The Gorenberg Green Line Groan

Over at the Zion Square blog, Gershom Gorenberg is groaning (and the comments are closed - so much for free expression and discussion).

The Green Line is a disappearing, if not disappeared.

Worse, maps without the Green Line

erase the State of Israel.

He researched and discovered

...a carbon copy of the original directive. It was written by Yigal Allon, then the minister of labor, on October 30, 1967, less than five months after Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the Six-Day War. Allon’s ministry included the government’s Survey Department. He told the department chief that from that day on, the pre-war boundaries should no longer be printed...Awaiting the drawing of new borders, Allon erased the old ones, with the acceptance of the government as a whole.

Then, Gershom gets politically ideological:

Allon’s action was a fiction, a self-deception. Even for internal Israeli purposes, the Green Line has remained the divider between the territory subject to Israeli sovereignty and the land under military rule... What lies past the Green Line (Jerusalem) is under Israeli control, but it’s not part of Israel.

Let's be honest here. Even in the "old", pre-1967, Green Line border of Jerusalem there was no international recognition.

He is even a bit angry:

...symbolically, [Allon] erased one of the basic elements of a modern state—a defined territory. His map shows a return to the reality of his youth, before the establishment of Israel: a single territory from river to sea, in which two ethnic groups fought for control.

But that struggle went on between 1949-1967 so the Green Line, in Arab eyes, means nothing. Israel can't have it as a support. So why get so upset (the Gorenberg groan)?

Then he gets downright ridiculous:

Seen from one angle, the absence of the Green Line says that Israel has expanded. Seen from another, it removes Israel from the map. Seen both ways, it lends support to dogmatists, Jewish and Palestinian, determined to possess the whole land and to keep sacrificing lives until they achieve their goals.

No Israeli government proposal or non-establishment suggestion to either/or Hamas, or Fatah, or the Palestinian Authority or the Islamic Jihad or Arafat or Abbas to base a solution on the Green Line has ever worked out.

The Green Line truly is a fiction - but of the extreme peace messianists among us.

But a word of my own:

the Green Line, besides not being a border but rather a ceasefire line, actually "The lines...shall be designated as the Armistice Demarcation Lines", lost any legitimacy or relevance once the Arabs went to war. In fact, I'd suggest that at the very least, once the PLO set out to liberate, sorry, destroy Israel in 1964, the line is irrelevant and possesses no legal force. As the armistice greements, like the one with Jordan, for example, were intended to

...facilitate the transition from the present truce to permanent peace in Palestine, to negotiate an armistice;

and that would be based on

the following principles...1. The injunction of the Security Council against resort to military force in the settlement of the Palestine question shall henceforth be scrupulously respected by both Parties; 2. No aggressive action by the armed forces - land, sea, or air - of either Party shall be undertaken, planned, or threatened against the people or the armed forces of the other; it being understood that the use of the term planned in this context has no bearing on normal staff planning as generally practised in military organisations; 3. The right of each Party to its security and freedom from fear of attack by the armed forces of the other shall be fully respected;...

Since we know - even if Gershom perhaps is fuzzy on this - that nothing of those guidelines for peace and security were intended to be upheld by the Arabs and, from the infitrations of the fedayeen to the Fatah terror, they surely were not, Gorenberg cannot now insist the Green Line should not disappear, for it was gone long ago.

When will the Gorenberg approach dissipate?

Can you hear me groaning?

^

Gorenberg - Facile, Fraudulant and Fake

Most recently, there was Gershom Gorenberg in The New Prospect. (Pssst. Richard Silverstein considers him a "liar". Two years ago, he was praising Benny Morris in The New York Review of Books.

In a recent appearance, he said:

...there are three things necessary to restablish Israeli democracy: The separation of synagogue and state, the graduation from being a national liberation movement to one that takes care of its citizens, and an end to the occupation...American Jews need to give up idea of a besieged Zionism...

Back in 2006, he had written in Building Nowhereland in the Washington Post:

Out on Highway 60, the bulldozers are at work...Once again they are changing the face of the land in a way that makes life far more difficult for Palestinians while damaging Israel's own long-term interests.

Actually, at least security-wise, the fence, in the long-term, has proven that the territories must be retained someway/somehow by Israel. For me, that's quite useful.

Now, in Israel’s Other Occupation in the New York Times, his piece is summarized as

The ethnic conflict in the West Bank is metastasizing into Israel, threatening its democracy and unraveling its society.

And in the article, he states

JEWS began settling in occupied territory weeks after the Israeli conquest of 1967. The strategy of settlement was born before Israeli independence in 1948, when Jews and Arabs fought for ethnic dominance over all of British-ruled Palestine. By settling the land, Jews sought to set the borders of the future Jewish state, one acre at a time. Post-1967 settlers, though they saw themselves as a vanguard, were really re-enacting the past, reviving an ethnic wrestling match — this time backed by an existing Jewish state.

Now, the attitudes and methods of West Bank settlement are inevitably leaking back across a border that Israel does not even show on its maps.

Let's be clear, (a) Jews have been "settling" in the Land of Israel for 3500 years and throughout the period of Dispersion and loss of political independence - under Roman, Byzantine, Persian, Muslim, Crusader, Ottoman and British conquerers and occupiers and (b) that historic connection of (a) formed the basis for the League of Nations' decision, preceded by the Balfour Declaration, the Versailles Peace Conference deliberations and the San Remo Conference decision, which recognized and guaranteed by power of international law the right of Jews to close settlement on state and waste lands in the territory of Palestine which was truncated and after September 1922 consisted of all the land between the Jordan River west to the Mediterranean Sea.

The "border" he seeks to sanctify, the "Green Line", was artificial, temporary and the result of Israel's defensive actions against illegal Arab aggression.  It's 19-year existence was of total divorce from Jewish history but Gorenberg is just that type of Jew - the 'now'.

In the NYT piece, he 'borrows' language to describe the reality of Acre and the rest of the north:

Segregation, though, is intrinsically a denial of rights. The countryside throughout the Galilee region of northern Israel is dotted with a form of segregated exurb, the “community settlement.” In each of these exclusive communities, a membership committee vets prospective residents before they can buy homes.

Havde you seen Jews in Arab villages?  No.  Because they get stoned, robbed and killed.  That was the modern Zionist experience and that's why, partially, separated communities developed and also because Jews wanted to be socialists and farmers and do all the hard work themselves.  Othwerwiuse, Gorem would still be calling them as "lording over slaves", I guess.  The kibbutzim are Gorenberg's original sinners but they are of the Left and so they are sidelined to his story.

But he has another problem:

If and when Israel finally leaves the West Bank quagmire behind, it will face a further challenge: the settlers need to be brought home. But allowing them to apply their ideology inside Israel, or to transplant whole communities from the West Bank to the Galilee, will only make the situation worse in Israel proper.

Would he wish we went to the moon, or Mars?

Who is the segregationist?
^

Prejudice?

Gershom Gorenberg published this in May:-

Arriving home in Israel after a semester teaching in New York, I got in a taxi at Ben-Gurion Airport and asked the cabbie to drive me to Jerusalem. "Take the main road, not Route 443," I said. Route 443 runs through the West Bank. When it was transformed from a country road to a highway in the 1980s, Palestinian land was expropriated under the legal fiction that the project's main purpose was to serve Palestinian residents of the area. Since 2002, however, the Israeli army has barred Palestinians from using it. I take 443 only when I must to cover a story.
"I don't like 443 either," the cabbie said. "It's dangerous now that the Supreme Court made them let Arabs use it." He pronounced "Supreme Court" like a curse. Such antipathy is common among Israeli right-wingers, who regard the Court as a club of bleeding hearts. I prefer a calm driver, especially on a road into the mountains, so I didn't argue politics with him.

a. Did he know, if at all, that the cabbie was a "right-winger"?

b. Could not a left-winger be anitpathetic to the Court, say, if it approved Jewish residency in certain areas beyond the Green Line, or authorize the route of the Security Barrier in certain locations beyond the Green Line?

c. Do all right-wingers hold that view?


- - -

Creating A Sinisterly Link Through "Lure" and "Context"

Gershom Gorenberg, has an article in The American Prospect.

Gershom has specialized in messianic Zionism. His Wikipedia entry defines him as "an American-born Israeli historian, journalist and blogger, specializing in Middle Eastern politics and the interaction of religion and politics" and "a left-wing, skeptical Orthodox Zionist Jew".

The article, as others of his usual writings, attempts to sinisterly link the mainstream of the nationalist-religious camp all the while distancing himself from what he does. It's a form of ballet.

The article is entitled "Yaakov Teitel and the Allure of Lawlessness" it begins with another theme altogether so as to create the "lawlessness" and then seeks to create a link between two different realities but in doing so, points an accusatory finger and walks away after staining a whole camp.

First, he relates of 'a glossy flier posted on a bulletin border in a small, illegal outpost of Israeli settlers near Nablus' and 'citing religious sources, the flier urged Jews to "harvest" the Palestinians' olives if they could, and uproot the trees if they couldn't.'

However, 'since Judaism forbids not only theft but also the destruction of fruit trees even in warfare', even Gorenberg had to point out that 'the writer had to use considerable casuistry to make his case'. Ans sure enough, i't was condemned a few days later in a popular right-leaning newsletter' but Gorenberg then writes: "The moderate right is disturbed by such tactics...The flier's text is testimony to the violence and lawlessness that are part of the ideological atmosphere at the settlement movement's radical edge" Okay, but what about that "edge"? Gorenberg dances: "The mayhem isn't just the work of a few crazed individuals" and then draws the link: "Use that as context for understanding the arrest of Yaakov Teitel...".

Gorenberg admits "Teitel's alleged offenses reads like a brief guide to hate crime" that "He was reportedly seen as a loner" but Gorenberg won't let his prey get away. He continues: "But that's framing the picture much too narrowly. Even if Teitel is a man driven by his own particular furies, he chose to live in an environment where acting on fury is sometimes treated as acceptable, even as a virtue."

Well, a) his first two suspected crimes were committed prior to his living in any Yesha community. So just perhaps his mind-set was fixed before he could insert himself into an "environment"? And his mind-set was less ideologically political than mentally unstable maybe? and b) a 'virtue' of 'acting on fury' is 'acceptable'? er, like getting drunk at bars and beating up innocent people or killing your sister because of unacceptable social activity? What exactly is Gorenberg saying?

Ah: "Ideological violence is basic to settlement history. Arguably, it is inherent to a project that asserts one ethnic group's ownership of territory while negating another group's rights".

So, Gorenberg is getting theological - a new meaning to 'born in sin'.

And he is quick to the defensive offensive maneuver: "Predictably, prominent settlers argue Teitel is an aberration". And he perverts something Emily Amrusi wrote, about the "300,000 people living today in Judea and Samaria" who are not guilty and certainly not connected to Teitel's perceived deeds. Gorenberg adds: "That's the number of Israeli settlers, not counting those in annexed East Jerusalem. For Amrusi, apparently, the Palestinians either are invisible or are something other than people".

Does Gorenberg think that Emily should have included Arabs in the pool of potential Jewish criminals? What does he take us for - fools? If she had written 'so-and-so million people' would he not have then, perhaps, claimed Emily was intimating that all Arabs posses a virtue of fury, that their history is one of ideological violence, that they are all to be stereotyped?

But he has thought of that and he quickly adds, after doing the damage: "Put aside that gaffe". Thanks there, Gershom.

And next, he gets downright mushy: "It's true that stereotypes should be avoided, that settlers are not a monolithic group. More Israelis have moved to settlements in search of the suburban dream than for the sake of ideology. Even among ideological settlers, there's a wide spectrum of attitudes. I assume that many felt a helpless revulsion when they heard of the Teitel case: Again, someone from their community had shed blood and besmirched their name."

But he can't let go: "...as I said, there is a historical context of settlers treating violence, not to mention casual disregard of the law, as trivial or even heroic...". Lucky for him, we're not talking about the Second Aliyah, the Third, the Hagana, the Palmach.

And he claims that Shvut Rahel is "a community established in violation of Israeli law, according to the government-commissioned Sasson Report".

That's wrong. Shvut Rachel was established right after the murder of Rachel Druck in October 1991, shot on the eve of the Madrid Conference on land zoned as part of Shiloh and in fact is registered as "the Shvut Rachel neighborhood in Shiloh".

Gorenberg if fearful that his mental instability will permit his friends and neighbors to "ignore the question of why he chose to live among them". So, every murderer and rapist and thief is to be looked at geographically - why did he come to live in this neighborhood or that village?

And then Gorenberg gets into conspiracy theories: "The open question now is whether Teitel was caught because his repeated attacks created more evidence for investigators, or because he'd begun attacking Israelis, or a combination of both" as if the failure to arrest him previously was due to an indifference to crimes against Arabs. I am sure the police would be upset about that

Gershom ends by noting "The occupation will not be listed as co-defendant or co-conspirator. But if he did do what the investigators claim, his hatred not only fits a context. It fits a context he chose, drawn by the allure of lawlessness".

The "context". Another innocent key word of blame and guilt. Another sinister link.

Such a ballerina.

On Forest Fires and The Writing of History

Gershom Gorenberg opens his book review essay in the latest New York Review of Books recounting a A.B. Yehoshua story:

In 1963 the young Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua published Facing the Forests, a novella destined to become a classic of Hebrew literature. It is a nightmarish story, the kind of dread-filled dream from which you awake shuddering, about a student who takes a job as a watchman in one of Israel's newly planted forests. His task is to watch day and night for fire; his only company is an old Arab whose tongue was cut out in "the war" — meaning Israel's war of independence in 1948 — and the Arab's young daughter. The forest, as the watchman learns, hides the ruins of an Arab village, the remains of an erased past: once other people lived here, members of a different nation. Their departure has to do with vague, unrecorded violence.

At the end, the mute Arab ignites the forest. The watchman-scholar does not participate in the arson, but welcomes the climax of fire and what it reveals: "And there, from within the smoke, from within the mist, the little village rises before him, reborn in its most basic outlines, as in an abstract painting, like every submerged past." As a watchman, the Israeli has failed. Perhaps as a scholar he has succeeded: he has uncovered history, as if in a hidden archive.

And in the past decade despite the campaign of the New Historians and the Post-Zionist academics and groups like Zochrot that have done much to revise history and also reveal history, the Arabs are still burning our forests despite no need - real or imagined, to unerase their past.

Here:

Fire Causes:
The first and most important cause of forest fires in Israel is arson (Table 2). In the 1980s and early 1990s arson comprised about one-third of all forest fires in Israel -- a very large proportion. Some of the sources for this arson were identified as the work of criminals whose sole aim was to collect insurance money. Many cases of arson in the late 1980s, however, were directly related to the Palestinian uprising (Intifada). Palestinians used fire as a means of their resistance movement as early as the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, but in the 1980s it was adopted as a highly visible action against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank. Arson was found to be easy to execute: all one had to do was cross the old border, which was unguarded and open to all, start a fire in one of the many forests which straddle the mountainous areas near the border, and then disappear. The occurrence of forest fires in areas adjacent to the old "Green Line" border between Israel and the West Bank was very frequent: in the years 1988-1990 between 288 and 388 forest fires were caused by arson and took place in areas near the old pre-1967 border (Kliot and Keidar 1992). In some of the fires which took place in northern Israel, Israeli Arab Palestinians were found to be responsible. These fires were extremely remarkable because 1988 was also rich in precipitation and, as a result, the vegetation concentration was highly combustible. Intifada-induced arson gradually faded out as the uprising started to die out in the early 1990s.

Guess either they don't like trees or they very much don't like Jews.

Getting back to the review essay, Gershom can't forgive Benny Morris his "dizzying movement rightward", that Morris' book is "unavoidably one with its own slant". Gee, that's so terrible. Are his facts wrong?

Gershom uses "1948 veteran Amos Keinan" to justify the showing of the Hirbit Hizah but neglects to note that Keinan himself participated in the conquest of Deir Yassin.

He also congratulates Morris:

"Morris is an unbending believer in the value of the paper trail: documents establish fact; interviews with participants are too subjective."

Ah, but who writes up reports? Objective persons?

Another point:

"Morris is using Arab statements from sixty or eighty years ago to make sense of today's stalemate; but it seems he is also reading those statements through the lens of today's events".

Or, of course, Gorenberg, et al., have been avoiding the "Mufti angle", that the so-called "Palestinian nationalism" has always been of a character of the most negative Islamic essence. That religious fanaticism is the basis of their movement, denial first, along with a horrendous capacity for hate and death although when forced to deal with a third book there on the issue, Gorenberg must conclude:

Exploiting Islam, al-Husseini succeeded in making Palestine a pan-Arab and pan-Islamic issue.

Gershom could have done more with this:

Arab forces also expelled or massacred Jews or prevented their return to places they had fled— but they could do so rarely, for the simple reason that the Arabs had few opportunities. They were losing on the battlefield. Nonetheless, Jordan's Arab Legion emptied the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City; Arab fighters massacred about 150 Jewish defenders of the religious kibbutz Kfar 'Etzion after they surrendered.

He could have mentioned Atarot, Neveh Yaakov, Bet Haaravah, all of Gush Etzion (Masu'ot Yitzhak, Revadim, Ein Tzurim) which he left out.

And he reveals his own slant:

This time, he leaps back much further: "The Jewish people was born in the Land of Israel, which it ruled, on and off, for thirteen centuries," until the Romans crushed the last, brief Jewish bid at independence in the second century CE. Later Muslim rulers never treated it as a separate province. By the nineteenth century it was an "impoverished backwater"—albeit one where Arabs outnumbered Jews by a ratio of eighteen to one.

Morris's underlying point here is that Jews were returning to their ancient homeland. In itself, this is correct, and is essential background to the events of 1948. But it is also a classic Zionist account, and is just one face of history.

Just one? It isn't factual? Gorenberg prefers prejudices one must assume.

Look At Who Is Bullying Jews

Gershom Gorenberg, a sometimes debating partner at panels and forums (I am sure he appears more than I and gets paid more), has another browbeating column in which, in the name of wisdom, good-sense and progressive political correctness, he seeks to intimidate American Jewish leaders. It's here in Moment, entitled "It’s Time for American Jews To Speak Up!" (and at his blog, it's An End to Umbrella Politics)

I've selected these bits and hope it's clear what he wants to say, and also clear are my comments and objections there:

...I’d like to believe that these sometimes self-appointed spokespeople [writes the self-appointed spokesman for left-wing radical politics] doubt the wisdom of expanding West Bank settlements, or question the attempt to ban two Arab parties from Israeli elections, or feel qualms about the firepower that Israeli forces directed at civilian areas during the war in Gaza. But...When it rains in Jerusalem, they open their umbrellas in New York...

...umbrella politics...has been rendered bankrupt in simple pragmatic terms by three developments: the Gaza war, the Israeli elections and the Obama presidency.

...the ceasefire that ended the fighting was just as fragile as the ceasefire that could have been achieved before the war... [so? does that mean, perhaps, that the policies and the politicians to direct those policies supported by Gorenberg are wrong, corrupt, no good? why wasn't the Rafah border held by ground troops? why are the Qassams, et al. continuing to fall? why is Gilad Schalit still in custody?]

...Ruling over the disenfranchised Palestinians of the West Bank undermines Israeli democracy. [and will,(cough, cough) establish a true reliable Arab democracy that will live, side-by-side, in peace and security with Israel]

...the Gaza war should serve as final proof for Obama that his administration must push for an Israeli-Palestinian accord...Obama will need support at home. He’ll want the support of Jews in particular, given their role in the Democratic Party and their ability to put pressure on Congress. [and what is the support he'll be seeking?] The first time that the administration firmly asks something from Israel—most likely, a request to freeze settlement construction—American Jewish leaders will face a choice. Will they stick to umbrella politics, echoing the objections from Jerusalem? Or will they have the courage to support an initiative that is essential to Israel’s future? [for argument's sake: do Arab-Americans act that way? and, maybe, just maybe, these leaders and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Jews don't agree with Gorenberg and, using their democratic right, seek to influence their government not to undermine Israel's security and also to strengthyen Israel as the Jewish Zionist state of the Jewish people?]

...Will American Jews dare to ask the same questions that are regularly asked by the Israelis themselves? Will they listen to their own opinions? Will they dare to voice them publicly and without embarrassment? For their sake and for Israel’s, I hope so.
[will they be bullied by Gorenberg to say the wrong things?]

An Example of Progressive Blogging

Gershom Gorenberg has a piece in The American Prospect entitled, "The Rebel Prince", against Moshe Feiglin. And also at his South Jerusalem blog, shared with HaimWatzman.

I, too, do not support Feiglin and his Jewish Leadership group, but I don't like what Gorenberg did there.

He notes that "on the Jewish Leadership website, a Hebrew document proposes principles for a constitution for Israel". The unavoidable presumption is that the document is an official one.

But anyone with a modicum of Hebrew could have read and known that that "document" was composed by Prof. Hillel Weiss and it was uploaded as part of an internal discussion as to the future character of a Jewish state. The implication suggested that that document is the agreed upon approach, decided at some official convocation, is not only wrong but intended to be misleading.

Shame he did that 'before the goyim'.

Gershom Goes Gruesome

Here's Gershom Gorenberg's 'anti' article (what else could you have expected?)in The Forward:-

Jerusalem Dig Fuels Arab Anxieties Over Al-Aqsa Mosque

Viewed logically, the scene didn’t look a whole lot like an attempt to undermine Al-Aqsa Mosque and build the Third Temple: At the bottom of a small trapezoidal pit, a single Palestinian laborer wearing a blue hard hat carefully scraped dark soil into a bucket and handed it up to another man standing on a ledge above him, who said “Take!” in Arabic and handed it on to another worker at ground level. At this pace, they were not going to undermine anything in the coming generation.

Actually, the laborers were hired hands at an Israeli government excavation in the archaeological park next to the Western Wall. The dig is aimed at checking for antiquities before construction of pillars for a new ramp leading to Mughrabi Gate of the Temple Mount, aka Haram al-Sharif, site of Al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock. At two more spots near the pit, other workers were also carefully scraping the earth when I visited recently.

In the background, it’s true, one could hear the grind and clank of bulldozers removing the old earth embankment leading to Mughrabi Gate. Three winters ago, after a snowstorm and a minor earthquake, the embankment began crumbling. A temporary ramp, resting on a spindly metal frame, was built to access the one gate to the Temple Mount that was open to non-Muslim visitors since Israel conquered the Old City in the 1967 Six Day War. The bulldozers might appear threatening — if one irrationally believes that the secular Israeli government, which has steadfastly left the management of the Haram in Muslim hands since 1967, actually wants to replace the Islamic shrines there with the Third Temple.

Nonetheless, furious Muslim responses were built into the new ramp project from the outset. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and everyone else who signed off on the effort should have foreseen the demonstrations led by Sheikh Raed Salah, leader of the radical faction of the Islamic Movement in Israel, whose slogan is “Al-Aqsa is in danger.” They should have expected the rioting at Al-Aqsa after prayers last Friday; the diplomatic protests from Jordan, Egypt and Turkey — Muslim countries that are crucial to Israel’s foreign relations — and the reported claim by Palestinian legislator Nabil Sha’ath that Israel intended to destroy Al-Aqsa. It was irrational for Israel to ignore the inevitable irrational reactions.

Israeli and Arab behavior in the latest flare-up could serve as laboratory evidence for the thesis recently laid out by Israeli American psychologist Daniel Kahneman on why leaders tend to act too aggressively. Kahneman — a Nobel laureate in economics — and doctoral student Jonathan Renshon wrote in Foreign Policy that even when people “are aware of the context and possible constraints” on someone else’s behavior, “they often do not factor [them] in when assessing the other side’s motives. Yet people… assume that outside observers grasp the constraints on their own behavior.” In this case, Arabs have misread Israeli motives, while Israelis have assumed that their own benign intent is obvious. To Kahneman’s thesis, we can add this: Harsh historical experience is no cure for these mistakes of perception.

The belief that “Al-Aqsa is in danger” has fueled the Arab-Jewish conflict for 80 years. In the 1920s, the infamous mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, fanned fears about Al-Aqsa to build support for Palestinian nationalism — and ignited the 1929 Arab riots, the first countrywide outbreak of anti-Jewish violence. More recently, in October 1990, the declared intent of a far-right Israeli group to lay a cornerstone for the Third Temple drew thousands of Palestinians to the Haram. Inexplicably unprepared for trouble, a tiny contingent of Israeli police used live fire against rioters, killing a score of people and sparking more rioting in the West Bank and in Israeli Arab towns.

That flare-up was apparently forgotten when then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu decided to open a tunnel running alongside the Temple Mount in 1996. Olmert, then mayor of Jerusalem, swung a sledgehammer at the opening. Netanyahu and Olmert knew that the tunnel posed no threat to the Islamic shrines, and they assumed that Palestinians would realize this. Instead, Palestinians read Israeli intentions in the worst light: Tunneling meant undermining. The bloodshed that followed was a preview of what Palestinians would call the Al-Aqsa intifada, which broke out after Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000.

Certainly, Muslim descriptions of Israeli intent are also divorced from historical experience: For 40 years, Israel has kept the shrines intact and in Islamic hands. Yet it is still in Israel’s interest to take the Al-Aqsa anxiety syndrome into account, because it is in Israel’s vital interest to maintain calm in Jerusalem. Before work began, the Islamic trust, or Waqf, that administers the Haram was reportedly informed, as was the Jordanian government. That does not mean that any serious effort was made to negotiate their agreement, perhaps by offering a quid pro quo.

Early this week, Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski intervened, deciding that the ramp required approval by local planning bodies. That’s a drawn-out process allowing residents — including East Jerusalem Palestinians — to file objections. The Israel Antiquities Authority said that, in the meantime, the exploratory dig would continue. The decision to keep excavating shows a strong desire to show who’s in charge in the Old City. But it does not demonstrate a reasoned respect for the impact of unreasonable fears.

Yet, by logic, we should expect the world to understand all this and despite the many times we have repeated the message that we intend no harm, do no harm and allow Arabs to harm our rights and sites, nothing works.

Would it not then be a bit more logical for Gershom to grasp that illogical consciousness is at work - anti-Jewishness, anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, perhaps? And that his justification of a "trembling Israelite" reaction is getting us nowhere, fast, and perhaps aids the Muslim violence?