Dreams of Bedford Falls

It's A Wonderful Life is my favorite film, which is saying something because I've seen lots of films. This year the film seems particularly poignant. In my mind It's A Wonderful Life has always been paired with The Bicycle Thief, both because they are closely contemporary and thematically synonymous. The protagonists of each film, George Bailey and Antonio Ricci, face the same crisis: they become reduced to pieces of capital. Antonio's value is subsumed in his stolen bicycle, George's in the insurance policy he offers to Mr. Potter. 

The Bicycle Thief (Spoiler Alert) resolves tragically. Antonio never recovers his bicycle, the final shot shows him and his son, swept along in a crowd, yielding to the streetcar plowing through the teeming urban masses, symbolizing the inevitable displacement of human labor by machines. It's A Wonderful Life is of course the inverse of The Bicycle Thief, unless one ends the film at the point that George is standing forsaken on the bridge, contemplating suicide- then the two films would be virtually identical. 

A lot of Capra's films seem to work that way- Meet John Doe, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington- they build to a crushingly tragic ending that then gets reversed through fantastic circumstance. His quixotic optimism has always felt uniquely American to me. But so has the tragic ending nested within each of those stories. Capra understood that American capitalism, like industrial capitalism worldwide, had the capacity to dehumanize individuals, tear apart communities, and erode families. 

In this respect his message in It's A Wonderful Life corresponds very closely to that of The Bicycle Thief. In The Bicycle Thief, Antonio Ricci transits from one source of support to another in search of aid. He entreats the state, the community, his family, his friends, the spiritual powers (in the form of a local holy woman)...all to no avail. These are all the groups and institutions that George feels abandoned by as he stands on his bridge of sorrow (and all come to his rescue in the party scene at the end in which Zuzu hears Clarence's bell ring). 

There are a number of ways to read the divergence between the two films. One could argue that Capra is shilling for the system- offering people a saccharine fantasy to lull them into complacency about the soulless destructiveness of the market. But that has never seemed persuasive to me. If Capra's goal was to anesthetize, the scenes in Pottersville would not be so jarring or so true-to-life. The most upsetting thing about the juxtaposition is that the people of Pottersville are the same as the residents of Bedford Falls, only organized differently. 

This seems to be Capra's point- we might all wish that we live in Bedford Falls, but we all know on some level that we live in Pottersville. Or rather, each community in America is both Bedford Falls and Pottersville at once. In every city and town there are those for whom state, family and community are working, and those for whom they are not, and the scope of each condition is contingent on the choices we make as individuals and as a society. Moreover, the better choices in that regard *require* optimism. As Americans the freedom our institutions grant us for expression, commerce, and conscience are potentially a blessing, but they also entail peril- pessimism overindulged can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. As FDR said, in our liberal democracy the greatest thing we have to fear is "fear itself." 

So that is the message I take from It's A Wonderful Life this holiday season- not that we used to live in Bedford Falls and we are slipping into Pottersville, but that both have been with us all along, and that the duty to work for one and against the other has never changed. Yes, at the moment there are a lot of people (one particularly orange-tinted) out there spreading fear and malaise, but that doesn't change the fact that it remains a wonderful life, and it is a virtue to keep listening for Clarence's bell. Happy New Year's to all. I may run into you in Pottersville, but I'll be looking for you in Bedford Falls.

Jerusalem, Israel, and American Jews

The recent debacle at the UN touches upon a subject that is a source of confusion and rancor among my fellow Jewish-Americans. When, about a year ago, I first expressed opposition to Donald Trump's plan to move the American embassy to Jerusalem I received angry messages from friends demanding why, as a Jew and a Zionist, I did not see the clear logic of acknowledging Jerusalem as Israel's capital. Similar reactions have attended my commentary on Trump's revival of this plan after his having seemed to drop it earlier.

Because most Jewish-Americans assume that there is a single, consensual narrative at the heart of Israeli identity, the controversy over Jerusalem incites significant cognitive dissonance. Most are surprised to learn, for example, that though Israel claims Jerusalem as its capital, it likewise denies having annexed the territory constituting the larger eastern section of the city that was occupied after the Six Day War, and has refused to give its Arab residents citizenship unconditionally. This latter paradox reflects contradictions among Israelis themselves over the nature and mission of their shared state, conflicts that are deeply woven into the history and culture of the Zionist movement.

On the eve of the Six Day War the journalist Geulah Cohen interviewed David Ben-Gurion, the founding prime minister of Israel:

Cohen: Mr. Ben-Gurion, what will you tell your grandson today when he asks you, "Grandpa, what are the borders of my homeland?"

Ben-Gurion: Well, I will answer him, "The borders of your homeland are the borders of the State of Israel as they are now. That is all. There are no absolute borders. Had the Arabs accepted the UN resolution [of 1947], our borders would have been reduced...'Historical borders' is a concept for the coming of the Messiah."

Cohen: Would you encourage an Israeli child to write a song of longing for a greater Jerusalem?

Ben-Gurion: If he wants to write it, he should write it. I would not write one.

[Quoted in: Anita Shapira, Israel: A History. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2012, 302-3].

Ben-Gurion's perspective here was that of a classic Labor Zionist in the mold of Theodor Herzl. For Ben-Gurion (as it had been for Herzl), Zionism was a secular enterprise, and thus Israel was a nation conceived in secular terms. When and if the messiah came s/he could worry about reconstituting the Kingdom of David, until then the Labor Party and its coalition partners would see to serving and protecting the people of the Jewish state wherever they were lucky enough to be able to hang their hats. Ben-Gurion's Israel served the purpose of allowing Jews to live free and dignified lives in a modern state free of antisemitism, a goal that could be achieved as efficiently in the profane city of Tel Aviv as in the holy city of Jerusalem.

Ben-Gurion's understanding of Israel's identity and purpose was never a universal consensus among Zionists, even before the founding of Israel in 1948- there were competing alternative narratives about the project of Jewish nationhood from the very inception of the Zionist movement. But in May of 1967 it is fair to say that Ben-Gurion's perspective was overwhelmingly hegemonic in the political discourse of the Israeli state, and in the projection of Israel's image to the larger world. The Labor Party had been the overwhelmingly dominant force in the founding and defense of the pre-1948 Yishuv (the organized community of Jewish settlers in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine) and had controlled the Israeli government continuously from its founding after the UN partition.  Within the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel the story that Ben-Gurion had to tell about why Israel existed and where it was going had much clearer and more persuasive explanatory power than any of those promulgated by more religious or more militant nationalists.

The situation changed drastically in the wake of the Six Day War. The dramatic circumstances of the war- the survival of Israel in the face of seemingly inevitable destruction by its Arab neighbors, the swiftness of Israeli victory against insuperable odds- produced a profound emotional catharsis among Israelis and electrified the imagination of observers abroad, especially American Jews. 1967 saw the birth of a newly robust Zionism in the US, as American Jews found inspiration in the Israeli display of strength and military prowess.

As they became more invested in Israel post-1967, the kind of Labor Zionist narrative purveyed by leaders like Ben-Gurion was ill-adapted to inform American Jews' engagement with Zionism. For Ben-Gurion the crucial dimension of the "Jewish State" was its coherence as a state- the fact that it contained Jews was almost incidental. Jews needed a state to protect them because they were arbitrarily oppressed for being Jews, but the fact that the state was militarily and economically defensible was what counted, not that it fulfill any cultural or spiritual goals in service of Jewish tradition. This secular tendency of Labor Zionism could be quite militant in its expression. In the second seminal Zionist text of Theodor Herzl, the novel Altneuland, for example, the great villain is a rabbi who is trying to turn Herzl's Zionist utopia into a theocracy.

For American Jews, who already had a state that they called home, this pragmatic Labor Zionist ideal lacked romance and appeal. They saw in Israel's victory an image of Jewish dynamism and assertiveness with which they desired to identify, but for them the crux of Israel as a "Jewish State" had to reside in its being Jewish. The image that most epitomized what American Jews found fascinating and awe-inspiring in Israel's story was the famous photo of the Israeli paratroopers gazing in rapt wonder at the Wailing Wall on June 7, 1967, just after they had "liberated" it from Jordanian control. The fact that Jews had been barred from access to the Wailing Wall, the holiest site in Jewish sacred geography, had been a grievance of Jews everywhere. The fact that Jews would now be able to reconnect with that part of their history and religion made sense to Jews in the US as a fundamental expression of Israel's mission and purpose. The perspective of American Jews, moreover, was inflected by the fact that they lived among millions of charismatic Christians, for whom Israel was perceived in fundamentally religious terms. Evangelicals saw the reunification of Jerusalem as a miracle that heralded Christ's return, and their excitement and admiration, conveyed through many forms of media, naturally caused their theological reading of events to color the reactions of American Jews.

These intuitive perceptions on the part of American Jews tallied coincidentally with the narratives purveyed by political groups that had been more marginal in Israel prior to 1967 but that steadily gained in influence in subsequent years and decades. Many religious Jews had rejected (and still reject) Zionism and Israel altogether, but Rabbi Abraham Kook and his son Zvi had written theological tracts in which they interpreted the founding of the secular state of Israel as an inadvertent fulfillment of scripture. For them the territorial reunification of Jerusalem had the force of prophecy, and in the years after 1967 their followers grew into the Gush Emunim movement that has established settlements throughout the Occupied Territories, in the hopes of restoring Israel to biblical parameters. Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), the founder of "Revisionist Zionism," constructed his doctrine as a form of classic blood-and-soil nationalism. For him the Jewish State was a secular entity, but rooted in the history and shared cultural legacy of the Jews as a people, thus it had to inhabit the original territory ruled by David and Solomon (found mostly in what is now the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and parts of Jordan). His followers formed the Likud Party, which first took power under Menachem Begin in 1977, and controls the Israeli government now under the leadership of Bibi Netanyahu.

Thus though many American Jews view the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital as an intuitively obvious choice for anyone who supports Israel, in reality such a move is working in explicit support of religious Zionists and Likud Partisans and their particular ideological goals. As I have written in other posts, the religious and ultranational ambitions pursued by Likud and the Gush Emunim settlers are strategically unsustainable. Thus in lending power to them American Jews are unwittingly working against the best interests of Israel, of Zionism, and of global Jewry more generally.

If American Jews are to play a constructive role in supporting Israel, it is time for Zionism here in the US to grow up and put aside childish things. As Ben-Gurion understood, the boundaries of the Jewish homeland are whatever the boundaries of Israel are right now, and if Israel is to remain both a Jewish and a democratic state it must grant sovereignty to the 4.4 million non-Jewish people living in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. American Jews are faced with a choice: they can cling to the romantic notion of Israel as a state that serves Jewish tradition (and see Zionism collapse), or work for a two-state solution so that Israel can continue to nurture and protect the Jewish people as human beings, both in Israel and abroad. 

Oh, Jerusalem

Today's UN General Assembly vote demanding that the US rescind its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital is another object lesson in the poverty of the "Art of the Deal." With 128 nations voting for the resolution and only 8 joining the US in opposition (with 35 abstentions), few events have so dramatically illustrated the depths of isolation to which the Trump White House has brought the US internationally. The embarrassment of the moment was exacerbated by the empty threats made by Trump himself, who declared that US aid would be denied to those nations that supported the resolution. The hollow bluster of such pronouncements was cast into stark relief when staunch US allies such as the UK, France, and Germany joined the overwhelming majority in defiance of the White House.

What effect this will have on Trump's image here at home is difficult to say. His Evangelical supporters, for whom the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital is considered a precondition of the fulfillment of prophecy, will no doubt be very moved by his perceived adherence to principle. Some of my fellow American Jews may view this as an extraordinary gesture of support for Israel. But because the question of Jerusalem's status is so poorly understood by most Americans (even those, like Jews and Evangelicals, most emotionally invested in the issue), the long-term effect of Trump's "Jerusalem adventure" will most likely be to confirm Americans' initial impression of the President, for good or ill.

The controversy over Jerusalem dates back to 1948. In the original partition plan endorsed by the UN, Jerusalem was designated a specially mandated international protectorate, in deference to its broad religious significance.  The Arab-Israeli war of 1948 undermined that plan, leaving the city partitioned between a Western zone under Israeli control and an Eastern zone under the control of Jordan. The residents of East Jerusalem were never wholly reconciled to Jordanian rule. In 1951 King Abdullah I of Jordan was fatally shot by a Palestinian assassin while visiting the Al-Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem.

Jerusalem came under unified Israeli control only after the Six Day War in 1967. East Jerusalem, along with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were among the territories that were occupied by the Israeli Defense Forces in that conflict and that have been the focus of negotiations over a proposed Palestinian State. The question of whether or not Jerusalem is "really" Israel's capital is thus something of a red herring. Israel's government has been housed in the western section of the city since 1948, thus any debate over the location of the Israeli capital seems absurd. But what is really at stake in this controversy are the municipal boundaries of the city itself: the question is not whether Jerusalem is Israel's capital, but how much of Jerusalem is (and will remain) in Israel?

On this latter issue the Israelis themselves are ambiguous. Though the "Jerusalem Law" of 1980 declared the city a unified municipality under Israeli jurisdiction, Israeli leaders have persistently denied that this constituted an "annexation" of East Jerusalem. Why would the Israeli government be so coy about the territorial status of its own capital? There are several reasons, but they mainly resolve on the implications for Israel of "annexation" under international law. Chiefly, "annexation" would obligate the Israeli government to unconditionally grant citizenship to all residents of East Jerusalem, which it has refused to do. Residents of East Jerusalem are deemed "permanent residents" of Israel (the equivalent of holding a "green card" here in the US). They may apply to become citizens of Israel, but only on the condition that they renounce all other citizenship and pledge loyalty to the state of Israel, which few Arab East Jerusalemites have been willing to do (as this is naturally perceived as a betrayal of the cause of as-yet-unrealized Palestinian sovereignty). Even then they may be denied citizenship on various criteria.

Why, if the Israelis were so motivated to claim Jerusalem as their capital, would they be so circumspect about granting its Arab residents citizenship? Several factors made the Israelis unwilling to unilaterally and comprehensively naturalize the residents of East Jerusalem, but chief among these was the presence of the Shuafat refugee camp, which housed Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war, in East Jerusalem at the time that the IDF occupied the territory. The five hundred families resident in Shuafat had previously owned homes in Israeli cities, some of which, like Lydda, had been forcibly cleared of Arabs by the IDF during the 1948 conflict. Making them into Israeli citizens would have opened the Israeli courts to claims for restitution that would quickly have become very costly and potentially complicated, especially if the residents of Shuafat made pleas on behalf of relatives resident in Jordan, Lebanon, or elsewhere. Thus though Benjamin Netanyahu presents the status of Jerusalem to the world as an innocuously symbolic formality unworthy of controversy, the policies of the Israeli government itself acknowledge that the question of East Jerusalem is deeply implicated in all of the most existentially fraught issues implicit in the enterprise of distinguishing Israeli and Palestinian sovereignty.

The fact that the 300,000 Arab residents of East Jerusalem cannot be easily accommodated with Israeli enfranchisement without opening up the can of worms that is the question of a "Palestinian right to return (i.e. how many of the 6 million members of the Palestinian diaspora will be empowered to take up residence and/or claim compensation for property owned in Israel)" may help explain why, at the Camp David Summit of 2000, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was willing to concede that East Jerusalem should become part of Palestine. Since then most international observers have assumed that East Jerusalem would fall to Palestine in any two-state solution, especially since the removal of East Jerusalem would deprive that prospective Palestinian state of a significant portion of its population and economic assets, rendering it unsustainable in the long term. This is why world governments have generally refused to establish their embassies in Jerusalem until the final status of the city's territorial parameters is resolved.

Donald Trump is not a man who does complicated, thus there is little hope that he can ever be made to understand the controversy that he has courted. The isolation and embarrassment to which he has subjected the US are made all the more execrable by the gratuitous timing and manner of his actions. This policy was not made with any forethought or consultation with key government agencies, but was resurrected from a pile of discarded controversies for the purpose of distracting the media and the electorate from the various scandals in which the administration has been continuously embroiled from its inception. What the long term effect of Trump's bluster and the UN resolution will be on Mideast politics is difficult to predict. The only certain outcome is that US influence in the region (and in global diplomacy more generally) will be reduced for as long as the current administration remains in power. 

The Lessons of Alabama

Doug Jones's victory over Roy Moore in last Tuesday's special election in Alabama will be repeatedly analyzed in the weeks and months to come. Once again the conventional wisdom has been overturned, the expectations of pundits and prognosticators confounded. At the danger of adding a droplet to what will no doubt be a torrent, I would venture to offer my own reading of the lessons to be garnered from the event:

1)Turnout is destiny. Alabama's election replicated a pattern displayed by the presidential race of 2016, which demonstrated that the distribution of opinion among the populace matters less than the raw number of people who take the trouble to go to the polls. That is to say, though Donald Trump was deemed an inferior choice by a majority of the electorate, larger percentages of his supporters (among whom were many people who had never voted before, and were thus difficult to predict as "likely voters") actually cast votes on November 8. That fact, combined with their fortuitous dispersion across the electoral college map, gave Trump the White House. In the same way, though it is hard to know whether any clear majority of Alabamans favored Jones, a larger percentage of his supporters showed up at the polls. A growing awareness of this trend (that elections are, presently, being decided by actual voters in open contradiction of the polls) is likely to affect voting behavior in the near future, making polls less useful as predictive tools. Fewer people will be dissuaded from voting by polls that tell them the outcome is foreordained.

2)Credibility matters. Why did a larger percentage of Jones's voters take the time to cast a vote? Some of the answer no doubt lies in Roy Moore's lack of appeal. But the outcome would not be fully explicable without some accounting for why so many thousands showed up to vote for Doug Jones. This is especially true in the African-American community, which turned out in greater numbers (relative to the total number of registered voters) for Doug Jones than it had for Barack Obama in 2012. Cynics who would reduce all electoral strategy to narrow identity politics have been proven wrong. Jones's race mattered less than the fact that, as a federal prosecutor, he had brought to justice the murderers responsible for the 1963 bombing that had killed four young black girls in Birmingham. He had actually taken personal and political risks in service of the interests of the African-American community, making him a much surer gamble than the average politician who merely talks about what s/he will do if elected. Call it a variation on the "Field of Dreams" rule ("if you build it, they will come")- "if you give them a reason to, they will vote."

3)Ideology matters less. Jones is a moderate by national standards, but is very liberal within the political field of Alabama. That was supposed to have ordained that he would not stand a chance, even under the extraordinary circumstances of this special election. But voters obviously care less about standard ideological desiderata than they do about having some credible reassurance that a candidate's victory will make a concrete difference for them personally. This was already demonstrated by the 2016 election, in which many Republican voters pulled the lever for Donald Trump despite his break with GOP orthodoxy, on the perception that he would be a champion of the working class (whether they actually had credible reassurance of this is debatable, but they clearly believed they did). Any qualms Alabama voters had about Jones's politics were quashed, especially among African-American voters, by the feeling that Jones stood a better-than-average chance of fighting for them.

4)Principles matter. In the run up to Alabama's election, many Democrats nationally bewailed what they perceived to be a strategic gap between their own party and the GOP. Lawmakers like John Conyers and Al Franken were falling due to allegations of sexual misconduct, while Roy Moore continued to enjoy Republican support. This was taken to portend doom, as Democrats naively ate their own while smart, cynical Republicans continued to back morally compromised candidates for win after win. But last Tuesday's election clearly gave the lie to such scenarios. A key factor in Jones's victory was the demoralization and disenchantment of the GOP electorate. Many Republicans, taking the example of Senator Richard Shelby, withheld their votes from Moore. Others who might have told pollsters that they favored Moore lacked the motivation to actually go to the polls: turnout in "pro-Moore" counties was much lower than in those voting for Jones. If turnout is destiny (and Alabama shows us that it is), then the side with the strongest motivation is the one that will prevail, and giving people reason to feel that their vote counts for something more than the naked seizure and exercise of power is intensely motivational.

What does all of this portend moving forward? Democrats should focus on offering credible solutions to voters, and worry less about ideological labels. A candidate like Elizabeth Warren, who has taken real political risks on behalf of working- and middle-class voters in her struggles to curb the financial sector, stands a much greater chance of motivating turnout than some more "middle of the road" candidate that has no record of such service. Getting one's own voters excited is a much more urgent need than trying to attract votes from or avoiding the ire of the opposing side. Democrats who fear that running a woman for president would fail to attract Trump voters are hunting unicorns. Better to ponder how one might bring the energy of the Women's March to the polls. A presidential ticket in which both spots were held by women, especially one in which the candidates had an established record of serving the working class and people of color, would be a virtually unbeatable force in the current climate.

Donald Trump's nominal support is likely to remain stable for the indefinite future, 30-40% of the electorate will persistently tell pollsters that they approve of his leadership. But Alabama showed us that the degree to which that approval translates into action at the polls is very variable. Motivation was high among Trump voters in 2016 when his movement was a complete novelty. Whether that enthusiasm will persist after his administration has been in power for 2 or more years is doubtful.  Many voters who still speak fondly of Trump did not show up to the polls in Alabama, not because they dislike Trump, but because nothing he has done has sustained their excitement about what voting for him (and, by extension, his program in the person of Roy Moore) might mean in their own lives. Barring some drastic change in Trump's governing style or level of competence, the trend we saw in Alabama will deepen and intensify in 2018. The lessons of Alabama dictate that the next election should be a blue wave, if only Democrats can field candidates with credible records of service to the voters and offer practical solutions to the problems voters face.