Naftul In, Bibi Out

 I had an important decision to make last Sunday morning: what music to listen to as I drove around in far-eastern Connecticut looking for the last-minute things we needed to buy for Emil’s wedding that afternoon. Lots of things suggested themselves, but I finally settled on “Brightly Dawns our Wedding Day,” a quartet from The Mikado and one of Arthur Sullivan’s most lovely choral pieces. The music—a BBC recording that Spotify recommended—was gorgeous. But, as I drove around looking for open stores, I realized that I was listening not only to an appropriate piece of wedding-day music, but also to a (choral, but trenchant) comment on the topic I knew even then I wanted to write about this week: the new government in Israel and the promise it holds for the future.

The plot line of The Mikado is a bit complicated, but the basic idea is that the singers are rejoicing over a happy marriage about to take place and noting, in four-part harmony, that one must always rejoice over happy events even without knowing what the future will bring. (Within the storyline of the operetta, the union being celebrated is unlikely to endure for more than a single month because the groom’s execution has already been scheduled for thirty days in the future. Emil and Adam’s union, on the other hand, I fully expect to be permanent and enduring. But the deeper point is that love should always be celebrated for its own sake and not merely because of where it might conceivably lead or tragically not lead, which idea I certainly can endorse wholeheartedly.) In the end, no one knows the future. But when two hearts are joined as one and from two separate individuals emerges a couple wholly devoted to each other’s welfare—that is a moment to rejoice, not to suffer over your inability to forecast every twist and turn on the road ahead.

And that is something like the set of thoughts I bring to the remarkable and—at least by myself—unexpected departure of Benjamin Netanyahu for greener pastures (or jail) and the no less unexpected ascension of Naftali Bennett to the office of Prime Minister.

Bennett heads a coalition of, to say the very least, strange bedfellows. In fact, it would not be entirely wrong to say that the parties to the new coalition, co-led by Bennet and his unlikely partner Yair Lapid, are united by more or less nothing at all other than their wish to send Bibi packing, which goal they have actually managed to accomplish. So the question isn’t whether the parties to the new government are each other’s natural allies (which they certainly aren’t) or whether they will attempt to exploit each other’s wish for the government not to collapse to accomplish their own goals (which they certainly will), but whether they will be able effectively and successfully to govern a nation known for its political fractiousness and, at least recently, political instability. That, more than anything else, is the question.

They are a very diverse lot, the partners to this new coalition.

Most unexpected of all, I suppose, would have to be Mansour Abbas, head of the Islamic Raam party. At first blush, there shouldn’t be anything too surprising here—Arabs make up about 20% of the Israeli population and there have been many Arab MKs in the past. But this is the first time an Arab party has been invited into the corridors of power as a member of the governing coalition. Is this a sign of desperation, welcoming into the government people whose allegiance to the Jewish nature of Israel is beyond tenuous? Or is it a sign of health, and of great health at that, this notion of a democracy specifically not excluding citizens from positions of power because of their ethnicity or their faith? I think I think the latter: part of the democratic process has to be a willingness to allow all citizens to be represented by the leaders they themselves choose. And that right cannot be abrogated by their unwillingness to toe this or that party line. It’s a daring move, bringing Raam in. It could obviously backfire. But it could also herald a new period in Israeli politics, one in which the citizenry is represented in the government in an unprecedented, but ultimately reasonable and fair way. We’ll see.

Bennett himself is the leader of the Yamina party, a tiny right-wing group that has exactly six seats in the 120-seat Knesset. That’s both good and bad: good, because Bennett’s retention of power will obviously have to depend on his ability to compromise with people who are in many ways totally dissimilar from himself or the other MKs of his own party, but bad because it means the PM has no natural power base on which to rely and will almost definitely be at odds with the vast majority of his fellow Knesset members. Yair Lapid, who heads the centrist and very hopefully-named Yesh Atid (“There Is A Future”) party, will take over as Prime Minister in two years. (In the meantime, he will serve as Foreign Minister.) Yesh Atid did better than Yamina, but they still only have seventeen seats in the Knesset. That means that together Bennett and Lapid only control twenty-three out of 120 seats. Will there be enough common ground for the members of the government to govern? Or will the coalition collapse almost immediately now that the only glue holding them all together—their common loathing of Netanyahu—has vanished with the object of their loathing himself. I suppose we’ll see about that too.

The other parties in the coalition are all far more likely to be uncomfortable in each other’s presence than comfortable. The left-wing Labor and Meretz parties have almost no important positions in common with the right-wing New Hope and Yisrael Beiteinu parties. Nor does it bode particularly well that the sole centrist party in the government now is Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party. (Gantz will remain in place as Minister of Defense.)

It’s also important to notice who isn’t in the new government. For the first time in a long time, there are no Haredi parties represented. Whether that will signal a sea-change in Israeli policy towards drafting ultra-Orthodox young men remains to be seen, as also remains to be seen whether the new coalition will have the strength finally to break the Orthodox stranglehold on matters of personal status (like marriage and divorce) and to offer a fair deal to non-Orthodox Jews in Israel whose tax shekels pay the salaries of the nation’s Orthodox rabbis but who must also pay dues to their own synagogues to support their own clergy. It’s unlikely that the coalition will want to step too heavily on the toes of the nation’s ultra-Orthodox population. On the other hand, the possibility of change with respect to the imperious, self-righteous way the chief rabbinate has been permitted to impose its will on the entire nation is something we can only hope to see realized.

So the chances of long-term success are not great. The coalition holds a razor-thin majority of exactly two seats in the Knesset. (This basically means that for anything at all to be accomplished, more or less every single member but one of the coalition has to be on board.) There are eight parties that belong to the governing coalition, a number only exceeded one single time in the past history of Israel. Whether that turns out to be the kiss of death or a sign of vibrant democracy at its most pliable and effective remains too to be seen. On the other hand, the new government includes nine female cabinet ministers, the most ever. But on the other other hand, none of the governing parties is led by a Jew of Middle Eastern or Sephardic origins—not a good sign for a nation in which non-Ashkenazic Jews have often felt looked over or disregarded.

So, to sum up, there are a thousand good reasons to expect the Bennett government to collapse momentarily. The man himself is a bit of an anomaly too—he will be Israel’s first religiously-observant Prime Minister who appears in public wearing a kippah, yet he leads a nation overwhelming secular in its orientation. (Whether his ascension will eventually be seen as emblematic of the nation’s move from the secular Zionism of the state’s founders to the kind of religious Zionism that has religion itself at the core of its self-conception—that too will be revealed only in the future.) He is Israel’s first Prime Minister born to American parents too, a natural, fluent English-speaker (like Netanyahu) who will do well on American television—which is key for Israeli politicians who want to win the hearts of the American public. But, of course, Bennett is also a natural Hebrew speaker—which is important since he now leads a nation of native-born Israelis to whom the ability to speak English well is unimportant and who will be far more closely tuned into the nuances of his Hebrew-language speeches and rhetoric.

The Israel of today is not the Israel of 1948. But neither is it the Israel of 1967 or even of the early 2000s. The nation today, particularly in the wake of the success of the Abraham Accords, is facing a set of potential foreign policy break-throughs, including with the Palestinians, that are unprecedented. So maybe the notion of a coalition that includes left-wing, right-wing, and centrist parties, plus an Arab party, will turn out to be the perfect government to move Israel successfully into the next decade, one—and the first—that can truly claim to represent the widest possible spectrum of opinions and positions. Things could go south at any moment, obviously. But for the moment I’m hoping for the best and wishing PM Bennett success in leading his nation forward successfully for these next two years.

Teshuvah on the National Level

As anyone who has ever attended a Rosh Hashanah service at Shelter Rock (or anywhere at all) knows, the core principle of the High Holiday season is the notion that, although done deeds cannot be undone (which would be something akin to unringing a bell or unsinging a song), they can be addressed purposefully and meaningfully through the process called t’shuvah in Hebrew and, slightly misleadingly, “repentance” in English. The Hebrew word derives from the verb meaning “to turn” and implies that one not only regrets a past act, but that one has specifically turned away from it and resolved, even should the opportunity present itself to repeat the deed, not to do that specific thing again. So that sounds simple enough, but the laws that govern the process are, to say the least, challenging. If you have wronged another, you have to ask that individual for forgiveness. But even if there is no specific other person from whom to ask forgiveness, you still have to exert yourself to right the wrong for which you are responsible nonetheless, thus addressing your own wrongdoing not merely internally or emotionally but practically and meaningfully. There can’t be too many of us who have actually read all 700+ pages of the Book of Repentance of Rabbi Menachem ben Shlomo Meiri of Perpignan, my favorite thirteenth-century Provençal scholar. But even without having the time or energy to undertake a reading project like that, the underlying principles that govern the process of seeking and attaining t’shuvah are available for all to contemplate in dozens of shorter works, including English-language ones like Louis E. Newman’s excellent 2011 book, Repentance: The Meaning and Practice of Teshuvah. (I read the Meiri’s book as my Elul reading project over the course of four years starting in 2013. Newman’s book will take considerably less time to get through.) But neither author asks the question that I’d like to write about today: can nations do t’shuvah or solely individuals?

I was surprised, but also moved, by the news that the German government has finally agreed to acknowledge that the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocents, including children, undertaken by its armed forces in the country in southwestern Africa now known as Namibia was not just an overblown and unnecessarily harsh military action, but an actual act of genocide. But, just as the Meiri (and countless others) have noted with respect to individuals, the acknowledgement of wrongdoing is nowhere near enough and has to be followed by concrete action. Can an offer of something like $1.3 billion to the victims’ descendants count? I think probably so.

The backstory matters. The big colonial powers in occupied Africa were France, Britain, and Belgium. But the Germans were there as well and, starting in 1884, claimed as German territory four colonies: German East Africa (comprising today’s Burundi, Rwanda, and part of Tanzania), German Cameroon (comprising today’s Cameroon and parts of Nigeria, Chad, Gabon, Congo, and the Central African Republic), Togoland (comprising today’s Togo and part of Ghana), and German South-West Africa (today’s Namibia). All became League of Nations mandates following Germany’s defeat in World War I. But by then the newly-acknowledged genocide was more than a decade in the past.

The basic principle was that Germany itself was overcrowded and in need for room to expand—and how more simply to expand then by seizing other peoples’ countries and unilaterally declaring them part of a new German empire? Of course, the Germans were not alone in this approach to the non-white world. But the problem in German South-West Africa was that the natives were not willing to go along with having their land seized and their native culture obliterated and, as a result, two specific tribes, the Herero and the Nama, rose up in rebellion against their despised foreign overlords. It didn’t end well. Armed German soldiers killed tens of thousands, then pushed survivors into concentration camps where most died of starvation or sickness and in which at least some were subjected to ghoulish medical experiments. (Is this starting to sound at all familiar?) Hundreds of human skulls were shipped back to Germany for further experimentation. Some have been returned. The rest somehow disappeared, but the chances that they were respectfully buried appear to be zero.

No Jewish people can consider this without reference to the Shoah, of course. There are plenty of differences, also of course, between the plight of the Jews of Nazi Europe and the fate of the Herero and Nama in German South-West Africa. But the notion of a nation unleashing its army against civilians with the specific purpose of killing as many as possible is one detail they both have in common. (And, yes, there actually is a verified command by Lothar von Trotha, the German military commander in today’s Namibia, unambiguously instructing his men to kill every Herero tribesperson regardless of whether that individual is armed or constitutes some sort of threat.)

The dead, of course, stay in their graves; nothing can bring them back to life. But the willingness of a nation to confront its past is stirring to me—and I can assure my readers that I am more than aware of the irony in me saying that about Germany, the perpetrator nation per excellence. Our tradition teaches that the gates of t’shuvah are always open. It’s heartening to see a nation take a first step through those gates and begin the process of reconciliation and healing that can surely follow. And what’s happened between Germany and Namibia has echoes in other news I read about this last week too.

Just last week, for example,  French president Emmanuel Macron publicly acknowledged his nation’s role in the horrific events in Rwanda in 1994 in the course of which more than 800,000 innocents, mostly belonging to the Tutsi tribe, were slaughtered mercilessly by their fellow countrymen who belonged to the other large tribal group in the country, the Hutu. No one accuses the French of themselves having killed those poor people. Nor was Rwanda part of the French colonial empire in the nineteenth century. (See above; it was part of German East Africa.) But the French cultivated a strong, friendly relationship with the Hutu-led government and failed to step in vigorously in a way that they surely could have averted the slaughter. They were therefore bystanders rather than actual perpetrators—but they were bystanders who could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives had they not chosen to do and say nothing while the killing went on. And it was that specific silence that President Macron was addressing in his remarks last week.

Also last week came the shocking revelation that a mass grave of hundreds of children had been found—not in formerly-Nazi-occupied Europe or in formerly German Africa, but in Canada…and not that far from where Joan and I lived in British Columbia. The remains of 215 children were found on the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, where they had all died of some lethal combination of neglect, disease, and mistreatment. The Kamloops School, just about 200 miles northeast of Vancouver, was part of a large network of schools, mostly operated by various churches including the Roman Catholic Church, that indigenous children were forced to attend by their white overlords. These schools were apparently mini-gulags in all of which some combination of physical violence and brainwashing was brought to bear to make the pupils into “regular” Canadians, which is to say, citizens with no knowledge of or affinity for their own native culture. Nor is this an ancient story for Canadians—the last such school only closed in 1996. Shocked by its own history, the government set up a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, one based on the similar commission set up in South Africa after the end of apartheid. And the Commission determined that at least 4,100 children died in these schools, almost all of them avoidable deaths, and that the children’s parents were never told anything close to the truth about what had happened to their own sons and daughters. As a father and grandfather, the suffering of those poor people feels incalculable to me. In 2018, Pope Francis declined to issue an apology for the Church’s role in this nightmarish story. But two different Prime Ministers of Canada, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau, have formally begun the process of national t’shuvah by formally acknowledging their nation’s responsibility in failing to act swiftly and decisively once it was known what these schools were really like. One quote by P.M. Trudeau struck me especially: “For far too many students,” he said, “profound cultural loss led to poverty, family violence, substance abuse and community breakdown. It led to mental and physical health issues that have impeded their happiness and that of their family. Far too many continue to face adversity today as a result of time spent in residential schools, and for that we are sorry.”

Such simple words: “we are sorry.” Yes, easy to wave away as too little, too late. But something, a beginning, a start. When I hear my own countrymen debating the specific ways our nation could or should begin to confront the legacy of slavery in these United States, I find myself looking to the leaders of Germany, France, and Canada, as I wonder what shape that kind of honest engagement with the past could take. And last week I also  read with great interest the story about the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria beginning to make after-the-fact payments to the descendants of men and women forced to work there either for no wages at all (i.e., as slaves before the Civil War) or for minimal wages far below what they deserved to earn in the years that followed. Also easy to wave away as a mere gesture. But, it strikes me that we Americans could just as reasonably consider the school’s gesture a beginning, a start, a step forward towards both truth and reconciliation.