"The Genius of Israel" by Dan Senor and Saul Singer

Before the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on Oct 7, the major news from Israel seemed to be the massive protests within Israel against the government’s plan to reduce the power of the Supreme Court. What was missing from the stories was the reason the Netanyahu government wanted to change the court.  

I found the answer in The Genius of Israel: The Surprising Resilience of a Divided Nation in a Turbulent World by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. Israel does not have a constitution. In 1995, Israel’s High Court of Justice declared that the court had the power to strike down ordinary statutes that the court determines are in conflict with what is known as the Basic Law. Essentially, the court decided, on its own, that the Basic Law was Israel’s constitution, even if no one, including Israel’s Knesset, had ever previously determined that.

 

The Netanyahu government determined to change what it saw as the court’s overreach (imagine courts legislating in America!). A lot of people liked what the High Court had done, especially in overriding other laws that couldn’t be passed by the legislature. Protests and riots were the result.

 

Dan Senor

To read American newspapers, what is going on is a power grab by the Netanyahu government. The cause, the original overreach by the courts, is conveniently omitted. Like everything else these days, the media report a narrative instead of the news.

 

This is why books like The Genius of Israel are important. The discussion about the court is a small part of the overall book. The main theme of the book is how has Israel, a country in which no two Israelis ever seem to agree on anything, managed to pull off what it has – economically, militarily, socially, and culturally. The answer lies in the Israeli character, and the authors make a convincing case.

 

Senor and Singer tell stories, give examples, and show data. From that, they reflect on how these things have happened – everything from winning a competition to land a spaceship on the moon, move it 500 meters, and take pictures to how two orthodox Israelis, exempt from military service and other group-building programs, became tech entrepreneurs. It delves into Israeli history, noting that Israelis were disagreeing with each other from the beginning (in 1948, the new nation was not only fighting for its life against all the Arab nations around it, Israelis were also fighting and often killing each other). Despite the internal conflicts and differences, As the title indicates, Israel does have a particular kind of genius, one marked by hevre, or the group a person is part of, and gibush, how people are brought together to deepen the bond between them. 

 

Saul Singer

The Hamas attack did one thing that Israelis often seem incapable of doing on their own, and that was to unify the country. It created both a national hevre and a national gibush.

 

Previously, the two authors published Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle. Senor is a former U.S. Defense Department official based in Baghdad and Qatar; a columnist for such newspapers at the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post; and currently a media communications and public policy executive at a global investment firm. Singer is a former editor and columnist at the Jerusalem Post; advisor to U.S. members of Congress; and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and other publications.

 

The Genius of Israel is a timely book. Published Nov. 7, it doesn’t address the Oct. 7 attack. But it goes a long way to explaining why and how Israel will respond. Enemies underestimate Israel at their peril.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Was this the America our veterans fought for? In one elementary school, yes – will Bardenwerper at The Pittsburgh Gazette.

 

Business Musings: All Good Things – Kristine Kathryn Rusch says goodbye to her writing / publishing blog.

 

‘The Exorcist’ at 50 – If demons are real, what about angels? What about an eternal soul? – Terry Mattingly at Get Religion. 

Poetry Prompt: Abstract Poetry -- Tweetspeak Poetery. 

The Vicar of Baghdad

It seemed to be just another noise from the troubled Mideast, those reports of fighting in Iraq and Syria. If we were aware of them at all, they seem to be the continued sectarian warfare in Iraq and the civil war in Syria. And then an Anglican priest in Baghdad raised the alarm.

ISIS.

We started paying attention, and realized that was something far beyond the norm of what seems to pass for normal life in the Mideast. An army. Atrocities. Massacres. Every bit as bad as Boko Harum in Nigeria. And then Mosul, a city of one million people, fell to ISIS.

The Anglican priest was Andrew White. And he is a vicar – of St. George’s Church in Baghdad. But he’s also known as the Vicar of Baghdad. He’s seen his face on a wanted poster, has to travel with a bodyguard of some two dozen soldiers, has experienced explosions and bombings, and has seen friends and colleagues be kidnapped and never heard from again.

Few Christians have experienced that kind of call to service.

He’s written several books; I’ve now read two of them: The Vicar of Baghdad (2009) and Faith Under Fire (2011). I found the first in the gift shop of Southwark Cathedral in London, where White was ordained, and the second at St. Martins-in the-Fields.

He tells amazing stories. Many read like thriller suspense fiction. Except his are true.

Andrew White was just completing training as an EMT with St. Thomas Hospital (just south of the Thames across from Parliament and Big Ben) when he experienced what he could only describe as a clear call to the Anglican priesthood. He had been attending an Anglican church but had been raised Baptist. He’s become something that’s neither Baptist nor what we expect of Anglicans – a priest who’s seen miracles among the people of his church in Baghdad, experienced and seen angels of protection, and recognizes when believers speak in tongues.

In The Vicar of Baghdad, White describes how he came to be a priest, and the rather surprisingly short route he took from there to his first experience in Middle Eastern politics, working to secure agreement and cooperation among the various faiths represented in Israel and Palestine. Part of that short route including training and study in Israel, and it was there he came to understand the need to study and understand Islam. During this time he also realized that God had called him to mission in the Middle East. From the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, White moved to what was happening in Iraq. He was already involved in Iraq but was in England when 9-11 occurred. The war in Iraq followed in 2003.

White moved, and still moves, easily among household names – leaders in Israel and Hamas, Yassir Arafat (while he was still alive), politicians, church leaders and imams.

In Faith Under Fire, White repeats some of the framework information of The Vicar of Baghdad, but this is more about his faith and the faith of the people he cares for in Baghdad, as it plays out in the day-to-day reality of civil warfare and unrest. I’m glad I read the two books together, because the first is largely an account of what he does while the second is more about what he believes – and how his faith suffuses and motivates what he does.

And while he refers to it only rarely, his service comes with a cost. One is separation from his wife and two sons, who live in England. The other is that he has multiple sclerosis, diagnosed shortly before his first Mideast experience.

Andrew White, the vicar of Baghdad, would tell us that he’s just a man. And he is. But he’s been used by God in amazing ways.

Photograph of Andrew White courtesy of The Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East. 

William Brown’s “Aim True, My Brothers”

Ibrahim Al-Bari is highly skilled terrorist, trained in Afghanistan and Iraq. His last operation in Israel was both a success for attacking a bus in a rural area but also a failure for the death of his brothers. He’s determined to punish America. He wants to do it in as a spectacular way as possible. And so he arrives in America via Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C., and implementation of his plan gets underway. He’s barely through U.S. Customs when he makes his first killing. Al-Bari knows how to use an ice pick

Because of his connections with security at the Egyptian Embassy, FBI agent Eddie Barnett learns that Al-Bari is in the country under an assumed name (and passport). He teams up with Moustapha Khalidi, chief of security for the embassy, and they begin looking for the needle in the haystack that is Al-Bari in America.

Barnett and Khalidi are joined by Rachel Ullman, a colonel in the Israeli army and an agent for Mossad. Ullman, scarred by the deaths of her husband and daughter, has become a lethal killing machine.

The three don’t have much time. The target is the President, and the plan is to launch the attack while he’s making a major (and televised) speech at Yorktown. But they don’t know that; they only know an operation is planned.

And so writer William Brown swerves another espionage thriller in Aim True, My Brothers.

And this one is just as “hang on by your fingernails” a suspense story as his The Undertaker, Winner Lose All, Thursday at Noon, and Amongst My Enemies. I’ve read them all and they’re all riveting works.

Brown swiftly moves the story from the back streets of Washington, D.C., northern Israel, to Boston, the White House, and historic Virginia. The reader is given the story through the action of Al-Bari the terrorist as he moves toward the culmination of his plan and how the three agents begin to track him. And Brown mixes in international politics and a nice dose of betrayal.

Aim True, My Brothers is fast-paced and well written, with a sense of immediacy and a story that could have been taken from today’s headlines.

Related - my reviews of:

The Undertaker

Thursday at Noon

Winner Lose All

Amongst My Enemies

Photograph: Yorktown Visitors Center, Yorktown, Virginia.

Poetry for Isaac and Ishmael

What does poetry have to say to Isaac and Ishmael, Jew and Palestinian? More than one might expect. Certainly more than I expected.

Poet Elana Bell has taught poetry to educators, prisoners, and high school students. Some of those students are in New York City, where Bell is writer-in-residence at the Bronx Academy of Letters.

Others live in Israel.

And Palestine.

And it all comes together in Eyes, Stones: Poems.

To continue reading, please visit my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.