A working model

An upstart program gives the hopelessly unemployed the tools – and the motivation – to find rewarding careers

In their down time, the unemployed play charades. They laugh, they mingle, they pour each other coffee. But they also dress in formal office attire and carry with them copious notes from their latest meetings. After all, just because they don’t have professions doesn’t mean they can’t be professional.

Their coffee break over, a group of participants in the latest STRIVE employment program file into a classroom to simulate a confrontation with an employer. Miri, a tall and plump woman in her late 20s, plays a nurse who has administered the wrong medication to a child in her care.

“How could you have made such a grievous error?!” barks an instructor, playing the role of the supervisor in a scolding via telephone. Miri refuses to admit her mistake and demands a face-to-face meeting to review the evidence, as her “boss” becomes increasingly agitated. A two-week suspension had been in the cards – and, the boss hints, avoidable had Miri handled this correctly – but now she is a whisker away from an outright dismissal.

After a heated exchange, the instructor steps out of character and turns to the class, asking, “How could Miri have done that better?”

Miri and her classmates have been in this kind of situation before – and usually come out of it badly. The goal of today’s class is to learn how to communicate in a manner that reflects responsibility and character, and to learn as well how to defuse an explosive workplace situation or prevent one altogether. Some of the students need to learn how to defend themselves without becoming defensive. Others need to learn how to stand up for themselves. And others are still working on not simply giving up and walking away from a job that will feed their families.

“What we’re trying to do is to get people to stop saying, ‘The system screwed me’ and start taking control of their lives,” explains Naomi Krieger, STRIVE’s general manager.

That ethos couldn’t come at a better time, as the country is in the midst of an alarming rise in unemployment. Now hovering around 8%, with more than a quarter-million Israelis already out of work, joblessness is at its highest point in three years.

“Unemployment will continue to rise… there are still difficult times ahead of us,” Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer said in late July. “I am optimistic about the Israeli economy,” Fischer continued, “but we shouldn’t exaggerate. We will need to cope with the problem of unemployment.”

The big question, of course, is how to do that. And with it comes the question of whether the government can complete the mission on its own. Most of the government’s efforts thus far – mainly, in derivations of the so-called Wisconsin Plan – have met with only meager success. So meager, in fact, that an 18 percent job placement rate has been considered cause for celebration. To put that in perspective, STRIVE claims a job placement rate of roughly 75 percent.

“The government has never had a holistic view of employment,” Yossi Tamir cautions.

He ought to know: a professor of social work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and former directory-general of the National Insurance Institute, Tamir headed the government committee upon whose recommendations the Wisconsin-based Mehalev program was founded. He is also currently the executive director of TEVET, the Joint Distribution Committee’s array of employment initiatives of which STRIVE is a part.

“The establishment of [Mehalev] sprung from a need to address an alarming increase in the number of people who were receiving guaranteed income payments,” Tamir says from the JDC’s Jerusalem office. “It was clear that doling out money wasn’t solving the poverty problem.”

The issue that Mehalev was supposed to fix, Tamir explains, was not unemployment per se, but unemployment by choice. Israel, Tamir notes, has the lowest rate of participation in the workforce in the Western world.

Cultural norms account for much of that, as many haredi men choose advanced Torah study over work, and many Arab women continue to serve in their traditional role in the home. A minimum wage that is too low in comparison to the benefits handed out to the jobless by the government is another cause. Indeed, Mehalev brought a significant reduction in those numbers, as thousands of people who had been receiving support checks while simultaneously working for pay “under the table” were forced to give up the dole.

On the score of getting more people to work, though, Mehalev has been a disappointment. For STRIVE to succeed, it would have to be different from Mehalev. And it is – very much so.

To begin with, there are nuts-and-bolts differences in the programs. For example, Mehalev aims to place people in jobs as soon as possible and clear their files from the government’s welfare caseload. By contrast, STRIVE’s work is still in its early stages by the time subjects are placed in jobs; at that point, there’s still more than two years of personal and professional development to go.

At least as important, though, is the psychological element that permeates the STRIVE concept and makes it unique. Beyond preparation for work, STRIVE officials say, the unemployed need motivation for work. The cases they are dealing with are people who have been out of work for long periods – some for years, and some even as third-generation recipients of welfare payments.

“One of the exercises we do with our participants is to ask: ‘If you could receive NIS 8,000 per month for the rest of your life, on the condition that you never work a single day, would you?’ At first, some say, ‘Of course!’ But then, when we ask what they would suggest their kids respond to the same question, they become very insistent that their children work to support themselves. The idea is to instill the sense that there is a value to working,” says Krieger.

In addition to the value of work, STRIVE students are given something most people take for granted: the hope and belief that they can accomplish their goals through hard work. It may seem simple, but for these people, it is absolutely transformative.

At the STRIVE offices in Jerusalem, Michal talks of her own transformation.

Before, says the slender 20-year-old, “I had a dream.” Then, after a pause, she adds, “but that’s all it was.”

The dream, she explains, was to start her own cosmetics line. What was holding her back was a stifling insecurity.

“I married young, had children and stayed at home, on the couch,” she says. “I allowed myself to be bullied and made to feel inferior. STRIVE gave me a direction. And it really got my head together.”

STRIVE’s introductory month of classes and workshops follows a rigid 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. schedule, with no excuses for being late or absent and no childcare option. The discipline and resourcefulness required to make it through the course, Michal says, were exactly what she needed.

Now working regularly at the cosmetics desk in a branch of the Super-Pharm chain, Michal is back to dreaming of starting her own cosmetics line – but now she views her work shifts as time spent learning the business from the inside. She’s not merely working, she’s investing in herself. The empowerment is immense.

“I don’t give in so easily anymore,” she says, beaming. “I even got divorced and took control of myself. It’s like I got an extra dose of smarts!”

Even more enthusiastic is Avi, a 30-year-old who bounced around in yeshivot and kollelim until starting a STRIVE course a few months ago. Lacking drive and lacking a sense of self-worth, Avi saw himself foundering.

It was his sister, though, who gave Avi the impetus to apply to STRIVE. She had just completed the initial course and “couldn’t stop talking about it,” he says. “The whole family saw how dramatically she changed. I thought it would be good for me, too.”

Even before STRIVE helped Avi find a job, he says, it helped him become a better father.

“In class I learned how to be an attentive listener, and how to develop confidence. I applied the lessons at home, listening to my children more and encouraging them to have more confidence in themselves,” he says with pride.

Avi is actually so enthusiastic that he is practically leaping out of his chair.

“The idea that I can do things, that I can try something new and maybe even succeed at it, is such a revelation,” he says. “Before, I was afraid to do anything, to try anything. Now my only fear is that this [positive] feeling will fade.”

Avi works at a travel agency that specializes in trips to Uman, where Rabbi Nahman of Braslov is buried. He, too, treats his job as a starting point rather than an end, though, and has already set his sights on opening a business of his own. He eagerly soaks up the “Ofek” (horizon) continuing education classes that STRIVE offers participants fortnightly, and hopes to one day come back to STRIVE to teach others how to succeed.

“Why not?” he asks. For Avi, anything is possible.

Dudu remembers the way he was just a few short months ago – sitting at home, dejected, without the desire to work anymore, having lost faith in his ability to hold down a job that would support himself, his wife and his two little girls.

At 36, he says grimly, and with no sense of hyperbole, “all was lost.”

Then he saw an ad in the newspaper for a STRIVE course and decided to give working one last shot.

“Now,” he says, beaming, “I’m happy to say that I’ve been working in the customer service department of Office Depot for the past three months. My smile says it all.”

For years, Dudu says, he struggled to figure out where he wanted to go in life. Now he hopes to study for a bachelor’s degree.

The power of the lessons he has learned in the STRIVE program, Dudu says, is so great that “soon, this will be like the psychometric exam. It’ll be an obligatory course.”

CLEARLY, STRIVE participants are benefiting. But what about their employers?

Meir Shalim, the deputy CEO for human resources at customer service company

Kishurit, is always happy to hire STRIVE graduates.

“Every month we take on new graduates, and we already have four or five cases of people who have come in from STRIVE who are now in senior positions with us. More than once our employee of the month has been a STRIVE graduate,” Shalim says. “They come in and hit the ground running with a lot of motivation.”

Kishurit currently employs nearly two dozen STRIVE graduates. Some have progressed from entry-level jobs to become shift managers or even supervisors. For a company that handles as many as 30,000 phone calls per day, that translates to a lot of responsibility.

“We make sure to give them positive feedback, to make sure they have all they need,” Shalim says. “You have to make sure to address their fears and concerns in returning to work after so long. We don’t pressure them in terms of time and such. We prefer to focus on learning the ropes and developing skills. It works.”

Why?

“These folks come in with twice as much desire to succeed as all the ‘regular’ workers.

They’re just so much more productive. We couldn’t ask for anything more.”

Danny Diamant, head of public relations for Mehashvim, which markets information systems to businesses and professionals, says his company has also been pleasantly surprised by the STRIVE graduates it has hired.

“Some have been here for a few years already, and are now leaders in sales. That’s significant, because it’s not easy to make it here. But there’s no group that has sent workers who have succeeded more than the STRIVE graduates have. As far as we’re concerned, it’s great.”

STRIVE makes a “win-win” pitch to businesses: pay no fee for finding workers, as they would have to do when working with manpower agencies, and get workers who are already trained and highly motivated. In return, the organization can sometimes convince employers to waive requirements that an employee hold an academic degree.

THE STRIVE program, which lasts two-and-a-half years, goes way beyond Miri’s class and job placement. Sure, the standard components of usual employment programs are in place – learning how to write a CV, how to make a good impression in a job interview, how to search for jobs, etc. – but what makes STRIVE unique, officials say, is its overarching focus on cultivating a positive attitude and the motivation to turn any job into a successful career.

Everything at STRIVE is meant to reinforce the lesson of, well, striving. The offices of the downtown Jerusalem branch, bright, colorful, inviting and modern, are the total opposite of the drab and dreary look of government employment offices. In fact, they could be mistaken for a PR firm. All the doors are glass – intentionally, Krieger says, to create the impression of transparency.

STRIVE opened its doors first in Tel Aviv, and then spread to Haifa and Jerusalem. The program was adapted from an initiative of the same name in Harlem, New York, founded 25 years ago by a former convict-turned-social worker and successful social activist.

The Israeli version focuses on the sectors of the population hit hardest by chronic unemployment – haredim, Arab women, immigrants from Ethiopia and the Caucasus, and the handicapped – and challenges them to turn their lives around.

“These are people who have had it rough for a long, long time. When they get the phone call telling them they’ve been accepted to the program, sometimes it’s the first time they’ve ever been accepted to anything,” Krieger says.

Each group has its own unique stigmas to overcome, she adds. For example, she tells the story of a haredi young woman at a STRIVE-sponsored barbecue in Gan Sacher. A counselor who noticed the woman standing off to the side, clearly uncomfortable about mingling, reassured the young woman: “Don’t worry, I’ll personally make sure you get a good shidduch.”

Whatever the reason, STRIVE is making great strides – of some 30,000 participants in the program at the three offices across the country, Tamir says, more than 20,000 have found work.

Tamir, though, says there is still much that can be done.

“Where we have failed, in my view, is in advancing workers,” he says with a sigh.

In Israel, he notes, the number of people working in minimum wage jobs is twice as high as in Europe and North America. One of the reasons for that, he adds, is that “too many mayors of small towns and local councils want industrial parks, but they don’t want to train residents for jobs in them,” so the bulk of jobs that could help depressed peripheral areas remain in the metropolises.

To help the most amount of people the fastest, STRIVE has focused on the big cities, but Tamir says he would like to expand the program to Beersheba and the Tiberias-Beit She’an area soon.

Tamir wants to help the people who have been passed over by successive governments. And while the government funds half of the STRIVE program, the outsiders’ success may be lighting a fire under the authorities to pick up the pace in their own work.

At the end of the summer, Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer announced an ambitious 10-year, NIS 1.75 billion plan to get 135,000 haredim, Arabs and handicapped to join the workforce.

“We are taking steps to remove obstacles related to education and professional training, transportation difficulties and discrimination,” he said.

If he wants suggestions on how to accomplish those grandiose goals, the minister will find a willing adviser in the newly enterprising Avi.

“There are two things everyone should do in life,” he says with a sly smile. “Visit Uman, and STRIVE.”

‘From the heart’ – but with a new mindset

Retooling the government’s Mehalev program has made it more efficient and less cruel at the same time

Bari Bar-Zion has heard all about the flaws of the government’s Mehalev (“from the heart”) program to move people from welfare to work. He knows quite well how bad things were when the program first got up and running – how people were forced to travel hours from their homes to attend meetings that did not, in the end, help them find work; how people were dropped from the welfare rolls as soon as they were placed in jobs, even if those jobs proved to be exploitative and short-lived, etc.

Bar-Zion was working in the Finance Ministry then, dealing with the economic mess of chronic unemployment. Like his colleagues, Bar-Zion was concerned by the disproportionate rise in welfare recipients that the government had come to finance. And like Eli Yishai of Shas, then industry, trade and labor minister, Bar-Zion felt that various strict and inflexible requirements made the Mehalev program “successful but cruel” and, ultimately, not as helpful as it could have been.

Changes that Yishai put in place have taken hold now, with demands that the companies operating the Mehalev program help participants find jobs that earn more money, prove that participants are indeed working, and ensure that they find work for the long term (at least 12 out of 15 months). Now CEO of Amin, the Mehalev franchisee for Jerusalem and the surrounding area, Bar-Zion oversees an operation that is run more efficiently – and, he says, more humanely – in helping people find meaningful employment.

Walking around Amin’s offices in downtown Jerusalem, Bar-Zion proudly points out the systematic path that participants follow, a detailed step-by-step process that guides them from the moment they walk through the door to the moment they head off to their new jobs.

“Each participant gets a personal plan,” he says, striding from the reception hall to the offices where social workers, job counselors and in-house National Insurance Institute representatives prepare participants for work.

“We run a tight ship here,” Bar-Zion says with pride. “Within three days of walking through our doors, new participants begin an orientation course that includes an intake process, visits with counselors, examination boards and the construction of a personalized program.”

Amin teaches participants a range of skills for getting, and then holding onto, jobs. It also provides babysitting and even dental care, Bar-Zion says, so that participants can concentrate on the task at hand.

“Looking for work is a full-time job,” he says.

While looking for work, participants continue to receive their NII benefits. And once they start working, they become eligible to receive financial grants from the government upon reaching various milestones on the job. They also continue to receive guidance from Amin counselors – in any of 14 different languages.

Amin is a combination of Action4Employment, a British company, and Aman, an Israeli consulting company that runs several government projects. Since 2005, it has received 14,000 case referrals from the NII. About 1 in 3 has been placed in a job, Bar-Zion says.

Some are on display, as it were. The security guard at the front door was a participant three years ago; he has been working at Amin for the past 18 months. Another security guard also came to Amin as a participant.

Most participants, Bar-Zion says with a laugh, actually find work outside Amin.

Unfortunately, about half of those who do find jobs work only part-time, and usually in low-paying jobs. Many of those who do not find work, it turns out, were receiving NII benefits even though they didn’t need or deserve them. In such cases, Bar-Zion says, Amin “fails” to make a job placement but succeeds in cutting down on fraud.

One of Bar-Zion’s employees updates him on a disciplinary hearing for a “frequent flier” who, since 2006, has rejected every job placement suggested to her. This is precisely the kind of person the government has tried to remove from the dole, the kind who abuses the system to siphon public funds into her bank account for nothing.

It’s actually very difficult for Amin to take away such a person’s NII benefits, Bar-Zion explains, thanks to the much-increased oversight of the companies operating the Mehalev programs. The panel that heard the case of the “frequent flier” was an external, government-appointed one, and social action watchdog groups meet regularly with Amin representatives to see that participants are given fair treatment.

Real progress in fighting unemployment (and welfare fraud, too, for that matter) still comes down to making job placements, though, and no one at Amin makes more job placements than Osama Shanan. A Druse who drives into the capital from Hurfeish, in the Galilee, each week, Shanan routinely places more than a dozen people per month in jobs. It’s easy to see why: the man is practically on fire, he’s so enthused.

“I believe in what I do. I feel like I’m doing community service,” says Shanan, a former investigator for the NII who spent four years checking to see whether welfare claims from east Jerusalem Arabs were legitimate.

“Thank God, I’ve helped a lot of families. I’ve seen what drugs, domestic violence, even prostitution can do to people. So many people come in here broken. If we can get them to work and to smile again,” he says, “then nothing is impossible.”

Shanan has heard all the excuses, and seen all the hardships that go with years of unemployment.

“Politics do play a part,” he says. “People say, ‘The occupation owes me.’”

But Shanan, who served in the IDF, does not relent.

“I have to look women in the eye and tell them that, no matter how they feel, no one is going to simply come in and give them money for their children. I spend a lot of time explaining how important it is to maintain their family’s dignity by working. I tell them it’s a mitzvah to work to support their children.”

He is always careful, he says, to get the message across that gainful employment comes when the participant wants it, not when it is forced on him.

“I constantly tell people, ‘Don’t work for my sake, work for yourself!’”

Shanan’s enthusiasm clearly rubs off on the people he counsels. One, a young Arab man, beams as Bar-Zion walks by.

“For years, no one ever told me to go get a job and make something of myself,” he says. “Now, Osama has me raring to go!”

Shanan appreciates the young man’s newfound passion, but he knows that real change comes with time.

“Just today, a new participant came in and started telling me that he wanted to work,” Shanan says. “I stopped him and asked if he really wanted to work. Because lots of people say they want to work, but then they start giving you conditions – I won’t do this, I won’t accept that, etc. He said it didn’t matter, he just wanted to work. So I arranged a placement for him at a factory in Atarot, right then and there.”

Leaning back in his chair, Shanan gives a prolonged shrug of his shoulders.

“We’ll see,” he says. “We’ll see!”

While Abbas crashes and burns

While everyone is busy grilling Mahmoud Abbas these days over the Palestinian Authority’s decision (i.e. his decision) to let the Goldstone Report die, and preparing to eulogize him for all the rage that is being directed at him for it, let’s not forget who benefits from this circus — Hamas. After all, the more intense the criticism of Abbas, the less attention is paid to the Hamas leaders who:

1) lauded, authorized, ordered and/or paid for the firing of Kassam rockets at Israel from amongst the homes and backyards of Gazan civilians;

2) goaded to the point of begging Israeli infantry to stomp through the crowded streets of Gaza City;

3) forced civilians to house or hide armed fighters in their homes;

4) mined schools, a zoo, playing fields and countless alleyways with explosives that any child could have triggered by accident;

5) hid in and fired from mosques;

6) looted internationally funded humanitarian aid packages of food and fuel for their own wealthy elites;

and more.

If Mahmoud were Menachem…

Ok, so, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad might have been born Jewish, as a report in the Telegraph claims.

The knee-jerk reaction to this is to snicker at the irony of the situation. After all, what could be funnier than the greatest single enemy of the Jewish people currently living having Jewish roots?

(Now that these allegations have surfaced, they’ll probably remain as vexing to Ahmadinejad and historians as the allegations of Adolf Hitler’s Jewish roots.)

Well, it isn’t funny at all. Anyone who laughs at Ahmadinejad’s alleged Jewishness implicitly accepts and condones the notion that being Jewish is a shame and a handicap, an embarrassment that deserves to be hidden away. It only reinforces the ugly stigma against Jews that goes unrepudiated in the Muslim world.

Rather than heckle Ahmadinejad with taunts about his ancestry, he should be confronted over the unbearable bigotry with which he — and the vast majority of the Muslim world — relates to those taunts.

Look who’s talking

Lizzy sure has a big mouth. And it’s dirty, too. Most of what she says can’t be reprinted here – but on YouTube, where Lizzy reigns supreme as the only animated lesbian stand-up comedienne hailing from Israel, the innocent-looking little cartoon character lets her potty mouth fly. Viewers, couldn’t you guess, love it.

“Lizzy is one of the funniest modern cartoons out there,” one enamored fan wrote in response to one of the dozens of Lizzy the Lezzy clips on YouTube. “This is freaking hilarious! And I’m so GLAD that I chanced upon this! Thanks for your work and for spreading laughter all around the world!” wrote another. “I laughed so loud my neck hurt. Now I’m gonna watch these all night long,” wrote still another. There are thousands more responses from viewers tickled by the sweet-singing cartoon’s salty vocabulary and shameless discussion of lesbian life.

All this comes, not from an imposing and statuesque megaphone of a woman but a petite and unassuming figure. She’s “extremely short with brown eyes and brown hair, tiny [breasts] and a very large oval-shaped head,” according to her description, and she “usually likes to wear trousers and a baggy top to cover my [butt].” Oh, and “I have no fingers, either,” she adds, “but don’t let that put you off.”

IF IN fact that doesn’t put you off, and if her explicit pillow talk doesn’t bother you either, then you may just find yourself among Lizzy’s rapidly expanding group of fans. From there, it’s easy to see what makes her so charming. She generally takes an upbeat view of things, addressing the world with a mischievous but disarming giggle.

Rather than tiptoe around stereotypes and taboos, Lizzy pokes fun at them – as when she responds to the question of whether homosexuality is a temptation from the devil with flashing red eyes and a deep belly laugh, or in her Halloween special, in which she accessorizes her witch’s costume with a vibrating broomstick.

Lizzy’s videos routinely begin with a singsong ditty, sometimes including an acoustic guitar. Each one is a permutation of a brief but catchy introduction, usually something like “I’m Lizzy the Lezzy, I’m out and I’m proud. I’m Lizzy the Lezzy, let’s sing it out loud. I’m Lizzy the Lezzy, just sing it with me. I’m Lizzy the Lezzy, and I like”- ahem… well, you know.

Then again, she makes an amusing rapper, dressed in a winter hat, scarf and gloves, as she sings, “We’re butch and we’re fem, and we look like Eminem. And when we find your sister”- okay, there she goes again. You’ll have to check out the video to hear the conclusion to that one.

No, this is definitely not kids’ stuff. Listening to Lizzy opine on the difficulty of finding a willing date is like watching the boys from South Park teeter over the thin precipice that keeps them out of the pornographic and in the realm of merely raucously indecent. (Actually, Lizzy’s folksy guitar-playing tribute to her ex-girlfriends manages to make a poke at redheaded “gingers” that’s even more outrageous than the one South Park did.)

It isn’t all fun and games in Lizzyland, though. Her jokes about the dangers of falling in love with a straight woman hint at a frustration that is anything but comical. After belting out an over-the-top, aggressive gangster-style rap about using partners purely for sex and then kicking them to the curb, Lizzy reveals that she’s “not like that, actually. I’m more like, ‘Stay! Don’t ever leave me!’ But they do…”

In such moments, the sometimes painful life of Lizzy – and, by extension, her creator, Ruth Selwyn, becomes apparent.

“Lizzy tells the truth,” Selwyn says succinctly.

IT’S WHAT makes her so popular with fans, and what disturbs her detractors. “I have received some homophobic and anti-Israel comments,” Selwyn says, “but they have easily been overshadowed by the many touching, moving letters about how Lizzy has helped many women deal with their own sexuality.”

In talking with Selwyn, it becomes clear that Lizzy has helped her just as much in coming to grips with her own identity. For example, Lizzy’s age is purposely kept vague, although, if pressed, Selwyn will say that her creation “is about 24.” Not coincidentally, that’s the age at which Selwyn, now 41, told family and friends that she was a lesbian.

Today, Selwyn is well entrenched in the local gay and lesbian community. She lives right around the corner from Rehov Sheinkin, the trendy stretch of cafes and boutiques that is the epicenter of Tel Aviv’s Bohemian scene. But getting here, from the small suburb of Birmingham, England, where she grew up, has been quite a journey. Along the way, she has learned how to become comfortable in the minority.

In a small town with very few Jews, Selwyn attended a Christian school, where she and her classmates were sent to church on Wednesdays. Singing in the church choir “didn’t bother me,” she says, because “I knew I was Jewish.” Attending heder on Sundays and being active in the Habonim Dror youth movement made sure of that. Already then, it seems, she was learning how to adapt to being different.

As Selwyn grew into adolescence, her feelings of otherness pervaded her blossoming-yet-ambiguous sexuality. As Selwyn grew into adolescence, her feelings of otherness pervaded her blossoming-yet-ambiguous sexuality. She recalls times when, at around 13 or 14 years old, she and a friend would tickle each other for lengthy sessions that seemed innocent but which, upon reflection, she realizes were her first forays into more intimate groping.

In high school, she and some of her girlfriends would joke about how they were attracted to Cagney from the popular television show Cagney and Lacey, about a pair of women cops. While her friends toyed with the idea, though, Selwyn was hesitantly awakening to the notion that she had more than just an infatuation with girls.

“I was very confused and unsure about what this inclination meant,” she says. “It was really something that I kept inside me, that I didn’t talk about. With some of my close friends I could admit it. I could say, ‘That’s something I wouldn’t mind trying.’ But I didn’t think I was gay, I just thought I was liberal-minded. Some people were trying it, and I thought I should try it too.”

It was actually a boyfriend she met while studying public performing arts at Manchester Metropolitan University who introduced her to a lesbian friend for the first time. (The boyfriend, Selwyn notes, was actually bisexual, and it was his femininity that attracted her to him.)

“I remember how she sized me up and said, in such a blunt fashion, ‘You’re a bit of alright! I wouldn’t mind going down on you,” Selwyn recalls. “Well, I jumped. I mean, that wasn’t what I was looking for at all. I was looking for love, for a spiritual connection. It wasn’t about sex at all. The fact that she said that to me right at the beginning scared me, because I was thinking, ‘Is this what lesbians are like?’

“That [experience],” she continues, “was one of the things that made me say, ‘I need a nice Jewish girl.’ I wasn’t 100 percent sure, but I was starting to get these feelings about my sexuality, and if I was going to do it, I wanted to have a Jewish girlfriend. It was very important to me.”

By then Selwyn had already made several trips to Israel, having visited with family, touring with her youth group and volunteering on a kibbutz. The idea of moving to Israel had been in the back of her mind, but it suddenly jumped to the forefront. One of her studies at university was sign language.

“I loved it,” she says, “but I was learning British sign language. When I thought about what I could do with that as a career, I realized it would be meaningless in Israel. That kind of triggered something and, boom! I didn’t want to stay in Britain.”

SO, IN 1992, Selwyn moved to Israel and started working on a kibbutz. She came, she says, not knowing that she was actually going to make aliya, with a rucksack and a few pounds in her pocket, but she ended up staying. After six months at Kibbutz Tuval near Karmiel, Selwyn went to Kibbutz Tzora for an intensive ulpan. It was there that she decided to “come out” and declare herself a lesbian.

“It just wasn’t working for me with guys,” she says. “I mean, I had tried plenty of times… but I needed to check out this feeling that I had. So I made the decision that I was going to try [a relationship] with a woman. No more men.”

Shortly thereafter, while she was working as a youth group counselor in Dimona, she found a girlfriend and prepared to tell her family about her.

“I told my two brothers first, hoping they would be able to soften the blow for my parents, who were about to come to visit me. When I told them, they were shocked at first, but they were also very supportive. They said, ‘We don’t understand it, but we love you no matter what.’ I was very lucky.”

Not long after that Selwyn moved to Tel Aviv and began to find her way through the city’s thriving gay community. Professionally, too, she had begun to pave her own path. She began to make documentary films, and was doing some English editing and graphic design when she started teaching herself how to program in Flash. In the early days of Web design she started making Flash intros, designing banner ads, etc. Selwyn had settled into a routine when Lizzy came along. She was “born,” Selwyn says, about three years ago, after “the latest in a long string of painful break-ups.”

“I kind of looked around and thought, ‘What next?’ I needed a change. I was thinking of the success of shows such as The L Word [an American/Canadian television show about lesbians in Los Angeles] and some lesbian films, and I just wasn’t that impressed. I started looking for lesbian-themed animation, and found none. So, ding! A light went on.”

That light stood up on stage and started singing about coming out of the closet (Selwyn records Lizzy’s lines and then digitally turns them five semi-tones higher than her own voice). Selwyn sent out that first clip to a few friends on MySpace. Those friends sent it out to more friends, who sent it out to more friends, until hundreds of people had chuckled at Lizzy the Lezzy.

Now Lizzy appears on T-shirts and tote bags and wall clocks, thanks to the online store that Selwyn has opened (a Lizzy the Lezzy throw pillow adorns her couch at home; from time to time, Selwyn looks over at it as if she were addressing the cartoon). She even gets to tell her story in a new book, called Lizzy the Lezzy Gets Laid!, that Selwyn published herself. In the small, simply illustrated full-color book, Lizzy struggles to navigate her way through the bar scene, looking for love and finding it exceedingly hard to come by.

Lizzy’s story is actually a semi-autobiographical account of Selwyn’s adult life; the characters that share the stage with Lizzy (Gary the Gay, Danny the Tranny, Kate the Straight et al.) are composites of people Selwyn has known, and Lizzy’s misadventures are usually retellings of Selwyn’s own experiences.

“For me,” Selwyn says, “coming out was a long process. I was scared of being ‘one of them,’ and I was seeking an emotional connection, not sex. So Lizzy is different in that sense. She was ‘born’ out, and she’s always chasing someone for sex.”

SELWYN TRIES to make Lizzy’s appeal as broad as possible. Lizzy has reached out to the deaf with a sign language version of her tunes, to the blind with a blacked-out screen while she pretends to sing in the nude, and to those whose siblings are gay or lesbian. She has sung her songs in Spanish, French and German, as well as Hebrew, decked out in traditional national dress for each one (her wardrobe for the Hebrew episode consists of blue jeans and a big, blue-and-white shirt with a Star of David on it). She has wished fans a merry Christmas with an uproarious twist on the Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer story, as well as greetings for Valentine’s Day and Easter.

Most of the time, Lizzy pokes fun at herself and others. She generally avoids politics – but she has also joined the fray when Selwyn has thought it necessary for her to do so. She dedicated an episode to the memory of Lawrence “Larry” King – a 15-year-old California boy shot in the head early last year by a classmate because of his sexual orientation – and (virtually) picketed against Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California.

Lizzy also appeared in a documentary with gay Israeli celebrities last year that Selwyn made to promote the success of Israel’s gay community.

“I’ve seen the gay scenes in London, New York and Madrid,” Selwyn says, “and I can say that Tel Aviv’s is the best. It’s a really tight-knit group.”

That open and liberal atmosphere was shattered in July, however, when an unidentified assailant fired into a gay community center in Tel Aviv, killing two people there. Selwyn, who attended the protest rally the Saturday night after the shooting, recalls with pride how thousands of people marched through the streets of Tel Aviv, chanting, “Gays can parade without being afraid!”

It was during that march, she says, that she noticed “just how gay and gay-friendly Tel Aviv is. There were gay pride flags hanging from bars and bistros all along the route. Our visibility, and the support for us, just shot up. If anything, we’re more ‘out’ now.”

The attack remains unsolved, with little hope of catching the shooter. Yet Selwyn says she is not afraid.

“I don’t think it represents the way our society is heading, I think it was a one-off kind of thing. Besides,” she says, “the risk is mitigated here by terrorism and traffic accidents!”

So Selwyn carries on, keeping Lizzy current. There’s a Lizzy clip in the works for an upcoming lesbian film festival, and even talk of Lizzy possibly hosting an animated talk show.

“She takes up a lot of my time,” Selwyn says, looking somewhat accusingly at her Lizzy the Lezzy throw pillow. “She’s very demanding,” she laughs, adding, “like all lesbians!” You just know that Lizzy would have a witty retort to that. The kind, of course, that we wouldn’t be able to print.

Reaching the endgame

It isn’t often that I agree with the Jordanians and Saudis, but they’ve gone and forced my hand.

On Monday, after meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Washington, Jordanian Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh articulated his country’s complaint against the plodding pace of the peace process.

“In the Middle East,” Judeh said, “there has been in the past an over investment perhaps by the parties in pursuing confidence building measures, conflict management techniques, including transitional arrangements, and an over emphasis on gestures, perhaps at the expense of reaching the actual endgame. As His Majesty the King puts it, Madame Secretary, there has been too much process and too little peace, a situation that most certainly is no longer sustainable. And what is required now and needed more than ever is to achieve peace…

“Tried, tested, failed formats, as have been discussed here during His Majesty the King’s visit in April, should also be avoided, including piecemeal approaches that never lead to peace, and that have proven repeatedly to be confidence eroding rather than confidence building. This time, the restoration of faith and the creation of the appropriate environment can only be achieved through clearly highlighting the endgame and skillfully guiding the parties to expeditiously crossing the finish line.”

Just a few days earlier, Prince Saud al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia told Clinton essentially the same thing, saying:

“Incrementalism and a step-by-step approach has not and – we believe – will not achieve peace. Temporary security, confidence-building measures will also not bring peace. What is required is a comprehensive approach that defines the final outcome at the outset and launches into negotiations over final status issues: borders, Jerusalem, water, refugees and security.”

Both men, of course, decried Israeli settlement building and insisted on the same maximalist demands as usual, chief among them a full Israeli withdrawal to the June 4, 1967 lines. Obviously, they glossed over the brutal terrorism that has made the very notion of peace laughable. And undoubtedly their words were at least partially motivated by a desire to once again portray Israel as the party that is blocking rather than advancing peace.

Looking beyond that, though, the most important aspect of these two men’s comments is their insistence on calling a spade a spade regarding the hopeless charade that has been the Israeli-Arab peace process. That incrementalism has not achieved peace and will not achieve peace, and that the piecemeal approach has been tested and failed, has been so glaringly obvious, yet so dangerously ignored, for far too long.

Can there be any question that the endless confidence building measures of the past 15 years have failed to build confidence or bring our peoples any closer to a true and lasting peace? Is it even possible to deny the futility of continuing on this fruitless course of inaction, which perpetuates the conflict by keeping a final settlement constantly at bay, in some vague and ever-elusive future?

What Judeh called reaching the endgame is not just a desperate move to end a wearying conflict, it is the only way to resolve the conflict in the foreseeable future. Let’s be clear: There can be no peace without a resolution, first and foremost, to the question of borders. All other issues – all other issues, including security arrangements, division of water sources and resettlement of refugees – are merely derivatives of the overarching issue of borders. For a generation, we have talked about having “us over here, and them over there”. Without a clearly defined border, however, we can not know where “here” ends and “there” begins. With one, everything else falls into place.

That’s the main reason why the Obama administration’s obsession with a settlement freeze is folly: because it’s irrelevant. The only issue worth pressing all sides for now, and pressing really hard, is the issue of borders. You can’t have a Palestinian state, or a secure and democratic Israeli one, for that matter, without them.

We’re not used to taking advice from Jordan and Saudi Arabia, but it’s time to make an exception. Negotiating for a final status agreement now, with no more dithering over confidence building measures, is the only alternative to many more years of “too much process and too little peace.”

Subs in the Suez

Is Israel’s decision to send a Dolphin submarine through the Suez Canal — overtly — a message to Iran, as this Jerusalem Post report suggests?

Well, duh.

Let’s review why. As I wrote back in 2006:

Israel’s long-range Dolphin-class submarines are reportedly able to launch nuclear-tipped Popeye Turbo cruise missiles…

Since the distance from Israel to Iran is far greater by sea than it is by air, Israel would need submarine bases at the end of the Red Sea and in the Indian Ocean in order for the Dolphins to pull within range of their targets.

As luck would have it, Israel has just such bases – according to foreign reports – in the Dahlak Archipelago, off the coast of Eritrea; and off the coast of either India, with which Israel has a flowering military alliance, or Sri Lanka, whose ties with Israel have grown quietly over the past several years. It was off the coast of Sri Lanka that Israel successfully tested – again, according to foreign reports – a submarine-launched cruise missile in 2000.

Remember, also, how the Israel Navy famously intercepted the Karine A arms smuggling ship deep in the Red Sea back in 2002.

For the past several years, Israel has placed significant emphasis on its naval warfare capabilities in general, and on control of the Red Sea in particular. The Dolphin is, actually, a formidable predator, and parading it through the Suez Canal is a not-so-subtle warning.

The good fight

Thank God for Johnny Ray Haskins.

Haskins was a towering man, a hardcore criminal who had spent years in a state penitentiary for violent crimes. But on that night in the lawless, rundown housing projects of the American Deep South, old Johnny Ray was the only thing standing between Jeff Hochman and death.

Hochman was staring down a loaded handgun being pointed at him by a furious drug dealer certain that Hochman, his client in a sizable drug purchase, was an undercover cop. He was right – but just before he carried out a death sentence on the unarmed pseudo-junkie for that betrayal, Haskins intervened, claiming the dealer had it wrong and that Hochman was a “legit” dude from the area.

“I asked him later why he had saved my life,” Hochman says from his rented Ramat Gan apartment, recalling that long-ago incident. “He said, ‘Man, I’ve done a lot of shitty things in my life. I’ve hurt a lot of people. But you were trying to help people you didn’t even know… so I figured you didn’t need to die.’”

No, Hochman didn’t need to die. He would come close on many other occasions, though, in the course of a career that saw him take on drug gangs, weapons dealers, armed robbers, murderers, mob goons and even Iraqi terrorists and insurgents – and nearly drown in his own attic during Hurricane Katrina.

“Many times, people have asked me to write a book about my life,” he says. “After all, not many Jewish guys have been with the Marines, the cops, the FBI, and hunted IED (improvised explosive device) cells in Iraq – and made aliya.”

Still, Hochman dismisses the notion of penning a memoir, saying simply and somewhat gravely, “Some things are better left unsaid.”

Not that Hochman is anything but outgoing and cheerful. Shortly after having left Iraq, the 43-year-old talked with The Jerusalem Post about settling down to the relative serenity of a new life here in Israel – a life, he says, that he has dreamed of ever since he was a kid growing up in Mobile, Alabama.

AS A CHILD, Hochman was keenly interested in police work; throughout school he was part of the local law enforcement explorers, “a sort of Boy Scouts for police,” as he says. But after graduating high school, Hochman joined the Marines. He would serve just over two years in the corps. It’s an affiliation that means a lot to him.

“The Marines’ Eagle, Globe and Anchor insignia is dear to me and, like a lot of guys, I contemplated having it tattooed. In fact, I almost did it one night when I was out drinking with the guys,” Hochman recalls. “But then I remembered my mother telling me that if I ever got a tattoo, she’d never forgive me.”

Growing up, he says, “the only time I saw tattoos on Jews was the numbers on Holocaust survivors’ forearms.”

Immediately after leaving the Marines, the tattoo-less Hochman sought out a police job. Just then, he says, a narcotics squad was being put together for an undercover federal task force in western Alabama. Hochman jumped at the chance. It was not, however, a glamorous – or an easy – job.

“In order to look the part, I had to lived in the projects, drive a shitty car, live a shitty life,” he explains. “I had a cover job as an assistant to a veterinarian, who was a former cop and who knew about my undercover role. But at night, after work, I would buy drugs, set up buys, whatever was necessary” to arrest drug dealers and weapons dealers.

He did this for close to three years, sometimes driving hundreds of kilometers to consummate a drug deal.

“I had to look like a junkie,” Hochman says, “so I’d mix beer and coffee and drink a whole bunch of that, to make me jittery and kind of out of it. I would walk into crackhouses – this white guy, in the South, in a house full of black drug dealers and junkies. I couldn’t look like a cop, so I couldn’t go around with a weapon, or a wire, or anything like that. There was no support waiting right outside for me, the way they do it nowadays. It was crazy.”

It was during this period that Haskins saved Hochman from ending up dead in a housing project. But there were other dangers as well, unbeknownst to Hochman.

“When I came out from undercover, one of my bosses was immediately arrested for drug distribution. Another was suspected of doing the same, though the suspicions were never proven. He later went to jail on corruption and extortion charges. When a third died; some said it was suicide.

“It was a big part of my career and taught me how important it is to be an honorable police officer, even when it’s the hardest to be. As an undercover cop there were a lot of things you could have done and gotten away with. It’s easy to do… My bosses were dirty when it was easy, and it put my life in danger.”

These gritty experiences opened doors for Hochman with the New Orleans Police Department, and allowed him to flourish there. From 1991 through the end of 2007 he tackled robbery, homicide, drugs and local mafia, rising through the ranks to become a detective sergeant and the head of a combined FBI/New Orleans Police Department task force on gang violence.

“All told,” he says, “I’ve worked about 1,000 murders in my career. I can’t even count how many shootings and armed robberies… It’s safe to say I’ve worked more violent crime than most Israeli police.”

YET AFTER all that, after facing all those bullets and blades and needles, it was water that nearly brought Hochman down. Lots and lots of water.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Hochman had been sick at home with a stomach virus. Rather than evacuate, he stayed home with his German Shepard, Thor, thinking he could weather the storm. And at first, he later recalled in a written account, he had – his home had suffered only minor damage, and flooding in the neighborhood had been minimal.

When the levees keeping the Mississippi River at bay burst, however, Hochman’s – and New Orleans’ – situation quickly took a turn for the worse.

“I had been lying in bed asleep and gotten up for something, going to the front bay windows of my house,” Hochman wrote. “Water was up about 15 centimeters, up to about the beginning of the hubcaps of the tires on the cars.”

Fifteen minutes later, water was pouring through his home.

“I quickly ran to the front bay windows again. The water was already over the tires and going up over the hood of the cars and was coming up underneath my house. I watched the current of the water, watching stuff flow down the street. I watched the water continue to rise and rise and rise, and I pretty much knew I was in trouble.”

Hochman had trouble communicating with colleagues on his radio, “but I could hear other officers screaming for help as the water was coming up into their attics. They were already up in the attic and they were having trouble and couldn’t get out.”

Hochman brought Thor up to his own attic, but still wasn’t panicking. He had sealed rations, water, a sledgehammer and crowbar, and a flotation vest for himself and the dog.

“I pretty much determined that I was going to tie the rope to a joist in the attic, hook it to me and Thor, bust out the ceiling and go sit on the roof with the dog. That was my plan.”

Downstairs, Hochman was amazed as the water level continued to rise.

“The water was finally around my chest, and I knew I was in serious trouble. I was going back and forth through the water to the attic to check on Thor, and I kept coming down to see if the water would go away, but it didn’t. It just kept coming up. I started hearing the refrigerators and washers and dryers and everything floating around and banging each other… The house was filled with water.

“I had thought the plan I had was good, but then I realized it wasn’t and I pretty much knew me and the dog were dead. I was going to die. I told [my colleagues] to go to other areas and get people that had a chance. There were already dead people floating around me, so I figured the jig was up for me.”

For more than 1,800 people in the area affected by Katrina, the jig was indeed up. But in the moments went hope seemed lost, Hochman wrote, “I thought about everything I had been through – with law enforcement, the military – and I thought, ‘[Screw] this, I’m not dying. Not letting some water kill me.’”

Within a few hours a fellow officer who had found a boat made his way to Hochman’s house. Together they broke through a small window and the wall around it. Hochman swam through his house and back into the attic, where Thor was waiting.

“I went to the attic and cut the rope I had Thor secured with, but he wouldn’t swim. That dog was crawling on my back trying to make nice when I was dragging him under water and through the house; I was his raft. I finally had to push him through the window… and onto the roof.”

The policemen made their way to a highway overpass where dozens of citizens were waiting for rescue. Once they were taken care of, Hochman joined up with the rest of his police unit and went to work “patrolling and pulling people from houses and stopping looters.”

In the aftermath of the storm, with most of the city underwater and paralyzed, Hochman kept the peace as much as he could by day, and slept in a Wal-Mart parking lot by night. For several days, he didn’t even have shoes.

“Some New York policemen came down to help out,” he says, “and after taking a look around, they told us that what we were dealing with was much worse than 9/11.”

TWO YEARS later, Hochman had put in enough time with the police and the military to retire. But he wasn’t done working, and the Department of Defense was looking for people with his kind of background to join counterinsurgency operations in Iraq. So he took an offer to hunt down IED cells and suicide bomb units with the National Information and Intelligence Agency (“kind of a combination of the FBI and the CIA in Iraq,” Hochman says). He was embedded with their operators every day for a year.

“We used the same mentality and approach that I used in my police work,” he says, “because they used the same approach as gangs and organized crime. IED cells operate according to the same principles as the mafia – they smuggle, they lie and they cheat. The only difference is that, in the States, you have large organizations fighting in a large system. In Iraq, you could be looking for a lone operator riding a motorcycle through a wadi, dumping bombs in the sand for $100 apiece.”

What was different, Hochman adds, was the weather.

“There were what we called ‘black days,’ when it was too damn hot to work,” he says, enjoying the air conditioning in a Ramat Gan café. “It was so hot that it was like putting your face into an oven.”

Then there were the sandstorms.

“I was trapped in one so bad, and so fast, I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “A red wall hundreds of feet high just engulfed me. I had a strong flashlight with me, but I couldn’t see its light, even when I held it right in front of my face.”

Sometimes, when a sandstorm struck, it stranded Hochman and his team members at the homes of their Iraqi investigators. One kept them pinned down for 40 hours straight. Iraq’s fine sand – “we called it moondust” – would penetrate weapons, gear and clothes.

When not facing unbearable heat or unstoppable sand, Hochman and his crew still had the harrowing task of shaking up insurgents. They fought back, with bombs and mortar fire. “I lost some friends,” Hochman says matter-of-factly, without elaboration.

Working in small teams deep inside a hostile population, Hochman and his men often entered homes of suspects, knowing they could be boobytrapped. “You always go into a house hoping your first step in won’t be your last,” as he says.

The team that Hochman led dismantled numerous bombing networks and won praise from commanders for its efficiency and professionalism.

“I’ve always wanted to be the guy who did some good out there… catching bad guys and teaching others how to catch bad guys,” Hochman says. “I love doing that. It gives you a real rubber-meets-the-road perspective.”

Now removed from that, he says, “I don’t miss Iraq. But I do miss the work. I miss catching bad guys – the kind of people who use kids and women to do their dirty work… and I miss the professionalism of the guys. That’s what keeps the world safe.”

After finishing his contract in Iraq, Hochman was offered the opportunity to do the same kinds of things in Afghanistan, but declined. It was time, he says, to come to Israel.

“I HAVEN’T been the best Jew as far as going to synagogue, but I have always been very Jewish and very pro-Israel. I have always been interested in making aliya and living here – and here I am.”

Hochman’s connection to Israel has been professional, with visits here with law enforcement and counterterrorism delegations in the ’90s through 2007.

“Actually,” he says, “after one trip here in the mid-90s, I wanted to make aliya and be a cop here – but Israel can not recruit foreign government workers for government positions here, so I’d have to start over. There was no ‘support basket’ for new [Western] immigrants then like there is now, so it didn’t make sense to come then.”

Long before that, in the late ’70s, Hochman had spent a few months in Israel, together with his family. His father, an engineer, built a wire harnessing factory here for an Israeli company that made battery cables and jumper cables.

His connection goes even further back, though. Hochman still recalls the awe with which, as a young boy, he greeted Israeli helicopter pilots who had come to Alabama’s Fort Rucker for training, and who would spend weekends at the Hochman home.

“Those guys are all retired colonels now,” he says. “They’re something of a friends network for me.”

The pilots can’t help with Hochman with ulpan, or with the annoying bureaucratic errands that all immigrants must complete, or with the wait for his few belongings from New Orleans to arrive. But now, as he searches for an apartment to call home and looks back on an action-packed career, Hochman has no regrets about where he’s been, or where he’s come.

“I had many goals at 17,” Hochman says. “I wanted to be an infantryman in the Marines, a law enforcement officer, a tactical (SWAT) operator, a detective, a supervisor, a part of the federal government. An I wanted, one day, to move to Israel. So of every dream I’ve ever had, almost every one has been fulfilled. The only thing I’ve ever wanted that I haven’t had yet,” he says, “is a wife and a child… and who knows?”

Hochman knows that, of all the challenges he has faced, learning Hebrew might prove to be the toughest. And he is concerned about not finding employment matching his experience and qualifications.

“I’m hoping that someone in Israel recognizes that I could be of service,” he says modestly. “I mean, I’m sure I can learn something. You can always learn. Maybe I can adapt some of the things that I’ve done to things here, and eventually teach a synthesis of those methods to some people in the States.”

No matter what, Hochman promises, you won’t catch him lounging endlessly on the beach or packing up and heading back to the bayou.

“I am determined,” he says, “to make it here.”

Explaining war

“Let the general in,” she says with a smile.

The Armored Corps brigade commander is tall and broad-shouldered, radiating experience and machismo with a trim grey beard covering a strong jaw. He’s the third general to come to this office this week seeking guidance.

The woman sitting behind the desk is several years his junior and a few ranks below him, too – yet when the brigade commander sits down, it is Avital Leibovich who is giving the orders. Fox News wants an interview with a senior officer who can explain what happened in the alleyways of Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, and it is Leibovich’s job to make sure the journalists hear what the IDF Spokesman wants them to hear.

“Every question they ask you, answer with an example from the field. Describe what you have seen with your own eyes, what you and your soldiers have experienced. Be as descriptive as possible,” she says.

“It bothers me that they’re talking about soldiers abusing Palestinians (during the operation), wrecking homes and whatnot,” the general says. “For every ugly story like that, I can give two stories that are the total opposite. I’m talking about reservists sending letters of apology to the families whose homes they commandeered, sending them money and leaving them food, that sort of thing.”

Leibovich looks the commander in the eye. “That’s exactly what they need to hear,” she says.

And now he’s ready to go.

This is today’s IDF: coordinated, rehearsed, media savvy. Perhaps even more significantly, it is an army in which its spokesmen play a larger role than ever before – for better and for worse.

THE MEDIUM is the message, as communications theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said. Just in case, though, the IDF Spokesman’s Office now controls both. The foreign press liaison unit, as the face and voice of Israel’s army to the entire world, is the gateway through which information flows (or, often, does not flow), and it has transformed from something of an afterthought into a major part of the military’s arsenal. As wars are increasingly fought on the virtual battlegrounds of television and the Internet, the soldiers of the IDF Spokesman’s foreign media liaison unit are a new breed of pressed-uniform commandos.

Leibovich’s highly motivated crew includes recent immigrants like Lee Hiromoto, a 26-year-old Yale graduate from Hawaii, Harvard graduate Arie Hasit, 25, and Aliza Landes, 26, a McGill grad.

“The North American desk must be one of the best educated units in the IDF,” Landes says only half-jokingly.

It was Landes and Hiromoto who came up with the idea, a day into the fighting of Operation Cast Lead at the end of December, to launch a youtube channel with material from the IDF Spokesman’s Office. It quickly became the most viewed channel in the world.

Here, initiative is the name of the game. Another recent immigrant on Leibovich’s staff of 20, Devora, called up one of the top military journalists in her native Belgium and offered to introduce him to Belgian Jews serving in combat units. He’s due in Israel soon to produce a lengthy feature for television that will be distributed across Europe.

“We’re proactive. We no longer wait for someone to come to us with a request, we are now the initiators. We suggest stories to journalists, instead of the other way around,” says Leibovich, who was just promoted to lieutenant-colonel. “Since each area has its own unique characteristics, and its specific areas of interest, we provide each ‘audience’ with what it needs,” she adds. “We tailor information and stories for North America, for Europe, for Russian-language media, for Arabic media, and for Latin America and the Far East.”

Whereas interaction with the Spokesman’s Office once meant long delays and garbled armyspeak, there is now a greater focus on productivity and efficiency, of providing what journalists need.

“I send out SMS messages to 400 reporters each day,” Leibovich says. “If someone wants to know how many Kassams fell in 2008, they can call me and get an answer within five minutes.”

And if the phone is busy, journalists can simply pop in. After several years based in Tel Aviv, the foreign press liaison unit returned to Jerusalem a few months ago – setting up shop in the Jerusalem Capital Studios building that houses the offices of some of the most important foreign media companies.

“The fact that we’re here at JCS is significant,” Leibovich says. “As soon as something happens, we can respond and brief them immediately. So they don’t have to start running around, calling up people in Gaza, asking, ‘What’s going on? What are you hearing? What can you report?’ We tell them, ‘We’re attacking here and here, because Hamas did this and this.’ They get all the information they need from us. So there’s much less spin.”

“The IDF is very adept at ensuring that its message gets out there, and gets out there quickly – and I don’t say that as a smart-ass remark,” says ABC Australia correspondent Ben Knight.

“During the war, it didn’t take much effort to get people into the office at short notice and hear their side of things. We never wanted for comment from the IDF, and we never had to wait too long. So they are obviously very well aware of the importance of doing it and very well practiced at getting their point of view out there. The Australian army does things quite differently, I can tell you that.”

WHERE THE unit once was distant, today it seeks out contact with foreign correspondents.

“I have learned that if you don’t take a journalist out to see things with his own eyes, you just won’t get through to him,” Leibovich says. “But once you do…!”

One example of the positive effects of taking journalists into the field has been in coverage of the West Bank security barrier. In its early days, inefficiency at the roadblocks and transfer points meant lengthy waits, exposed to the weather, for Palestinians. More recently, improvements in procedures and infrastructure have significantly eased the situation, and showing that to the world helps reduce pressure on Israel.

“Back in 2003, all you saw were stories about the unbearable wait at roadblocks and all that. But things are so much better now, so much more efficient,” she says. “I take journalists out there all the time to inspect roadblocks. I tell them, ‘However long you want to wait here, I’ll wait with you.’ So they stay there for two and three hours, and they can’t believe what they see – that it only takes a few seconds to check a car and let it through. One Scandinavian group waited hours in the sun, turning red, expecting to see trouble that never came.”

(Some journalists respond, however, that while the army is eager to show them these improvements, it is loath to let journalists review the multitude of roadblocks and barriers throughout the West Bank that restrict the movement of Palestinians.)

Whereas visiting journalists may have once been treated with some disdain, the IDF now sees them as vehicles for getting its message abroad.

“We’re dealing, in many cases, with foreign correspondents who are flying in from Washington, or from Zimbabwe, or from Finland. They’ve had so little time to digest what’s happening here – they’ve heard a little, they’ve read a little – so that any chance we have to show them what is really going on, and help them put it in context, we have to take it.”

Leibovich has plenty of stories to offer: articles on technological advances in the army, which portray the IDF as a professional organization; on krav maga; on the ongoing development of the Merkava IV tank; on the increase in women serving in combat roles; on new immigrants in uniform, etc. – any chance to present the IDF as something other than just a fighting machine.

“We believe that the IDF has nothing to hide,” Leibovich says. “I’m not taking journalists on secret missions or anything like that, but I have no reason to hide a squadron of fighter jets. So, just the other day I brought the staff of 30 media outlets to an air force base to see the technology used in our F-15Is, our attack helicopters, and more.”

The army has invested in improving the quality of photos it sends out, and it sends out many more of them now than before. During the Gaza war, it made colorful, readable maps available to its reservists who escorted foreign journalists, so they could appreciate the seriousness of the rocket threat to the western Negev. And every morning, Leibovich sends out a report on the amount of humanitarian aid the army allows into Gaza. In the information war, then, the IDF is holding its own.

“We showed Palestinians setting up rocket launchers next to schools, or using civilian buildings as weapons storage facilities,” Leibovich says. “What did the other side show, except for people with their faces covered, making statements?”

The unit doesn’t take its work for granted, though, monitoring the foreign press to measure the tone of coverage on the IDF and to see whether the army’s perspective is reflected in that coverage. Soldiers even scan blogs, twitter, and all manner of new media to gauge the effectiveness of their work.

“I want to know whether our message got through,” Leibovich says. “If we’re trying to get across that we’re not targeting innocent civilians, for example, I want to see that that message comes through in the media.”

During the war, Leibovich enlisted the help of those outside the Spokesman’s Office who could make Israel’s case credibly.

“It’s very important for us to have commanders tell the stories of what they experienced personally,” she says. “Also, we had briefings almost every day, with an artillery expert, or an expert on weapons and international law. It wasn’t me speaking, it was outside experts. After that, when you read the wires, you read the quotes of those experts.”

Despite the experts, and the photos, and the SMS messages and the maps, however, there were still plenty of media outlets that chose not to present those materials.

“You know,” Leibovich says with a sigh, “sometimes there are correspondents here who ‘get it’ and file fair stories, but their editors back home change the stories. I can only send out the information, I can’t make them use it,” she says. “But I’m not going to just throw up my hands and give up. We’re not defeatists.”

NO, THERE are no defeatists in Leibovich’s office. But, for all the improvements in the functioning of the IDF Spokesman’s Office, there remain certain elements that are self-defeating. Take IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Avi Benayahu, for example. At a toast with foreign journalists shortly before Pessah, celebrating the liaison unit’s move to the JCS building, Benayahu gave a speech that was more a lecture on the evils of Hamas than a welcome speech to professional journalists. He talked at the journalists, not to them, and his tone suggested he sees himself not as the “national explainer” that the popular former IDF spokesman Nachman Shai was, but as the army’s chief propagandist.

The journalists largely ignored Benayahu anyway, instead sharing with each other their frustrations about his unit’s apologetics, denials, and stonewalling on sensitive issues. It was just one sign of how, despite doing many other things right, the army still doesn’t completely “get it,” either.

While the world saw images of deprivation in Gaza, Benayahu and others insisted that there was no humanitarian crisis there.

“Of course there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza!” Leibovich says, incredulously. “Look, there’s a difference between having only pita to eat but at least having something to eat, and having nothing at all. Now, lots of trucks are going into Gaza every day – every day – with humanitarian aid…”

For European viewers sympathetic to the Palestinians, though, answering the cry, “It’s terrible there!” with the angry retort, “No, it’s not terrible, it’s only very bad” does not help Israel’s case.

What would help is more photos of terrorists operating in civilian areas – photos that the IDF had in spades both before and during Operation Cast Lead, but failed to release in time.

“I can tell you that our response time this time around, in comparison to the Second Lebanon War, was vastly improved,” Leibovich counters. “During the Gaza war, we distributed video four times a day.”

As the death toll in Gaza climbed, and Palestinians claimed most of the dead had been innocent civilians, the IDF countered that the vast majority had indeed been involved in the fighting or members of armed groups. Yet, even when it later produced a report claiming the final death toll was lower than the Palestinian figure by several hundred people, it refused to release the names on its list so journalists could investigate the differences between Israel’s claims and the Palestinians’.

The army’s response was essentially that identifying bodies was not its job. Its insistence on refuting Palestinian claims, but not substantiating its own, turned the death toll issue into a he said-she said argument that, ultimately, Israel lost.

Leibovich’s response – “The asymmetrical warfare that Hamas wages is not limited to the streets of Gaza. It extends to the press as well. In the end, the Palestinian narrative comes from unreliable sources” – typifies a “they’re wrong, and that’s the end of it” approach that makes many correspondents bristle.

Leibovich adds: “Our list of names went through a very lengthy verification process that included extensive intelligence gathering. We won’t release the names because we do not wish to harm our intelligence sources.”

Be that as it may, without the names, no journalist could take the IDF’s numbers at face value – although that’s exactly what the army expected of them. Of course, foreign journalists could have investigated on their own, had they been allowed into Gaza. But they weren’t. Despite the painful lessons from the spurious reports of a “massacre” in Jenin in 2002, Israel did not allow foreign journalists into the Gaza Strip during the fighting.

The ban was part of a general restriction on information, that came in response to the army’s much more open approach during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, and it damaged Israel in two ways: it deeply frustrated many foreign correspondents who might have been made to see the war from Israel’s perspective, and it left the reporting to Palestinian and Arab media stationed in Gaza. This, in turn, allowed those reporters to allege various Israeli war crimes that no Western media could later disprove.

As one correspondent, speaking to The Jerusalem Post on condition of anonymity, notes, “When the IDF keeps quiet, it gives the other side an advantage.”

CLEARLY, NOT all foreign journalists share the enthusiasm of ABC’s Knight. The IDF Spokesman’s Office, says the anonymous correspondent, “is terrible about getting us information.”

“Oh, sure,” he says, “they’ll call us up and offer us the chance to talk with the first female officer in the canine unit, or something like that. But when it comes to the army’s use of white phosphorous or war crimes [allegations] – nothing.”

Investigating claims, and sharing the results of those investigations openly and quickly, is another sore spot.

“I don’t say that the IDF is all pure and white, that we never do things that aren’t right. But when something happens, we admit it. We learn from it, and we make sure things get better,” Leibovich says. “Well,” answers a correspondent, “it’s a problem that they’re the ones investigating themselves. It seems like they never find themselves guilty of anything.”

That perception is inaccurate – but since perception is reality, the IDF needs to combat it better.

The controversy over war crimes allegations leveled at the IDF from within its own ranks illustrates the point. A few weeks after the fighting, two veterans of the conflict told others gathered at the Rabin Pre-Military Academy that their comrades had shot and killed unarmed women inside Gaza. It took the army several days to investigate the claims – and while they were ultimately exposed as false, they did tremendous damage in that time to the IDF’s mantra that it is the most moral army in the world.

Another complaint, says a journalist, is that access to senior officers is often highly restricted, “and when we can meet with them, they either don’t say anything of substance because the lawyer sitting next to them tells them not to, or they tell us things that become worthless as soon as they forbid us from revealing their identity.”

Another correspondent complains that the IDF is “very amateurish about important things,” such as providing findings of official investigations but forbidding all reference to them as such. “They just don’t seem to know about, or care about, our rules of attribution.”

Additionally, both note with frustration, stories about which they have inquired without receiving a response often turn up in the Hebrew press – and then, when they call for a comment on the Israeli reports, the IDF refuses to even acknowledge that the story has already been published.

“We understand that the army has to limit information based on security concerns,” says the first correspondent. “But so much of this has nothing to do with security. Too often, they’re hostile to us, or they act like they just don’t care about us.”

“Ultimately,” Leibovich answers, “the IDF is my client, not the media.”

That, of course, is absolutely true. The IDF Spokesman’s Office is tasked with furthering the interests of the army, and those interests are bound to conflict with the interests of journalists sometimes.

“We have to explain why we’re right, why we’re fighting,” Leibovich says with genuine conviction. “And we have to contend with the image of the Palestinian underdog versus us as the larger, stronger force. It isn’t easy, but we’re doing our best. And I promise, we’ll continue to get better.”

A lesson in Sri Lanka

For a few months already, government troops have been on the verge of ridding Sri Lanka of the island nation’s terrorist scourge, the Tamil Tigers. Now, it seems, they have done so.

Most of the world has ignored this 25-year-long conflict, and Israel is no exception. But now that this struggling island state has defeated one of the most accomplished terrorist and guerilla forces in modern history, it is imperative that every Western nation — and especially Israel — take great pains to study this development well.

The Tigers’ extinction is a resounding reality check for all those who have said that such a movement could not be defeated. Indeed, it was only after the rebels broke a truce that the Sri Lankan government decided to abandon its plan of managing the conflict and go for total victory that success became possible.

There is a profound lesson in this for Israel and its ill-fated strategy vis-a-vis Hamas: Pursue victory, and you shall get it. Pursue calm, and you shall never have it.

Like the notion of bringing Hamas to surrender is ridiculed as impossible, so too was the idea of defeating the Tigers of Tameel Elam once considered impossible. But no more. Today it is not folly to declare, “terrorism can be defeated!” It is folly to ignore such a declaration.

Mr. Smith challenges the pope

He’s enjoying lunch in the lobby of the Ramada Renaissance Hotel in Jerusalem, speaking casually but knowledgably about Jewish suffering. He’s wearing a “Shema Israel” pendant and recalling the “awe-inspiring” experience of visiting the “Kotel” (Western Wall) during a family to visit to Israel when he was 13. But Stephen D. Smith is not the typical Jewish tourist.

Smith, the son of a Methodist minister and a religious education teacher from Nottinghamshire, England, is the founder and director of the United Kingdom’s Holocaust Centre and a passionate advocate for Christian-Jewish relations. He is here to promote his latest project, No Going Back, a collection of essays directed at Pope Benedict XVI that Smith collected and co-edited for the occasion of the pope’s visit to the Holy Land.

The essays come from some three dozen Christians, Jews and Muslims from all over the world who answered the simple question, “If you had five minutes with Pope Benedict XVI, what would you say to him?” They reflect, Smith says, a great sense of concern that this papacy is much more hardline than that of John Paul II, and that the current pontiff’s conservative views on internal church matters are harming relations with the Jews.

In addition to the threat of Islamic extremism, the book focuses on concerns about three recent developments and what they mean for Christian-Jewish relations:

* The recent restoration of four excommunicated priests – especially Bishop Richard Williamson, whose anti-Semitic comments and Holocaust denial embarrassed the church and strained Vatican-Jewish relations.

* The Good Friday prayer, a rather negatively worded prayer for the conversion of the Jews that had been diluted in recent years, which Benedict XVI decreed may be restored to its earlier language.

* The advancement of the beatification process of World War II-era Pope Pius XII, whom Jewish groups claim did too little to combat or condemn the Holocaust.

“If a priest were excommunicated for consecrating gay marriage, he would not be accepted back into the fold. Yet a bishop who espouses anti-Semitism has been welcomed back into the fold,” Smith says, referring to Williamson. “So what message is the church trying to send? That gay marriage is not okay, but that anti-Semitism is okay?”

In light of all these events, Smith continues, “Views of this pope are forming as someone for whom fostering and enhancing Jewish-Christian relations are of less importance than in decades past. Our book… seeks to address these growing and legitimate concerns on His Holiness’s visit.”

“Many of our authors are people who sit between the communities; that is, they may be Catholics who are working positively on Jewish-Christian relations, or Jews working on engaging with Catholics. And when they see that kind of internal change going on, it sends all the wrong signals,” Smith says. “Because nothing that the church does internally is ever a purely internal matter.”

Smith, 42, has been delving into Christian-Jewish relations for two decades now. He studied Christian theology with an emphasis on Jewish studies and that, he says, is where he began to confront the issue of Christian anti-Semitism.

“I became extremely troubled by it,” he says, “especially because it didn’t seem like it was really being dealt with.”

So in 1995, Smith and his brother James built the Holocaust Center “to challenge Christians.”

Later, in response to the Rwandan genocide, he founded the Aegis trust. The organization educates about genocide, commemorates such atrocities and supports the victims of genocide.

He was also introduced to Carol Rittner, a Roman Catholic nun who is a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, editor of various Holocaust journals and author of several books about the Holocaust.

“She focuses a lot on the nexus between Christian ethics and conflict resolution, and she’s quite demanding in her thinking on that,” Smith says.

The two teamed up with Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer in 2000 on the book The Holocaust and the Christian World.

Since then, and in particular since the passing of John Paul II, who guided the church to an unprecedented rapprochement with the Jewish world, Smith and Rittner have grown increasingly wary of the church’s conservative bent. That’s why they collaborated again on No Going Back.

“Just as Jews try to ‘build a fence around the Torah,’” Smith says, “Pope Benedict XVI appears to be trying to build a fence around the church. The church is saying, ‘This is who we are, and we’re going to wear it on our sleeves, and whatever anybody thinks about that, we don’t really care.’

“That’s the wrong signal to be giving – particularly in the Middle East,” Smith feels. “That doesn’t give Jewish partners any confidence. It certainly gives no right to be able to come and say, ‘Let’s all make peace and Israelis and Palestinians reconcile with each other.’”

If Benedict XVI does not make bold statements on anti-Semitism, Smith says, what remains will be merely “vacuous statements that will make people wonder what, if anything, the church has to offer.”

The pope did address the issue of Holocaust commemoration upon his arrival in Israel on Monday, saying, “It is right and fitting that, during my stay in Israel, I will have the opportunity to honor the memory of the 6 million Jewish victims of the Shoah, and to pray that humanity will never again witness a crime of such magnitude.

“Sadly, anti-Semitism continues to rear its ugly head in many parts of the world. This is totally unacceptable,” he continued. “Every effort must be made to combat anti-Semitism wherever it is found.”

Those comments should go a long way toward soothing worries about the pope’s position in light of Williamson’s Holocaust denial. But the rest of the Christian world, Smith says, will still have to prove its resolve in the face of Islamist groups whose aims include the destruction of millions of Jews. As a man who has spent so much of his life raising awareness about the Holocaust, he is very worried that that danger is being overlooked.

“The big threat [of Jewish mass murder] is not past!” Smith says with great gravity. “I don’t think the Jewish people are past the threat of genocide at all. And the issue goes way beyond whether Iran obtains nuclear weapons that it can drop on Tel Aviv. The problem is the ideology of the Islamist groups around the world, for whom hatred of the Jews is a central tenet.

“People often say, ‘Well, this is a conflict between the state of Israel and other states, and Israel is strong, etc. But what people don’t appreciate is that the threat is not really against Israel, per se. It is against Jews, many of whom live in Israel. People conflate statehood and military conflict with a threat against people because of their ethnic background…”

“What were the four main elements in the Holocaust? A racial ideology; a target; the stated intent to harm that target, and the means to carry out that threat. The same pieces were in place in Rwanda. And they are in place with the Islamists, too – all, that is, except the means. And that is only so because they are not coordinated.”

In World War II Europe, Smith says, “churches protected their own institutional survival at the cost of their moral credibility.” He shutters to think the Christian world may let the same thing happen again.