks, he concludes by informing the reader, “What I feel like doing now is not writing an article. I actually feel like taking a can of black spray paint and covering every wall in Jerusalem, Gaza and Ramallah with graffiti: LUNATICS, STOP KILLING AND START TALKING!”

During the second intifada, Grossman grew decidedly less forgiving of the Palestinians–of Arafat’s double talk, of the nihilism behind suicide attacks–and less hopeful about the prospects for lasting peace. Though he never stopped criticizing the occupation or drawing attention to the suffering of civilians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, his language lost some of its verve. Death As a Way of Life lacks the vigor of The Yellow Wind and Sleeping on a Wire, in no small part because instead of scaling walls its author seems hemmed in by them. The book reads like a lament for a lost opportunity for ordinary people to experience in their daily life something Grossman views as one of literature’s animating impulses: the power to dissolve the distance between oneself and “the Other.” “The purpose of literature,” Grossman writes in “The Desire to Be Gisella,” the most searching essay in Writing in the Dark, is to redeem a character in a story “from alienation and impersonality, from the grip of stereotypes and prejudices…to comprehend all the facets of one human character: its internal contradictions, its motives and inhibitions,” and then to realize that many of the same emotional currents course through yourself.

The toll of the conflict has also reverberated in Grossman’s fiction. In books such as Someone to Run With (2000), an entertaining if slightly saccharine novel that explores the world of street kids, drug dealers and stray dogs in Jerusalem, and Her Body Knows (2002), a pair of novellas about the perils of passion and jealousy, there was little trace of the surrounding atmosphere, a fact that did not go unnoticed by critics. In The New York Review of Books, Gabriele Annan expressed surprise that “there is scarcely an Arab to be seen” in Someone to Run With, this from a novelist who “is also a political journalist who has written about life in Arab villages.” The omission was no accident, and it prompts one to wonder whether Grossman’s desire to see past labels, coupled with exhaustion, is narrowing instead of deepening his scope. As Grossman told an audience in New York City in the spring of 2007, “in the works of fiction I have written in recent years, I have almost intentionally turned my back on the immediate, burning reality of my country, the reality of the latest news bulletin.” He wanted to write “about other things, things no less important, things for which it’s hard to find the time, the emotion, and the total attention, while the near-eternal war thunders on outside.”

Retreating from the shadow of war is a familiar habit among Israeli novelists. Writers who grew up in the aftermath of 1948 sought to slip the chains of collectivism forged during the decades of kibbutzim and youth movements, of Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion. As the critic Hillel Halkin has noted, the literature of this generation abounds with figures such as Yonatan Lifshitz, the protagonist of Amos Oz’s A Perfect Peace, who longs “to be alone at last, entirely alone, to find for himself what it was all about.” Oz and his peers sought to refurbish what Yaron Ezrahi has termed “the impoverished language of the Israeli self” by overcoming the “difficulty of discovering or inventing one’s private voice in the midst of this chorus of pioneers, all singing the epic of the return of the Jews from exile and the resurrection of our ancient language in the Holy Land.” A half-century later, Grossman arrived at the end of a week filled with turmoil and, in his diary, noted what he’d forgotten to think about: his children, his family, his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. “So many cherished things and private moments are lost to fear and violence,” he sighed. “So much creative power, so much imagination and thought, are directed today at destruction and death (or at guarding against destruction and death).”

And yet the situation Grossman finds himself confronting in Israel today is arguably the opposite of what Oz’s generation faced. When Israelis come home from work these days, they don’t instantly engage in heated debates about what happened in the Knesset, much less in Nablus or Ramallah. Quite often, they turn on a reality show, or flip open a laptop and network on Facebook. Although the age of the kibbutz is long gone, the language of the Israeli self is again impoverished, this time laid waste by solipsism and detachment. Grossman’s A Woman Flees Tidings was a runaway bestseller in Israel, perhaps because of what readers knew its author had suffered, perhaps because it recounts a scenario so familiar in a nation where losing a child to war is an almost universal fear, or perhaps because, as historian Tom Segev suggested to me, the book taps into a widely shared desire to escape, to flee bad news. The problem in Israel today isn’t too little space for private concerns, one could argue, but apathy and cynicism about public ones.

Despite his disappointment with the conduct of Israeli and Palestinian leaders, Grossman hasn’t succumbed to fatalism. In 2006, on the eleventh anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, only a few months after Uri’s death, he delivered a speech in which he called on Israel’s leaders to stop making excuses and talk to their enemies (the speech is reprinted in Writing in the Dark). Yet in a society that, for the moment, is circling inward, walling itself off from the larger world to avoid further disappointment and pain, even as the rage around it builds, it’s hard not to wonder whether this “troublemaker and magician,” as the critic John Leonard once described Grossman, feels choked off. Grossman’s best work shows how much can be wrung out of unsettling encounters with the unfamiliar, from entering “the vortex of [one's] greatest fear and repulsion,” as he put it in The Yellow Wind, and emerging mended, enlarged, purified. It would be difficult to think of someone more entitled to withdraw into himself than Grossman. But it’s equally hard to imagine this bringing him much satisfaction, not least because he knows that those who retreat inward only flee further from the truth. “A society in crisis,” he once said, “teaches itself to congeal into one story only and sees reality through very narrow glasses. But there is never only one story.”

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