Archive for March, 2010

'Just having things ‘normalised’ can be a relief'

With some difficulty, I manoeuvre my extra-long double buggy — dubbed “the gondola” — into a room cluttered with plastic toys. The psychotherapist gets up from her beanbag to help me to fold it up. I introduce her to Isaac and Imogen, my seven-month-old twins, and then put them down on the mat. The babies, blissfully unaware of the therapist’s eyes, proceed to give the toys a good gumming. Read the rest of this entry »

'Bibi may have changed'

News is breaking this morning that Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has caved in to US pressure. Sources report that he has tacitly agreed a freeze on the controversial plans to build several hundred new Jewish homes in Ramat Shlomo, East Jerusalem. This shows a flicker of hope. Not only does it — tentatively — bode well for renewed peace talks with the Palestinians, it also shows that Bibi may have changed. Or at least, he has learned from past mistakes.

In 1996, when Netanyahu was last in office, Bill Clinton faced him down on a similar issue. Netanyahu, through evasive political maneuvering, sought to both placate and defy the US administration. The result was disastrous for the Israeli leader; at the first opportunity, the Israeli public voted him out of office, citing his handling of US relations as their primary motivation.

This time round, history has repeated itself — but thankfully, only up to a point. Netanyahu, in moving towards a compromise with the Americans that will enable forward movement, has shown that at last his traditional belligerence has been tempered by pragmatism.

Nothing is ever certain in the middle east. Tomorrow’s news may demonstrate that Bibi has changed his mind, and re-authorised the settlement construction in the face of US pressure. But today, at least, it seems that we’re looking at a new Bibi. And we can warm our hands around a small — and increasingly rare — flame of hope.

NB: The reports on which this blog post was based later proved premature. Netanyahu did not, in fact, cave in; he simply offered a temporary freeze on construction, which did not satisfy Washington. For Netanyahu to drop the building plans completely would have put him in extremely hot water with members of his coalition back in Israel. Subsequently, the Israeli premier stated that ‘construction in Jerusalem is like construction in Tel Aviv and we have clarified that for the American government’. So the story rumbles on. >sigh< –JWS

'the muffled drums of war have been gathering volume for some time'

“Netanyahu thinks he is the superpower,” remarked Bill Clinton bitterly in 1996, “and we are here to do whatever he requires.” Today, as the Americans and the Israelis refuse to budge on the fraught issue of settlements in East Jerusalem, this statement rings truer than ever. US-Israeli relations are at a historic low. But the current standoff is about much more than settlement-building. Underlying it is Washington’s concern that Netanyahu’s repeated gestures of provocation—like the establishment of Jewish heritage sites in the Palestinian territories—are drawing the region towards a conflict unprecedented since 1948. And this time there is a nuclear dimension.

Read the rest of this entry »

'As a parent it is my duty to acknowledge that the strands that weave the tapestry of our identities are not singular, but multiple'

The prospect of Britain and Israel going to war is an unlikely one. At the orthodox Jewish school that I attended, however, it must have seemed like a distinct possibility. We used to regularly debate which side we would fight for. Although steeped in religious observance, we had been born in England, grew up here, and developed strong allegiances to English football teams. We spoke little modern Hebrew and had been to Israel just a handful of times. Nevertheless, the feeling was unanimous: we would take up arms on behalf of the Jewish state.

From one point of view, we were simply using a primitive thought experiment to mould our nascent sense of identity. At the same time, however, this was more than just an abstract exercise. Many of my schoolmates volunteered for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) after completing their A-levels and my younger brother, Zack, was among them. Read the rest of this entry »

'America's brainiest couple'

The people known as “America’s brainiest couple” met over an irregular verb. “It was ‘stridden’,” says Steven Pinker, regarding me steadily from beneath his mop of curly hair. His wife, Rebecca Goldstein, laughs. “Steven cited my use of the word in one of his books,” she explains, “and we started exchanging e-mails about it. You could say that our relationship started with conjugation.”

There could have been no more appropriate way for these two extraordinary minds to meet. Pinker, one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people, is a renowned cognitive psychologist and the author of bestselling books on popular science. Goldstein, a novelist and philosopher, has received a MacArthur “Genius” Award, a Koret International Award and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her new novel, the mischievously titled 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: a Work of Fiction (Goldstein warns me not to leave out the subtitle) is released in the UK this month. Read the rest of this entry »

'the outside of the club, indecently exposed by the rising sun'

(First performed 29th February 2010 at Jewish Book Week / JCC Writers’ Football Literary Event, London)

The first panel. The picture is drawn from a bird’s eye perspective, looking down upon cramped rooftops beginning to bake. Cables and wires stretch from one side of the road to another, and in the background are Bauhaus-style apartment blocks jutting with cuboids. The caption reads: ‘November 2008. Tel Aviv, 4am. The sun rises on a city still silent with sleep’. Read the rest of this entry »