Stay Informed

Sign up to receive the Middle East Bulletin!

Support Middle East Progress

In-Depth Coverage

Original Commentaries

11/20/08
Pakistan: Learning the Right Lessons from Iraq  —Senator Robert P. Casey, Jr. (D-PA), Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Original Commentary for Middle East Bulletin.
11/13/08
The View from Gaza  —Taghreed El-Khodary, New York Times journalist in Gaza and Harvard University Nieman Fellow (2005-2006). Interviewed by Middle East Bulletin.
11/04/08
Getting on the Right Track  —Dalia Rabin, chairperson, Rabin Center, and daughter of the late Yitzhak Rabin. Interview with Middle East Bulletin.

Setting the Record Straight

Keeping Focus on Long-Term Objectives

“[W]hile we do need to have a cooperative approach that involves many of our friends and allies in meeting with the Pakistanis, … as we work out with them a rough division of labor, the U.S., I believe, ought to be taking the lead in addressing the issues in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. And given the difficulty of doing so, I suspect that we will not have a great deal of difficulty in convincing them to allow us to take the lead there. But as we all know, there is a real tension between our short-term tactical aims in trying to capture or kill terrorists across the border and militants in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and our longer- term counterinsurgency pacification goals. We very much need to be focusing on the end state. What is it that we want this area to look like? ... In that context we need to have a common agenda with the Pakistani government and very much to include the military on counterinsurgency in that area. There needs to be, therefore, a focus on combining military efforts with economic, development and political development in those areas.”
—Robert L. Grenier, managing director and chairman for Global Security Consulting, Kroll, event, “Partnership for Progress: Advancing a New Strategy for Prosperity and Stability in Pakistan and the Region,” Center for American Progress, November 17, 2008

Middle East Analysis

The 12th Year

Noa Rotman, granddaughter of Yitzhak Rabin, published in Yedioth Ahronoth, adapted for Middle East Bulletin

My memory is worn, scarred, stimulated and pained. Once a year, I sit shiva in the national mourners’ hut, wearing a three-piece suit, hair styled, everything in place, crying reservedly. Once a year, they bring out my grandparents’ freckled wonder girl to say something touching, something authentic and real, while all made up for the cameras, hoping that she won’t forget to top it off with an interesting anecdote from her last encounter with him. The wonder girl, who turned 30 this year, who has the first hint of wrinkles around her eyes, isn’t sure how to sort between realities and revised memories, among the images in her head.
My memory is worn, but the jailed murderer, it seems, is not. He has enjoyed conjugal visits with his fiance. His fiance, who was introduced to him by right-wing activists since he was sent to prison and who divorced her husband to carry on a horrifying lineage, has been waiting to clutch her son. What sickening timing, for this child, , the result of a repugnant merger between pure satisfied evil, brought into the covenant as our dark reality is teetering on the edge of hell.

Our bodies hang on the edge of this abyss. It is a long, long row; this is the twelfth journey to this infinity; our fates on the silver platter of Israeli talkback culture, asking and being asked once again, to remember, with great pathos, and never to forget. Actually no, devoid of pathos, but rather with Rabinesque sincerity, feeling a pain that never abates, slightly ashamed, left with a suppressed anger presented with a civic smile. As everyone expects.

We make our way to another school named after him, with a choir comprised of sweet kids who today may want to remember him, but tomorrow may join the choir of those who dispute his legacy, wishing once again to believe that more people miss that man, whom we have been mourning for twelve years. Occasionally someone reprimands us for refusing to move on.

My memory hurts. How does it hurt? It hurts like longing, like a broken heart. Why use the word ‘like’? My heart is truly broken. Maybe I’m blessed because I used to have a normal family, with an omelet in the evening and a warm blanket at story time before bed, with pajamas with a faint smell of laundry detergent, with the table set for Friday night dinner, with cakes and relatives. And when everything shattered and we almost became a meager copy of the family we once had been—a faded row of almost painfully beautiful, mourning figureheads—I decided to rescue the remnants of the family I had and stopped cooperating with the collective memory.

After we stayed quiet for some time, we realized that wouldn’t work, because people said we were too quiet and that we had stopped remembering, that we were a lesser generation than our predecessors. But wait - just a moment ago it seemed like the winds of silence were blowing: after excess talk, mounds of criticism and garbage piled up on our queen mother, our beloved grandmother Leah, who was scorned until she was reduced to nothing, fading away in front of the news cameras on Mount Herzl.

My memory is pained, my anger has been provoked, my soul is tired, and my life has only just begun.

Please rise for the singing of our national anthem.