The historian J. Rufus Fears noted that great leaders – from Pericles to Lincoln to Churchill – share four characteristics. They are anchored in principles, guided by a moral compass, posses a vision, and have the ability to build consensus to achieve their vision. These are the qualities that differentiate them as statesmen rather than mere politicians.

Unfortunately, the current leadership in Israel is the epitome of mere politicians. Prime-Minister Olmert, for example, is a drunken captain at the helm of a ship headed for an iceberg. An uninspiring power-hungry man mired in corruption and lacking vision, he is leading his country into disaster.

The truth is that people matter. For good or ill, individuals can change the course of history. Recently, the United States has seen what remarkable change the right person can achieve. A tall African-American man did what most thought impossible. No, I am not talking about Barack Obama, but Boston Celtics forward Kevin Garnett.

The NBA star turned around a team that had been in the basement of the league forStatesmen:: Pericles, Lincoln, Livni, and KG years, whose uniformly awful under-performances of its talent led some fans to believe the team was cursed. But in just one season, Garnett led the Celtics to a championship via the biggest turnaround in league history. How did he do it? With skills, passion, tenacity, determination, and teamwork. In short, he was a true leader, the sort of individual whose rarity underscores their potential to overcome obstacles that had been thought insuperable.

As strange as it may sound, Kevin Garnett gives me hope that the Arab-Israeli conflict can be solved. But the question is, who is going to be our Kevin Garnett? As things stands today, my money is on Tzipi Livni.

While Livni and I are far from ideological soul mates, her tremendous potential is obvious. A woman who embodies the characteristics of the type of leadership that Israel needs, she is honest, sharp as whip, empathic towards her enemies, has a clear vision for Israel’s future, and has shown the ability to build a consensus to achieve her vision. (For example, in 2005 it was Livni who managed to persuade the divided Israeli parliament to ratify Ariel Sharon's controversial plan to withdraw Israel's settlements from Gaza.)

But Livni's most impressive quality is that she is willing to learn and evolve. Not in the selfish service of staying in power, but in the selfless service of her vision of Israel as a democratic and Jewish state. And to that end, she has the courage to do what she thinks is right even if it means alienating those who are close to her.

Remember, this is a woman who came from a hardcore right-wing family – her father, former member of Irgun and leader in the Likkud Party, has the map of greater Israel engraved on his tombstone – and who now after realizing the futility and danger of annexing historic Israel has dedicated her political career to creating Jewish and Palestinian states.

The former "Herut princess" undoubtedly has set her father spinning in his grave. But that is exactly what we need. Leaders who have the courage to spin the dead for the sake of the living. Even if it means going against the ones they love most. Like Abraham of old, Livni has smashed the idols of her father's home.

Some people have second-guessed Livni’s political prowess -- especially after, in light of the Winograd report, she called on Olmert to resign but refused to leave her post in protest. Others have cast doubt on Livni as Prime Minister material due to her lack of known security credentials (it is hard to turn classified service in the Mossad into political advantage).

Much of the criticism leveled at her has a clear sexist overtone, effectively boiling down to: "Livni lacks the testicular fortitude to lead a country like Israel. With threats from Hamas, Hizballah, and Iran we simply cannot leave it all to a woman. Tough times call for manly men (i.e. Netanyahu/Mofaz/Barak). Yes there was Golda but she didn't really count. After all, as Ben-Gurion once remarked, Golda was the only man in his cabinet."

In a similar vein, talking about Livni, a friend of mine once said that Israel can never elect or accept a leader that blinks. I hope he is wrong, because again, that is exactly what we need. Not the My Pet Goat type of blinking, but the type that breaks the reflexive and destructive pattern of unthinking stimulus-response that has characterized Israeli leadership. We need a leader that blinks twice, ten times, a hundred times, before sending off children to kill and die in a war. A leader that in between those blinks thinks about the long-term consequence of their actions – for us and for our enemies.

As I said, Kevin Garnett's leadership of the Celtics gives me hope that the Arab-Israeli conflict can be solved. I didn't mean it glibly. He didn't, and couldn't have brought about his team's epic turnaround single-handedly; rather, he did it by making those around him better. He did it by taking to heart the African concept of Ubuntu, which illustrates how our individual success is bound up with the success of those around us. (Literally: 'Ubuntu' was the 2008 Celtics motto.) Perhaps in the end the ability to inspire excellence from others is the true mark of a great leader.

The challenges of the state Livni is likely to soon assume control of, unlike the challenges of Garnett's league, are anything but a game. The lives of millions of people, present and future, depend on Israel's next premier being a statesperson rather than a mere politician. Given the opportunity to lead, Livni would have to inspire excellence not only from her fellow Knesset members, but also from her Palestinian interlocutors. Which is not a low bar to clear, to say the least.

Abraham Lincoln said, "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." To what degree Livni can rise to the challenge remains to be seen, but she is a talent more prodigious than any her country has been blessed with in a long time, and she turned up at just the time her country needed such a talent.

Just hours before I arrived on the Israeli side of the Sufa border crossing to Gaza on Monday, the IDF killed three terrorists affiliated with the Islamic Jihad as they were planting a roadside bomb a few hundred meters away. Business was temporarily disrupted while the scene was being secured, but by 10 am things were back to normal. Every day 70-80 trucks carrying freight are transferred from Israel to Gaza through Sufa. As Shlomo Tzaban, the manager of the crossing, briefed the group of journalists that I was with, a steady stream of 18-wheelers making their way to the crossing whirled up clouds of dust. The returning trucks were empty, since the border crossings only serve Palestinian needs: the only things that are exported from Gaza to Israel are rockets and mortars, which you don't need trucks for.

These border crossings are a part of the unnatural umbilical chord that attaches Gaza to Israel. "When people in Gaza turn on a switch, it's our grid; when they turn on a faucet, it's our water," explains IDF Major Mike Vromen. Eighty percent of the population is completely dependent on the humanitarian aid that flows through Israel into Gaza. This is how it works: trucks with goods, funded primarily by USAID, arrive on the Israeli side of the crossing. They are checked by the IDF and then unloaded onto a 200 meter long conveyor belt, which transfers the goods across the border, where they are then reloaded onto Palestinian trucks and distributed to various parts of the Gaza Strip by a confusing array of actors on the ground: WFP, UNRWA, CHF, to name just a few. It is a multi-million dollar industry.

During a Q&A with IDF Colonel Nir Peretz later in the day, I ask what purpose the conveyor belt has. Why not just drive the trucks across the border? The colonel looks at me like I am a total idiot but sticks the knife in gently: "Gaza is run by Hamas, a terrorist organization. Do you know what they would do with our trucks if we just opened the gate and drove right through?" Well, yes, I have a pretty good idea: they would shoot at them and try to blow them up in the same way that they almost daily attack the border crossings. Case in point: the Erez crossing was blown to smithereens on May 22 when a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated 4 tons of explosives packed into his truck. So the conveyor belt does make sense, but that is also an instance of what is so disturbing, namely that an Israeli at some point came up with a practical solution of how to continue to transfer goods into Gaza even when the border crossings are constantly being attacked. The image that comes to mind is that scene from Jurassic Park where a T-Rex is being fed a live cow. What would it take for a basic sense of self-preservation to kick in here?

(Above: Scene from the Sufa border crossing; photography by Paul Widen)

The Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem recently released a video of an Israeli solider shooting a rubber bullet into an Israeli protester at short range. The incident took place during a demonstration against the separation wall in the Palestinian village of Bil'in. The army has said that it is investigating the incident, yet added that since Bil'in has experienced past clashes between protesters and the IDF, "security forces were ordered to employ crowd dispersal means on the demonstrators."

Occupation At What Price To Israeli Decency? The injured activist, Eran Cohen, an 18 year-old from Tel-Aviv, has stated that he was there to protest the incarceration of a friend. In the video, Cohen is seen wearing a backpack and screaming in the direction of the soldiers in Hebrew. According to Cohen: "I yelled 'enough with the violence' at them, and then a soldier turned around and fired a rubber bullet into my leg. I was evacuated to Assaf Harofeh Medical Center, where I was examined and operated on to extract the bullet. I was given pain killers and released home." Cohen says he plans on returning and continuing to protest what he sees as the injustice suffered by the Palestinians in Bil'in. "The village’s residents suffer more bullet hits than I have. Compared to what they are going through, my case is nothing."

While it is unknown whether the solider was following orders when he discharged a bullet into Cohen's body, the video captures a very transparent violation of official army regulations. According to the IDF's code of conduct, military action can only be taken against military targets, the use of force must be proportional, and when appropriate, soldiers must provide the wounded with medical care. Moreover, IDF regulations state that rubber bullets must be fired from a distance no closer than 40 meters. As the video shows, Cohen, who did not in any way pose a threat to the soldiers, was standing at a distance of no more than ten meters from the solider who shot him.

Being a solider in the territories is an extremely stressful experience, one you can never fully understand until you lace up those boots . But the response of the solider and his platoon seems inexcusable to me. It is not only that the solider shot the protestor -- notice that there is no verbal or gunfire warning (at least not on the recording) -- but also the way he did it: with the same ease that one swats away a pesky mosquito.

Moreover, his platoon seems to be totally uninterested. They just keep on walking without even turning their heads. (Eventually Cohen was helped by other protesters). Such indifference is a telling and alarming sign of what soldiers in the occupied territories have become accustomed to. One is left to wonder: If Israeli protesters have it this bad, what do their Palestinian counterpart have to deal with?

People have often argued that if only the Palestinians were to use the method of Gandhi and King, then this whole crises would be over and done with. Paul Wolfowitz, for example, said, "If the Palestinians adopt the ways of Gandhi, they could, in fact, make an enormous change very quickly. I believe the power of individuals demonstrating peacefully is enormous." While I sympathize with the idea of non-violent resistance, when applied to Palestine such thinking tends to ignore or minimize the historical record and the reality on the ground.

Mubarak Awad: The Palestinian Gandhi deferred? The historical record of non-violence in Palestine is discouraging to say the least. The closest that the Palestinians have come to a Gandhi has been Mubarak Awad, the charismatic leader who stressed non-violent non-cooperation with the Israeli occupation. Israel's response to Awad was to expel him from the country in 1988 -- a decision that in hindsight was a tragic mistake. The first Intifada, which had the very real potential of being a non-violent uprising, lacked the leadership necessary to mobilize large-scale civil disobedience. After that, the script has pretty much remained the same, with no one of note seriously considering relinquishing the sanctity and logic of armed conflict for the alternative of non-violent resistance. Understandingly, many people have come to the conclusion that it is not in the DNA of either people to respond to conflict in a non-violent manner

When you see videos like Cohen's, videos that are in accord with the testimony of many eyewitness on the ground, you began to wonder if the likes of Gandhi or King would have stood a chance in the occupied territories in the first place. As the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh once said, if Gandhi was resisting the French instead of the British he would have given up non-violence within a week – presumably because he would be dead. Surely if the IDF’s de facto position (in contrast to its de jure regulations) is to shoot peaceful protestors, Gandhi and King would have had a very tough time getting their movements off the ground. Moreover, a serious Palestinian effort at civil disobedience will most certainly experience vigorous and violent opposition among Palestinians as well. No members of Hamas and other militant groups will allow their power to be challenged without a fight. And as we have seen in the past, Hamas and their ilk has no difficulty gunning down and eliminating opposition.

Finally, the "Gandhi in Palestine" theory also ignores the reality that the Israeli heart, like an egg in boiling water, has become hardened. It's not that the Israeli people are lacking in compassion. It's just that the situation has created more than one wall dividing us from the Palestinians. The only reason we pay attention to this video is because it captures an Israeli solider shooting a fellow Israeli. Were this a Palestinian, we would not have cared. Indeed, it would take a great deal of exposure to lucid raw injustice to weaken our Dershowitzian Super-Egos -- those voices inside our heads that have been fine-tuned to explain away and assuage our guilt.

Civil disobedience can only function against a semi-civilized opposition, an opposition that is governed by rule of law, decency, and proportional restraint. Israel needs to figure out if that description represents her.

In order to do so, Israelis must answer a number questions: As long as we occupy, what kind of occupiers are we? Are we an occupation that talks like the British but acts like the French? Or should we aspire to treat those under our control the way we would want to be treated if the situation was reversed? Oh wait, if we did that, would we even be there in the first place?

Crazy Man Behind A Microphone: Norman Finkelstein says the darndest things Sometimes a guy just can't win. Last week, we noted that a deranged person with a blog for deranged people accused Jeffrey Goldberg of being a "jihadist" agitating for "Jewicide" because his position on West Bank settlements is the same as the position of the Israeli government. Moreover, our two-bit character assassin couldn't look past the idea of minimal dissent from her self-destructive militarism, to notice that Goldberg had made greater sacrifices for Israel than she ever could --- specifically by volunteering for the IDF --- and so might just be arguing on the level, rather than from ulterior, Jewicidal motives.

Well, it looks like serving with the IDF doesn't buy Goldberg any credit with the extreme paranoid left, either. Specifically, Norman Finkelstein accuses Goldberg of having tortured Palestinians while serving as a prison guard. What's Finkelstein's evidence? Well, he doesn't have evidence, but he has the next best thing, assumptions, and he has them in abundance. Perhaps it's giving away too much to Finkelstein to observe that he can't be bothered to decide whether he's accusing Goldberg of being an active party to torture, or an accessory to torture, or merely insensitive to Palestinian suffering.

Jewcy has covered Professor Finkelstein's strange case at some length. Whatever the substantive merits of his tenure denial --- on which his extracurricular endeavors should have had no bearing provided his scholarship was up to scratch --- and whatever the credibility of some of his antagonists, Finkelstein has a pretty well-established history of propagating outrageous, paranoid nonsense. Pathological people can't help themselves, so perhaps Goldberg shouldn't take things personally. In any case, Goldberg did respond to Brad A. Greenberg that "[The accusation] is just ridiculous. I never laid a hand on anybody...One of my principle roles there was making sure the prisoners had fresh fruit...Norman Finkelstein is a ridiculous figure and he is lying and purposely misreading my book." So it would seem.

Standardized test: A plaque commemorating victims of terrorism Jerusalem has suffered so many terrorist attacks that the city council at some point seems to have decided to standardize the plaques commemorating the victims. A number of morose remarks could be made about this, but I'll make an effort and try to shut up. I remember being here in 2002, when a record number of 60 Palestinians blew themselves up in various parts of the Holy Land. Riding on city buses in Jerusalem was like playing Russian roulette. The falafel joint around the corner from where I lived at the time seemed like the ideal target: no guard, always crowded, situated in a small shop whose cramped dimensions would maximize the damage of the acetone peroxide explosives, along with the proverbial nuts and bolts. A 16-year old Palestinian kid blew himself up there on a sunny afternoon in July as I was at home, listening to Counting Crows:

"...So we slide inside of someone's mouth
and someone's eyes
until
there's a sound of something intimate exploding..."

People were obviously reluctant to frequent cafes and restaurants during that period, which forced almost every single food venue to post a guard at the entrance. Sidewalk cafes were fenced in, but even then there were occasional smart terrorists that would bring along guns with their bomb belts and shoot the guard before entering and blowing themselves up. Hence the question, "Yesh neshek?" ("Do you have a gun?") was posed to every patron wishing to enjoy a latte in those days. It was one of the first expressions that I learned in Hebrew.

Now, to be fair, the last suicide bombing in Jerusalem was perpetrated on September 22, 2004, but if you are the owner of a cafe, how many bomb-free months do you count before you decide to expand your establishment unto the abutting sidewalk? There might be a secret algorithm here that I am unaware of, not entirely dissimilar to the one that prompted the standardization of commemorative plaques. Or there just comes a day when nothing else could make more sense.

Well, that day might have arrived already, without fanfare. Sidewalk cafes withoutCafe Betzalel: A peaceful place for now fences or guards are popping up here and there in the center of town as a result of this definitive lull in the Second Intifada (or whatever we choose to call this period of low-frequency warfare). Last Friday afternoon I enjoyed a live performance by a local band as I sipped on a cold Goldstar beer at one such place, Café Betzalel, named after Betzalel ben Uri, the ancient Hebrew building contractor who won the tender for the construction of the Tabernacle, way back when. The name means "in the shadow of God," aptly capturing the ambiguity of life in Jerusalem: the imminence of the Divine, and the darkness it sometimes entails.

Just one successful bomb attack will of course destroy not only the chosen target, but every expanding business in town owned by someone who thought that the violence had actually ended. But during the lull we live.

(Photography by Paul Widen)

That interview Barack Obama did with Jeffrey Goldberg over the weekend outlined the perils of running for president without shutting off your brain. At the tail-end of his effusive praise of the Jewish people and the Jewish state, after pledging "unyielding support for Israel's security," Obama described the lack of resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict as "a constant wound, a constant sore" that bolsters Islamists' recruitment efforts and enables them to claim a moral high ground illegitimately. The idea was to frame the peace process, correctly, as a matter of American as well as Israeli national security.

Naturally, within hours, the Republican Jewish Coalition had its knickers in a painfulJohn Boehner, Anti-Semite: The Republican House leader attacks Israel viciously; just look at the quote twist. According to JTA's Ami Eden, the group released a statement accusing Obama of "excus[ing] the inexcusable actions of anti-American militant jihadists by putting the blame for their actions on America’s foreign policy."

Right. This is the real-world foreign policy version of Kyle Smith's lunatic review of Iron Man. It's not enough for Israel's false friends to swear "unyielding" fealty to Israeli security, pre-emptively decline to negotiate with Hamas, and for good measure, reject and denounce Jimmy Carter. If you so much as hint that resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict might be even marginally a good thing, on balance, you're not anti-war, you're on the other side. To adapt a line Julian Sanchez wrote of Kyle Smith, the RJC's hysteria is the dying fall of a movement that's lost its purpose and confidence.

Meanwhile on Capitol Hill, Eden reports, Eric Cantor, the solitary Jewish Republican in the House, willfully misinterpreted Obama's description of the unresolved Levantine conflict as a "sore" as a description of Israel. John Boehner, the House Minority Leader, picked up the distortion and ran with it, prompting Jeffrey Goldberg to reply, "Mr. Boehner, I'm sure, is a terribly busy man, with many burdensome responsibilities, so I have to assume that he simply didn't have time to read the entire Obama interview, or even the entire paragraph, or even a single clause." That's far too polite a response, while Andrew Sullivan's suggestion --- calling Boehner the liar that he is --- has proven ineffective at moving the sort of people who behave this way. They seem to respond to two things: blunt force and smear campaigns. So let's try the legal option.

Have you heard the news? John Boehner said that "Israel is...a constant sore...commit[ted] to...terrorism...[and]...an apartheid state...that...Americans are rejecting." Shocking but true, it's all here and black and white. How did a raving antisemitic loon manage to become the top-ranking Republican in Congress, and how is he still in that position?

In another part of Washington, Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard, last seen excising "torture" from the dictionary, showcasing that point-missing irrelevant pedantry neoconservatives are so good at, has a chuckle at Obama's statement to Goldberg that the lack of resolution of conflict in the Middle East "infect[s] all our foreign policy." Cracks Goldfarb wise, "Call me naïve [love the umlaut--ed.], but while solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is unquestionably an admirable and important goal, I’m not sure it 'infects' all, or even most, of the challenges we face in the world." Goldfarb goes on to name foreign policy challenges uninfected by Israelis or Palestianians, which include repression in Burma, genocide in Darfur, and Russian saber-rattling in Georgia.

Call me näïvë, but there's this thing in language and logic called restricted quantifiers. If I say, "there's nothing in the fridge," I don't mean there's strictly, literally, and unrestrictedly nothing --- there are plenty of air molecules. I mean there's nothing within the scope of what I'm talking about. Now you could insist that Obama meant that the SLORC crackdown on dissidents would end if Israel recognized the Palestinians' Right of Return. Or you could use English competently. But not both.

Now, does the Israel-Palestine conflict exacerbate "the challenges we face in the world" restricted to the middle East? This Pew survey, finding that "brokering a Comprehensive Middle East Peace" would do more than anything else to improve opinion of the US in the middle East (withdrawal of US forces from the Arabian peninsula comes in second), suggests that the answer is "yes." A survey of the editorial board of the Weekly Standard suggests that the answer is "no." So it's a tough call.

Columbia's main lawn: In a rare protester-free momentSo, protests sometimes happen at Columbia University. In the past month alone there has been a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the 1968 riots, a week-long CU Democrats war protest (including a massive red balloon display that, despite its seriousness, only succeeded in getting that song stuck in my head), a protest about Tibet, protests about Columbia’s impending expansion into Manhattanville, and a Take Back the Night rally. Not to mention the blood drive, arts fair, sex fair, free Mumia posters, a relay for life, and that random jumping castle and pink balloon-display that showed up last Friday. Seriously, Columbia students have recently done everything short of throwing a pie in Thomas Friedman’s face.

So what are those crazy kids going to do next? How about an al-Nakba rally – Say, day before Yom Hashoah-ish? Sure, why not – it can at least provide topical fodder for name-calling.

Many Jewcy readers will know that this May is the 60th anniversary of Israeli independence. They might be less familiar with the fact that many Palestinians and Palestinian support groups are marking this time as the 60th anniversary of al-Nakba, a time in which Palestinians were forced out of their homes to make room for the new state of Israel. That's why, starting this week, a new flier campaign began over at the Columbia campus about the mistreatment of Palestinians as a casualty of Zionism. According to the fliers, it’s officially Nakba Week.

Competing birthdays: A poster commemorating Al-Nakba's 60th anniversary Also, a Pro-Nakba Week student published this article in the campus newspaper, accusing the campus Hillel (and its president, Emily Steinberger) of disrespecting the week’s commemoration by refusing to co-sponsor the event simply because it used the word “Nakba.”

Then came the backlash. LionPAC, the pro-Israel group under the broader Hillel umbrella, put up a bunch of retaliation fliers equipped with their own pro-Israel statistics. And in retaliation to the original Spectator article, Steinberger submitted this report, which, among other things brings up (drumroll, please)…the Holocaust! So the whole debate becomes not the “new chapter in Columbia’s Israel-Arab discourse” that LionPAC says it wants, but instead a great big print-based shouting match.

It is of course the prerogative of every ethnic group to raise sympathy for and awareness of their respective oppression by waiving their grievances in people’s faces. But will shoving opposing tragedies at the opposition really solve anything? As Spectator columnist Armin Rosen puts it, this methodology is “more proof that the Zionist and anti-Zionist blocs totally deserve each other.”

Holocaust discourse in general is something that is all too easily buffeted about. Palestinian supporters often accuse Zionists of acting like Nazis toward the Palestinians -- within a homeland that was created to be a Jewish safe haven in the face of Nazism. Similarly, Zionist are often too quick to pull their own Holocaust card. We’ll see who racks up the most references when we get down to the “discourse.”