News Round-Up

During the several months that I lived and worked in Israel, I flagged a variety of interesting, unusual, or simply amusing news articles that I intended to comment upon in this blog. Unfortunately, I never had time to write about most of them. With my semester in Israel now at a close, I thought I would take note of them here, all in a single post, in rapid-fire, abbreviated fashion. So, without further ado:

1. At the end of 2007, shortly before my arrival in Israel, Haaretz reported that the Israeli military had become much better at minimizing civilian casualties during aerial attacks on Palestinian terrorists in Gaza. "The rate of civilians hurt in these attacks in 2007 was 2-3 percent. The IDF has come a long way since the dark days of 2002-2003, when half the casualties in air assaults on the Gaza Strip were innocent bystanders.... The data improved commensurately. From a 1:1 ratio between killed terrorists and civilians in 2003 to a 1:28 ratio in late 2005. Several IAF mishaps in 2006 lowered the ratio to 1:10, but the current ratio is at its lowest ever: more than 1:30." This is very welcome news, generally under-reported outside of Israel, which belies the frequently made suggestion that Palestinian terrorism and Israeli counter-terrorism are somehow morally equivalent. Better yet, it appears that Israel is minimizing civilian casualties without compromising the effectiveness of its struggle against terrorism, which suggests that the goals are not mutually exclusive. In May, The New York Times reported that Israeli tactics (including the much maligned West Bank separation barrier) have drastically reduced the number of suicide bombings in Israel, "from a high of 59 in 2002 to only one in 2007, and one so far this year." The article worries that these tactics may have a downside: they may make it harder to achieve peace with the Palestinians. Perhaps, but the high rate of bombings in the dark days of 2002-2003 was not exactly conducive to peace either.

2. In May, Israel's Welfare Minister Isaac Herzog and its National Insurance Institute unveiled a plan to open government-funded savings accounts for Israeli children. "According to one method, the government would open an account for each child at birth and place the funds in that account, to which the family could also contribute. NIS 50 a month at a 5 percent interest rate would give each child NIS 17,600 [about $4,900 - W.Y.] by the age of 21. According to the second method, the government would give each infant a grant of NIS 3,500 at a preferred interest rate, yielding NIS 11,000 (at 2008 prices) [about $3,000 - W.Y.] after 21 years." Interestingly, this is a variation on an idea outlined by American law professor Bruce Ackerman in his 1999 book The Stakeholder Society, which also formed the basis for the United Kingdom's Child Trust Fund. When are we getting these in the United States?

3. The Israel Baseball League struck out! That was the unwelcome news at the end of May. "The much-hyped Israel Baseball League," The Jerusalem Post reported, "which was slated to begin its second season June 22, has been cancelled for 2008 and its future is in jeopardy." A. and I, who were looking forward to rooting for the Tel Aviv Lightning during our stay in Israel, were bitterly disappointed.

4. In May, Haaretz reported that Israel, having already withdrawn from Gaza in 2005, was now proposing to withdraw from most of the West Bank, leaving only about 8.5 percent of the territory in Israeli hands. "Israel wants to keep West Bank land with its main settlement blocs, offering land inside Israel in exchange. The land would be between Hebron in the southern West Bank and Gaza - at least part of a route through Israel to link the two territories." What Israel offered, in other words, was contiguous territories, and the 8.5 percent it proposed to keep is close to the 5 percent proposed by Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and U.S. President Bill Clinton at Camp David in 2000. (Barak also offered to dismantle most of the settlements and to swap land in return for the remaining settlements, near Israel's 1967 border, which he didn't want to remove.) The Palestinian reply? Not interested, in part because they only want to swap 1.8 percent of the West Bank for Israeli land, and in part because the Israeli proposal postpones the difficult negotiations about Jerusalem till a later date.

5. To be fair, the leadership of the Palestinian Authority aren't the only ones who have shown themselves capable of acting in a foolish and shortsighted manner. In July an Israeli defense committee approved the construction of 22 homes for the families of a former Gaza settlement in the sparsely populated West Bank settlement of Maskiot. As I suggested above, any future peace agreement with the Palestinians will likely allow Israel to keep a few major settlement blocs near its 1967 border in exchange for land inside Israel. However, Maskiot is far from that border. Israel should be dismantling it, not expanding it. (That said, I do think the government should approve the construction of new homes for the former Gaza settlers inside Israel.)

6. The problems plaguing Israel's universities, which I blogged about in an early post, continued to fester during my semester in the country. In June, Haaretz reported: "The past two years were among the hardest experienced by Israel's higher education system.... Leaders of the higher education network claim that the current crisis has only just begun, and that the finance ministry dried out the higher education system over recent years, bringing academic instruction and research to the brink of collapse. University heads say that without additional resources, it will not be possible to open the next academic year." As if the universities didn't have enough tsuris, six Israeli Arabs -- including two students at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem -- were arrested in July for allegedly plotting to shoot down President Bush's helicopter earlier this year. I was at least relieved to discover that none of these would-be terrorists were sociology students. The only good news for Israeli universities that I read before returning to the States was about the launching of a new academic exchange program with Britain -- a pointed response to the misguided efforts of some British trade unionists to "boycott" (more accurately, blacklist) Israeli academics and universities.

7. People sometimes ask me whether I felt safe living in Israel. The answer is yes, and apparently I am not alone. A recent poll found that 76 percent of Israeli Jews believe it is safer to live as a Jew in Israel than in the Diaspora.

8. In June, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) published an official document on “Vigilance Against Anti-Jewish Ideas and Bias.” Sounds like a good thing, right? In principle, yes, but last-minute changes in the document's language pertaining to Zionism and Israel strained Jewish-Presbyterian relations. The Forward published an excellent editorial about the controversy here.

9. One of the interesting features of Israeli society is that it is, in civic republican fashion, a nation of citizen-soldiers in which nearly all Israelis serve in the armed forces. At least it used to be that way. The Jerusalem Post reported in early July that military service is becoming less and less universal, which will undoubtedly have interesting and important sociological consequences for the country.

10. In July, Saudi Arabia hosted an international conference to promote religious tolerance and reconciliation. Public worship and display by non-Muslim faiths is prohibited in Saudi Arabia. Does anyone else see the irony here? (Apparently not al-Qaida: they called on Muslims to kill Saudi Arabia's king for hosting the conference. Tolerance is in short supply in Gaza, too. At the end of July, Haaretz published an interesting story about a former Hamas member who had converted to Christianity and thereby put his life in danger.)

11. In case you missed it, here's how to seize the day in Tel Aviv. Haaretz called it a "love letter" from The New York Times.

12. There was no love lost between me and Tel Aviv's jellyfish. In August, The New York Times reported: "From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread.... The faceless marauders are stinging children blithely bathing on summer vacations, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets." Couldn't they have told me this before I got stung at the beach in Tel Aviv?