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Jewish Journal

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January 25, 2013

Can Bibi’s wife Sara spoil Israel’s coalition?

Leave a Comment / Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News, Opinion /

Forging a coalition is, without a doubt, the most difficult part of the election process in Israel.

After a long, hard fought and often ugly election battle, it falls to the future prime minister to make deals with those who were, until recently, his nemesis all in order to obtain the required 60 Knesset seats necessary for his party to govern the country. Election planks and platforms are first weighed and then cast away in favor of the issues of power, control and of course, prestige.

Well before the final results were in, Benjamin Netanyahu placed calls to potential coalition partners. Immediate calls went out to the ultra orthodox Sephardi party Shas which then won 11 seats, the ultra orthodox Ashkenazi party United Torah which then won 7 seats and the anti ultra orthodox Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party which in the end won 19 seats.

The call Netanyahu did not immediately make was to the party that, to all appearances, is the natural partner to his own Likud/Yisrael Beitenu party. Netanyahu did not place a call to Ha Bayit Hayehudi (The Jewish Home) party, a modern Zionist orthodox party which garnered 12 seats, until late Thursday. And there is a simple reason for that.

Netanyahu's wife Sara did not want him to make the call. There is bad blood between Naftali Bennett, the leader of The Jewish Home, and Mrs. Netanyahu. The feud goes back to the time before Bennett headed and then sold a multi-million dollar start-up it goes back to the time when Bennett was chief of staff in the office of the prime minister.

Imagine the pressure in the Netanyahu household. Netanyahu needed to weigh the sides to weigh the wrath of his wife against his need for a successful coalition that would insure his position as prime minister. Not an easy decision to make. Sara has a strong hold on her man, but the pull of the prime ministry may be even stronger. Despite the protestations and clash of personalities, Bennett can only help Netanyahu and the phone call was made.

Sara Netanyahu is known to have a long memory and to hold a grudge. Many an adviser who crossed paths with this first lady ended with crossed swords and was tossed out with the trash. She is probably no different than Barbara Bush or Nancy Reagan or, for that matter, Hillary Clinton. But she is definitely less subtle. In the end Sara will probably lose this battle, but she will come back later with a vengeance.

Israel is thought to be so easily understood by Western commentators and analysts. Pollsters think that it is an easy nut to crack. But unless you understand the nuance of the country, unless you can read the people, commentators, analysts and pollsters will get it wrong every time.

They think that because English is so readily and often eloquently spoken and because so many Israelis have been educated in the United States or other Western countries that Israel is a Western culture. But it is not. Israel is almost Western, but it is also very much a Middle Eastern country — albeit a modern Middle Eastern country, and that makes all the difference.

Many western commentators don't really take the time to analyze Israel. That is why for months now commentators and analysts have been talking about the radicalization of Israeli politics and bemoaning the fact that mainstream Israel was leaning more and more to the right.

If this election teaches us anything it teaches us that they were wrong. Why were they so wrong? They failed to do their own analysis and instead, these observers of Israeli politics swallowed hook, line and sinker the Palestinian line. That line is simply anti-Israel. And so anything that is not decisively pro-Palestinian is seen by commentators as rabidly right wing and as an extremist point of view.

By now the picture of true Israeli society should be perfectly clear. The centrist Atid party with nineteen seats is now the 2nd largest party in the Knesset only after Netanyahu's Likud. And it will almost certainly insist on playing a major role in the ruling coalition. The most important platform put forth by Atid is the universal draft – a requirement that every Israeli serve in the army. This general platform resonated with masses of Israelis and was also referred to as 'an equal burden' to be shared by all Israelis, including Arab Israelis. This issue catapulted Atid into a major position in the 19th Knesset.

Interestingly, the other new and newly huge party in the Knesset, Habayit HaYehudi or The Jewish Home, now the fourth largest party in the country, believes in the same principle. And both parties believe in the breakdown of the power of the ultra orthodox rabbinate.

These two new parties, both led by young new political leaders, obtained a combined thirty Knesset seats. That is exactly 25% of the Israeli parliament. They are not extremist. They are a real reflection of the new Israel.

With Netanyahu and his 31 seats, Yair Lapid and his Atid party with 19 seats and Naftali Bennett and his The Jewish Home party with 12 seats these three parties combined have 62 seats, a perfect number to form a ruling coalition. They make up just over half of the 120 seats needed to form a government.

Sara Netanyahu had better start getting used to it. I think that her husband will be spending a lot more time with Naftali and Yair than he will with her in the very near future. The rest of Israel made the decision for him.

Can Bibi’s wife Sara spoil Israel’s coalition? Read More »

Newsflash: Smoking is Very Unhealthy

Leave a Comment / Blogs /

I have shocking news. Smoking is very very bad for you.

In 1964 the US Surgeon General issued a report summarizing the known adverse health effects of smoking. At that time about 40% of American adults smoked. A widespread campaign followed informing Americans about the link between smoking and lung cancer, emphysema, stroke, and heart attacks. Federal law required the placement of health warnings on cigarette packages, and school children all learned about the adverse health effects of smoking.

By 2010 the prevalence of smoking decreased to 19% of American adults, mostly because of more people quitting (rather than fewer people starting). But from 2004 to 2010 the prevalence of smoking has changed little. We seem to have reached a steady state, a nadir of smoking despite the now well-known health hazards. And while smokers were much more representative of the general population in the 1960s, they are now disproportionately poor and less educated. Current smokers are also on average younger than non-smokers, since so many smokers quit as they get older.

This week the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published two studies that attempted to quantify the differences in longevity between smokers and non-smokers. The studies followed hundreds of thousands of men and women and compared the information about their smoking status to their longevity and cause of death.

The results were fairly dramatic. On average, those who never smoked live over 10 years longer than those who continue to smoke their whole lives. For those between 25 and 79 years old, the death rate for smokers is three times that of those who never smoked. Those who quit also did much better than those who didn’t. Those who quit between the ages of 25 and 34 lived 10 years longer than those who continued smoking, almost reaching the longevity of those who never smoked. The benefit of quitting decreased with increasing age, but never disappeared. Smokers who quit between the ages of 55 and 64 still lived 4 years longer than those who kept smoking.

My regular readers will recognize that these are not randomized studies, and they therefore deserve some skepticism. That’s true. One study was controlled for alcohol use, educational level, and body mass index, but one can easily imagine other confounding factors (poverty, poor access to health care) that may be more prevalent among smokers and independently increase the risk of death. So we can’t be certain that the effect of smoking is as large as the study suggests. Still, the studies add to a mountain of evidence that has already established the risk of smoking. And a randomized study will never be done, so we will never be able to measure the risk exactly.

The bottom line is that smoking is likely to cut your life short. Quitting at any age has benefits. Sooner is better.

The author of Because smoking has become a stigmatized behavior concentrated among persons of low social status, it risks becoming invisible to those who set health policies and research priorities. Yet, the need for greater attention to the policies known to reduce the prevalence of smoking remains urgent. As former Australian Health Minister Nicola Roxon has said, “We are killing people by not acting.”

But the increasing “invisibility” and disenfranchisement of smokers seems to me inevitable. For half a century we have very successfully educated people about the risks of smoking. We have waged a campaign that has made it clear that smoking is hazardous and we have tried to make it uncool. We cannot simultaneously applaud our important success while being surprised that those most resistant to the message are those whom information and solid judgment are least likely to reach.

All diseases that are predominantly acquired through behaviors, like HIV or cervical cancer, follow the same pattern over time. As education about prevention of the disease spreads, those who have access to information and value their health will stop contracting the disease. A generation later those who are still engaging in the risky behaviors are very difficult to reach. Few problems are more intractable than people in free societies choosing to harm themselves.

Further progress in decreasing the prevalence of smoking is likely to be incremental and slow. I suspect further attempts at addressing this problem through policy will involve tradeoffs, not solutions.

Learn more:

” target=”_blank”>Quitting smoking prolongs life at any age (LA Times)
” target=”_blank”>21st-Century Hazards of Smoking and Benefits of Cessation in the United States (NEJM article)
” target=”_blank”>New Evidence That Cigarette Smoking Remains the Most Important Health Hazard (NEJM editorial)

Tangential Miscellany

Seven years and over 300 posts ago I decided to start writing a weekly health news blog. Since then my posts have been republished in half a dozen publications, started some fascinating debates, and I hope educated and stimulated you. Thank you for reading. I promise to try not to bore you in the next seven years.

Important legal mumbo jumbo:
Anything you read on the web should be used to supplement, not replace, your doctor’s advice.  Anything that I write is no exception.  I’m a doctor, but I’m not your doctor.

Newsflash: Smoking is Very Unhealthy Read More »

Abbas asks Israel to let in Palestinians fleeing Syria

Leave a Comment / Israel /

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas tried to get Israel to let 150,000 Palestinians fleeing war in Syria resettle in the West Bank, but dropped the request after the Jewish state demanded they first give up their right of return, he said.

Syria is home to around 500,000 Palestinian refugees, some of whom have been fleeing the country because of civil war between forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad and fighters seeking to topple his government.

Israel has said it has no plans to allow them to enter the West Bank.

“I asked the Secretary General of the United Nations, I told him to ask our neighbors to let us be bring them to Palestine. Four days later the surprise answer came to me, (the Israelis) agree,” Abbas told Lebanon-based Al-Mayadeen television in an interview broadcast on Friday.

“They agree on one condition…that each one of the refugees renounce their right of return. We said, forget it,” Abbas said.

Around 5 million Palestinian refugees live in U.N.-run camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Gaza, the West Bank and Syria, after they or their ancestors fled or were forced from homes in what is now Israel during the 1948 war of Israel's founding.

Palestinians believe U.N. General Assembly resolutions enshrine a right for these refugees to return to their original lands, an idea consistently rejected by Israel.

Their fate has been one of the thorniest sticking points throughout the decades of violence and diplomacy between the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Twenty thousand Palestinian refugees have fled from Syria into neighboring Lebanon, joining 400,000 Palestinians living in hard-scrabble ghettos in that small nation.

The office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has denied it would let Palestinians from Syria into the West Bank. Israeli government representatives told Reuters they had no information on such talks.

The head of the U.N. agency responsible for Palestinian refugees told Reuters he had not been informed of any deal between Israel and the Palestinians on a repatriation.

“It seems to be, frankly speaking, an unrealistic option from the practical point of view, to move a large number of people through Jordan and then the occupied territory, or Egypt,” said Filippo Grandi, head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

Abbas, who himself fled his original hometown in Northern Israel, courted domestic controversy last year when he told an Israeli news channel that he had no desire to return.

Palestinian rivals in the Hamas Islamist group in Gaza, who reject peace talks with Israel that Abbas has long pursued, said the president's comments undermined efforts to resettle lost land.

Additional reporting by Oliver Holmes in Beirut; Editing by Peter Graff

Abbas asks Israel to let in Palestinians fleeing Syria Read More »

Yahrtzeits and Yom HaShoah

Leave a Comment / Blogs, Culture, Mobile, Mobile Sections, News /

My father Sam’s Yahrtzeit falls between January 27th, the International Holocaust Memorial Day adopted by The United Nations in 2005, and Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day established in 1951 by the Knesset. For 49 years I thought my father died on the 9th of February, 1962, but learned last year when my cousin emailed me a picture of his grave that he had died on the 11th. I was born on the 9th of November of the same year, and it had always felt meaningful to me that I was born exactly nine months after his death. I now know it was nine months and two days, yet the meaning still holds.

Nine months: the accepted gestation of a human life that shows its presence as an electric beat even before there is a heart to hold it. The fact that I entered the world as a beat without a heart just as his heart stopped beating has always filled me with a sense of the relay of life. We’re here to make meaning in the short time we’re given, and at the end of our passionate sprint and just as we are running out of steam we hand the baton to the next person who is waiting expectantly, pure nascent longing to burst out and into their own stretch clutching the baton. I remember the intramural games in grade school. What it felt like to know that there was someone up ahead waiting for the baton, your teammate, your kin, waiting to rip the baton out of your hands and take it home to the exhilaration of victory or, if not, at least the satisfaction of an effort, in community. And, too, what it felt like to wait for the baton to arrive, how you could feel your feet running even as you stood stock still in wait as you watched your fellow sprinter run toward you with all their might and hope, and next, how you could feel the baton in your own hands before you even touched it just by connecting with your teammate’s fast approaching gaze.

We live at an important time in post-Holocaust history. In Los Angeles, the second largest Holocaust survivor community in our country and the fifth in the world, we live, we Jews and Christians and Buddhists and Muslims and atheists, with our heartbeats as common ground. We live among and aside an extraordinary group of elders—those who can, if they choose to and are able, speak to us in real time about this chapter in modern history that is unprecedented and lifetimes later still equally incomprehensible and heartbreaking.

And it is they who hold the baton now, some standing still in wait of the right invitation to reveal for the first time, and others more seasoned who hit the roads from morning to night, from museums to classrooms to meetings. They carry with them totes that contain their material evidence—a document, a newspaper clipping of their story, a book they have written, and if they are lucky, a photo or two.  They do this with one goal in their heart, as child survivor Eva Brettler who paraphrases Elie Wiesel explains, “to speak for their family members and friends and neighbors who cannot speak for themselves.”

This year, in the days around January 27th and Yom HaShoah, reach out to hear the voices of legacy and offer up your heart and your conscience to be changed and emboldened.  At the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and The Shoah Institute, at The Museum of Tolerance and in synagogues and churches, at colleges and universities, and at local libraries and community centers. Find your place in this story.

Yahrtzeits and Yom HaShoah Read More »

The Israeli Election – A View from America

Leave a Comment / Blogs, Israel, Mobile Sections, News /

Israelis have spoken – that is, 67.52% of Israel has spoken equaling 3,777,977 votes with a smaller percentage of Israeli Arabs voting than ever before. In the next six weeks we will learn what the ruling coalition will look like.

There were some big surprises in the final vote tally representing a kind of tikun (correction) within Israeli politics. Rather than continuing the trend towards a more extremist right-wing government, Israelis wanted their next Knesset to turn back towards the middle of the political spectrum.

The two most significant winners are Yair Lapid of “Yesh Atid” (i.e. There is a Future) representing the middle with 19 seats, and Naftali Bennett of “Bayit Yehudi” (i.e. The Jewish Home) from the right with 11 seats. Netanyahu was the big loser though he will likely remain Prime Minister. Kadima dropped to 2 seats and the ultra-Orthodox parties lost strength as well with a total of 19.

What does it all mean?

For the past two months I have been studying modern Hebrew by Skype with two wonderful teachers in Israel. Tomer lives in Tel Aviv, is 25 years old, secular, a graduate student in history and literature at Tel Aviv University, a jazz musician, and interested professionally in the media. He was among the 20% of “undecided voters” until he walked into the voting booth and cast his vote for Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party.

My other teacher, Avital, lives in Efrat (on the West Bank), is 28 years old, religious, a graduate student in Hebrew grammar at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and wishes to be an editor and translator. She was viscerally excited whenever speaking about Naftali Bennett.

Both teachers are smart, sophisticated, educated young Israelis. They are concerned about quality of life, the Israeli economy, the growing deficit, and the future of the middle class. Each was drawn to a candidate who is straight-talking and unencumbered by political corruption.

Tomer worries that Lapid yitkapel (slang: “he will fold/cave” to the pressures of Netanyahu and politics). Avital had wished that Bennett would have fared better. She liked his campaign's emphasis on family and Jewish study. Both Tomer and Avital liked that their respective candidates each emphasized the importance of shivyon b’nitel (“sharing the burden of military/civilian service, including the ultra-Orthodox).

Bennet and Lapid are alike and dissimilar, mirror images of each other. Lapid has called for a renewal of negotiations with the Palestinians leading to a two-state solution, is against the division of Jerusalem and wants the large settlement blocs to remain in Israel with appropriate land swaps in a final settlement.

Bennett wants to annex 60% of the West Bank and is opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian State anywhere on the land west of the Jordan River.

Lapid is a secular Jew and attends our starship Reform synagogue Beit Daniel in Tel Aviv occasionally. He believes in a pluralistic democratic Israel.

Bennett is a modern orthodox Jew who is married to a secular woman and wants the government to support all the orthodox parties and not just Shas. He and Bayit Yehudi have provoked the scorn of Shas' 90 year old spiritual father, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who branded them as a party of “goyim.” Bennett does not speak about religious pluralism nor about equal rights for Reform and Conservative religious streams. He wants to change the way judges are appointed so as to prevent them ruling on the constitutionality of legislation passed by the Knesset. He charges that the media is controlled by the left, though neglects to note that the most widely read Israeli newspaper is Israel Hayom, financed entirely by the wealthy American right-wing Jew, Sheldon Adelson.

A defining decision will be whether Netanyahu includes Bennett in his coalition or excludes him. If Bibi excludes him the government will essentially re-affirm the goal of a two-state solution. If he includes Bennett, he will signal his disinterest in negotiations leading to a two-state solution.

Secretary of State designate John Kerry is planning to visit Israel and the Palestinian communities in February to get a lay of the land. I would hope that President Obama will come as well, or very soon thereafter, in order to speak heart to heart with the Israelis and demonstrate his personal concern for their security and welfare as a Jewish and democratic nation, and then do the same with the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, thereby opening up the process leading to a final two-state solution.

Granted, the President has much on his plate, not the least of which is the Iranian nuclear threat. But only the President can act as the divorce mediator between the Palestinians and Israelis, and I hope he will take on that role.

Tomer and Avital, their generation and the people of Israel deserve nothing less.

The Israeli Election – A View from America Read More »

Israeli Game of Chicken with Gaza Bit Netanyahu Election Morning

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized /

How could hundreds of pre-election polls in Israel be so wrong? Actual voting is different than opinions shared with pollsters.  Much of the bellicose verbiage of the right wing parties resonated with the “resiliency” that the average Israeli is supposed to display after weathering a harrowing war experience. Israelis weren't voting with their feet by emigrating, but they definitely voted with their ballots and displayed higher vother turnouts.

Essentially, moderating self-preservation impulses were what ultimately was expressed in the voting booths.  Even the fighting elite such as the Israeli Air Force, seemed to have let moderating impulses guide their votes.  As Aluf Benn of Haaretz writes: 

Most voters at air force-base polling stations preferred Lapid over Netanyahu. Is this because they are more moderate, or because of the implication of the premier's threats against the Islamic Republic?

Five of the past six elections have had an unilateral Israeli-initiated military actions, when there had not been or was no extraordinary impending threat on Israel’s civilians, such as the assassination of Hamas’  Ahmed Jabari as he was in the middle of maintaining and negotiating an expanded ceasefire with Israel.

In the nine weeks before the 2013 elections Israelis discovered that rockets locally made in a sieged Gaza had achieved longer ranges that included Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. That new fact may have have nagged many Israelis to take a step back and vote for a “moderate” new personality, Yair Lapid,  who laid down right after the election as his opening gambit in coalition talks were the predictable ending the yeshiva military exemption and—surprise (as J.J. Goldberg points out)—reopening peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. 

Lapid is listening to his electorate who woke up in the morning deciding to vote for him after telling pollsters something else for months.

Pini Herman, PhD. has served as Asst. Research Professor at the University of Southern California Dept. of Geography,  Adjunct Lecturer at the USC School of Social Work,  Research Director at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles following Bruce Phillips, PhD. in that position and is a past President of the Movable Minyan a lay-lead independent congregation in the 3rd Street area. Currently he is a principal of Phillips and Herman Demographic Research. To email Pini: pini00003@gmail.com To follow Pini on Twitter:

Israeli Game of Chicken with Gaza Bit Netanyahu Election Morning Read More »