As the Likud Party sits on a dominant lead in the polls, attention turns to Israel’s political Right — and especially its far Right. The National-Religious camp has regrouped, unifying its various parties and dumping its former leadership, which was always perceived as bureaucratic, not terribly ideological, or alternatively messianic and alienating to mainstream Israelis.
The most important newcomer on Israel’s political scene is Daniel Hershkowitz, who was just named leader of the newly constituted Jewish Home party. Hershkowitz is both a rabbi and a scholar. He is a senior mathematician at the Technion, Israel’s equivalent of MIT. Though he is keeping his specific political views close to his chest, he has earned a reputation in the northern part of the country as a warm and caring personality, someone who knows how to translate classic Jewish values and texts into an idiom palatable for secular Israelis. The prospect of a real political outsider with both rabbinic and mainstream bona fides makes his appointment a fascinating development, though time will tell how he withstands the withering trials of a political campaign. Stay tuned.
The other major development is the drama surrounding Moshe Feiglin, whose “Jewish Leadership” movement has been trying for over a decade to make inroads within the Likud itself. In this week’s Likud primary, Feiglin won the 20th spot on the party’s list for the Knesset — making it look like he was a shoo-in for the Knesset.
But Feiglin is a nightmare for Likud’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu. Feiglin’s views have moderated in recent years, but he still holds positions that are far from mainstream: He favors Israel’s pulling out of the UN, he sharply opposes any peace negotiations based on giving up land, and though he has distanced himself from the forcible transfer of Palestinians out of the West Bank that was first popularized by Rabbi Meir Kahane, he still calls for reducing their population by paying off Palestinians willing to emigrate. Rightly or wrongly, Feiglin has been for the Left what Yossi Beilin was for the Right: A lightning rod, a symbol of all that is monstrous, a name you can roll off your tongue and pluralize with pleasure: All those Feiglins. The name even recalls a Dickensian villain, something the erudite Left has used to its advantage.
This isn’t what Bibi needs. For years he has worked to disperse suspicions that he is a fig-leaf for the settler movement, to convince Israelis of the political center that he cannot be held responsible for the Rabin assassination, that he is committed to peace and eventual withdrawal from the West Bank, that he is a plausible leader for the country. So immediately following the primary, he fired back, and the Likud has just concocted a complex technical excuse to bump him down to the 36th spot — making his Knesset entry far less likely. This is major hardball, a transparent effort to ignore the voters’ wishes. But it also may be the Likud’s only hope of keeping its legitimacy in the eyes of mainstream Israelis, who were so impressed with the new roster of well-liked figures like Moshe Yaalon and Benny Begin.
I had heard about his last week. The veneer of civilization is thin (and this is obvious even among the close to 80,000 or so Lebanese ‘Christians’ who make their home, nominally, in Montreal, and with whom I am quite familiar) and if they can chop each other up for decades on end, what safety do foreigners have, particularly brave/foolish ones like Hitchens?
Violence can come out of nowhere, as casually as ‘death in the afternoon’.
With Iran and Syria on the ascendancy, the prospects for a free Lebanon are poor.
Siniora and Jumblat, the best that lebanon can sustain, are creeps. The others, worse – with the exception (that proves the rule) – of the Hariris – and Saad Hariri himself a reflection of the dynastic impulses particularly common is these parts.
Baal-worshipping Lebanon is not worth a bucket of warm piss. Certainly not the bones of a single Israeli or American soldier. The best way to enter Lebanon, if you absolutely must, is wearing a flack jacket in the turret of a merkava.
To paraphrase Paul Henreid from “Casablanca”, it’s not often a man gets to be heroic in front of mill
ions of liberal chicks. And they certainly aren’t accustomed to that from THEIR men.
1: What does Robt Gibbs have to do with Baal-worship and Merkavas?
Christopher Hitchens came VERY close to losing his life on that Beirut street. That Greek Orthodox repressed homosexual wankers organization would have slit your throat in a heartbeat and posted photos on the Internet crowing about it.
However, you are brave, if not a bit foolish. I cannot, in ANY way, fault you for wanting to rip that sign down. I may very well have ended up in the same situation because I tend to act first when offended then start thinking. You did the right thing, but could have ended up being silenced forever.
EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US who value freedom and rail at the bloodthirsty tyrants and the neighborhood bullies with a cause should applaud Christopher for what he did. Frankly, I wish one of these scumbags were walking with a cane today after one of you guys took out his kneecap, but then the rest of them would probably have murdered you right there, or sent a car bomb to take out your hotel.
Kiplings admonition, “You may talk of gin and beer, when you’re quartered safe out here…”, is especially poignant here. You and I talk and talk about terrorism and what we should do about it, ensconced safely back here in the States. Christopher Hitchens, Michael Totten, and others like Michael Yon and Max Boot actually are walking around these places where the West is attempting to roll back the cloak of fascist brutality. They lay their lives on the line to tell it like it is, and they perform a great service to us all.
Christopher Hitchens is a guy I would really like to sit down and quaff a Theakston’s with one day, and Michael Totten as well.
Glad you guys came out of this alive. SCREW the Fascists in EVERY nation they inhabit!
The rest of this story (viz. the part following where Contentions leaves off), as appears on the Michael Totten link, should be read. In the end, Totten concludes that Lebanon of its Hobbesian form is effectively anarchy and that thugs from the SSNP have more than their corner in the extant schema. Characterizing Hitchens’ assailants as “a street gang with a state” Totten has it about right.
I have long viewed Christopher Hitchens as a national treasure – for his capacities for clear, penetrating thought and incandescent prose. Now I view him as something on the order of a hero as well.
“My attitude to posters with swastikas on them,” he later told Alice Fordham at NOW Lebanon, “has always been the same. They should be ripped down.”
While Hitchens has been known to infuriate me at times, this alone is a quote worth treasuring!
a half dozen members of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party jumped us on Hamra Street when he defaced one of their signs
The man went half way around the world and into an Arab country and he defaced a sign?
What is he, like two years old?
And your point is what? That we should be horrified by the mutts who inhabit the place?
I’m sorry. I’m horrified that you chose to spend 3 minutes with Hitchens.
What was that for you? Like your Lou Reed moment (“Walk on the wild side”)? What were you thinking?
The SSNP is a horrible and sick organization. But Hitchens had no right to deface the sign. That does not justify the violent response. But he’s dealing with animals here, not people. We recognize a right to free speech and what he did violated that. It’s a thin line between protesting evil and justifying wrongs in order to combat it. This crossed the line.
I admire Hitchens, but this sign business was stupid.
Discretion being the better part of valor, I would have chosen a different time of day to deface the sign.
I don’t know the ins and outs of Beirut, but I would have chosen a time when the streets are the least crowded, ridden up to the sign in a taxi, jumped out, sprayed the sign, back in the cab. Gone.
Hitchens should have been a little smarter. He put not only himself, but his companions at great risk. But I admire his stand.
Michael Totten,
you’re right; you should’ve taken the punk with the phone down immediately and brutally. I’m glad you learned your lesson with only minor cuts and bruises. Hopefully Hitchens did too, but I’m not so sure about that.
I was nearly mobbed once in Indonesia because I hesitated the same way you did. Some punk made catcalls at my wife while we were in a shopping mall, and when I went after him she got between us without realizing it would hinder me. While she was berating him I tried to stiff arm his throat from behind her, but I missed and only managed to knock him across a sales kiosk. Instead of going after him, I stupidly invited him to attack me, but he wouldn’t do it even though he’d grabbed up some kind of club-sized rod that was part of the kiosk’s construction. The next thing you know, I was surrounded by a fist-waving mob, and clubber was shouting “Get the Australian.” (I’m American, but this happened back in ’98 or ’99 when Australian forces were ridding newly independent East Timor of the rampaging thugs sent there by Indonesia’s armed forces.) If it weren’t for the intervention of the mall’s security guards, I could have been killed. People are killed by spontaneous mobs in Indonesia on a regular basis. Most of the victims are thieves, but it happens to foreigners fairly often. It turns out the guards had been following me around every time I shopped there because they wanted to protect me in case I ever needed it. I had new found respect for them when I found that out. I had thought they always shadowed me because they suspected I might be a thief. As one of the least likely people in that mall to be a thief, I used to get angry and drive them off. We laughed when we realized our former misunderstanding, but after that, my wife I always went out of our way to hang out with them and buy them snacks whenever we went there.
I learned my lesson too. If you’re in a public place and faced with someone intent on violence, take him out as fast as possible and get the hell out of there.
The striking thing about both of our mistakes is that we knew better beforehand, but allowed our civilized sensibilities to get in the way of our survival. Like Al Capp said back in ’66, that’s a lesson the whole country needs to learn in its relations with the rest of the world.