In the Negev, Religion Is Making the Desert Bloom

April 10 2019

Both in and out of office, one of David Ben-Gurion’s enduring passions was settling the Negev, the vast desert in southern Israel, and turning it into an agricultural powerhouse. Reviewing two recent books about this part of the Jewish state, Allan Arkush notes that “while development has not taken place on the scale or in the way that Ben-Gurion imagined, Israel has, in fact, made a large swath of the desert bloom.” Arkush begins with Yael Zerubavel’s Desert in the Promised Land:

As Zerubavel reports, most of the Jews who came to settle in Israel’s south in the first two decades after the establishment of the state did so involuntarily. Immigrants, mostly from Arab countries, were transported “directly from the boat to their designated settlement in the Negev in order to minimize the possibilities for them to object to this plan.” In fact, some were smuggled into their new homes in development towns in the dead of night to prevent them from being alarmed by the desolation all around them. . . . Zerubavel, [however], writes not to condemn or, for that matter, to celebrate the policies pursued by Israeli leaders in the 1950s but to situate them in the context of a broad range of “complex and contradictory” Zionist stances toward the desert in general and the Negev in particular. . . .

The anthropologist Pnina Motzafi-Haller’s subjects [in her book Concrete Boxes: Mizrahi Women on Israeli’s Periphery] are all the descendants of the people who were unceremoniously dumped in the desert a half-century or more ago. Some of them have risen above the unfavorable circumstances . . . into which they were born, but others have never escaped them or have done so only for a short time. . . .

Of all the options available to her subjects, however, it is not rebellion but “religious strengthening” (hitazkut) that Motzafi-Haller regards as the “most constructive,” an attempt to transform, or at least better, their lives, rather than to escape them. “The act of participating in religion classes marks them as serious, respectable women with high spiritual aspirations, not gossips who spend their evenings watching shallow soap operas on television.” This can lead not only to greater peace of mind but also to new patterns of consumption [and financial responsibility].

Motzafi-Haller is, we shouldn’t forget, an unabashedly secular woman. Her recognition of the beneficial aspects of religiosity is neither pious nor apologeticShe sees hitazkut as just the best available option.

Read more at Jewish Review of Books

More about: David Ben-Gurion, Judaism in Israel, Mizrahi Jewry, Negev

Israel Had No Choice but to Strike Iran

June 16 2025

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.

Read more at UnHerd

More about: Iran nuclear program, Israeli Security