Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, seen here addressing a regional economic summit in Tehran in May 2011, says he is "optimistic" that nuclear inspectors will not find anything amiss this week during their visit to the country. (Parmida Rahimi via Creative Commons)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Israel, the United States and Iran have all gone deep into mixed-signals territory.

Conversations with Israeli officials, including Defense Minister Ehud Barak, left one prominent journalist convinced that Israel will strike Iran by year’s end. Yet two weeks ago, Barak had said that any possible Israeli attack on Iran is “far off.”

Leon Panetta, the U.S. defense secretary, said in December that any military strike would only set Iran’s nuclear program back a couple years — a remark that some Israelis read as conveying a sense of resignation to the idea that if Iran really wants a nuclear weapon, eventually it will be able to get one. But in a television interview broadcast Sunday, he vowed that the U.S. would take “whatever steps are necessary” to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

Meanwhile, Iran is responding to international sanctions with a mix of threats to shut down the Strait of Hormuz and efforts to placate Western concerns about its nuclear program by allowing in inspectors and calling for new talks.

Two questions remain the focus of considerable speculation: Will Israel strike Iran? And will the sanctions cause Iran to bend?

The first question was the subject of a much-discussed Sunday New York Times Magazine cover story by Ronen Bergman, one of Israel’s best-connected security journalists. It featured rare and extensive on-the-record interviews with top Israeli officials, most prominently Barak.

Recent moves by the Iranians have underscored the significance of the second question.

Last week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said that Iran was ready to sit down for talks to discuss its nuclear program. On Sunday, a team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, arrived in Tehran.

The team, according to the Associated Press, includes two weapons experts and will visit an Iranian nuclear facility near the religious city of Qom. President Obama’s revelation in 2009 of the until-then secret underground facility helped the U.S. make the case to the world community for intensified sanctions, leading to the recent international squeeze on Iran’s economy and energy sector.

The inspectors’ visit is the first since an IAEA report in November concluded that Iran was engaged in activities — particularly in the area of enhanced uranium enrichment capabilities — that could have no other discernible purpose but weaponization.

Iran continues to insist that its nuclear program has strictly civilian purposes. Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s foreign minister, was quoted by various media on Monday as saying that he was “optimistic” about the results of the inspectors’ three-day visit, and that it could be extended “if necessary.”

“One shouldn’t get too carried away, but I assume they have something to offer or they would not agree to schedule this visit,” said Barbara Slavin, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who has written a book on U.S.-Iran relations titled “Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies.”

But Michael Adler, an Iran expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, noted that the Iranians resisted setting a formal agenda for the inspectors’ visit, which suggested a lack of seriousness by the Iranians.

“Iran has a history of offering to talk when it is under pressure, and then stalling so that the talks delay punitive measures against it,” Adler said.

Iran is also sending mixed messages to the United States in the region. In addition to its threat to shut the Strait of Hormuz in response to mounting sanctions, Iran’s army chief warned a U.S. aircraft carrier not to return to the Persian Gulf. But other Iranian officials later seemed to backtrack, calling the entry of another U.S. carrier into the gulf a routine event. Also this month, Iran test-fired cruise missiles that could be used against U.S. ships.

Israel’s plans, meanwhile, also have been the subject of speculation.

Bergman in his New York Times Magazine article concluded that an Israeli strike before year’s end was all but inevitable.

“I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012,” he wrote. “Perhaps in the small and ever-diminishing window that is left, the United States will choose to intervene after all, but here, from the Israeli perspective, there is not much hope for that.”

A number of Iran experts questioned his conclusions, noting that his article included a wealth of Israelis warning against such a strike — and even referred to Barak’s Jan. 18 statement that any decision to strike was “very far off.”

“It was a very odd article considering all the people he quoted who said that a strike was a bad idea,” Slavin said.

In part, Bergman argues, the feeling that Israel will need to strike Iran stems from what he suggests is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s belief that the U.S. will not attack in its stead should Iran be on the verge of developing a nuclear weapon.

U.S. officials, including Panetta, have tried in recent weeks to emphasize their commitment to stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. In an interview broadcast Sunday, Panetta told the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” that the United States would take “whatever steps are necessary” to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, calling it a “red line” for both Israelis and the United States.

Asked about the possibility of military action, Panetta responded that “there are no options that are off the table.”

Panetta also stressed the urgency of the situation, suggesting that Iran would be able to develop a nuclear weapon in approximately a year.

“The consensus is that if they decided to do it, it would probably take them about a year to be able to produce a bomb and then possibly another one to two years in order to put it on a deliverable vehicle of some sort in order to deliver that weapon,” Panetta said.

In articulating the notion that Iran could be able to develop a nuclear weapon in fairly short order, Panetta seems to be on the same page as Israeli officials.

In a statement Monday after returning from the annual economic forum in Davos, Switzerland, Barak again sounded a note of concern.

“Over the course of the various meetings” with other leaders at the forum, Barak said, “we repeatedly emphasized our stance that we must urgently intensify and broaden the sanctions against Iran. The determination of world leaders is critical in order to prevent the Iranians from advancing their military nuclear program.

“We must not waste time on this matter; the Iranians continue to advance [toward nuclear weapons], identifying every crack and squeezing through. Time is urgently running out.”

Soldiers from the Israeli army's haredi Orthodox unit called the Netzah Yehuda Battalion praying. (Abir Sultan/Flash90/JTA)

JERUSALEM (JTA) — When Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, granted a few hundred haredi Orthodox Jews an exemption from army service, it’s likely he never dreamed that 63 years later, tens of thousands of haredi Israelis would claim the exemption — or that the issue would be among the most contentious in modern Israel.

Haredi army service took center stage again this week when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he would not seek a five-year extension of the Tal Law but would allow the Israeli Knesset to vote on the issue.

The law, named after retired Supreme Court justice Tzvi Tal and enacted in 2002 under then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, allows full-time yeshiva students to delay their army service until age 23. At that time, students either can continue studying full time, do a shortened 16 months of army service (instead of three years) or a year of national service. Afterward, they may choose to join the workforce.

“The Tal Law has failed,” said Yehuda Ben Meir of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies. “It has not been able to wean the community off the idea of not serving and not working. There is now a third generation that believes this is the way they should live.”

Until the Tal Law, haredim were theoretically draftable unless they were full-time Torah students. Opposition to joining the army meant that tens of thousands of young men were staying full time in yeshiva just to avoid army service. Theoretically the men were subject to the draft if they left the yeshiva before age 40, but practically they could leave the yeshiva after turning 30.

The Tal Law was intended to get the students out of the yeshivas, into the army briefly and then into the workforce, solving a problematic cycle.

It hasn’t turned out as its proponents had hoped.

Only a small number of haredi Israelis have joined the army, though the numbers are increasing slightly. According to Israel Defense Forces figures, 1,282 haredi men enlisted in the army in 2011, up from 898 in 2010 and 729 in 2011. Most of them served in special male haredi units, where the kashrut standards are higher and there is no mixing with women.

But the vast majority of haredi men have stayed in the yeshiva, and their rabbis continue to discourage serving in the army. The opposition is largely ideological. Haredi leaders worry that the army will open up a path to lax Jewish observance. Some haredi sects are anti-Zionist, and those that support the state believe that Torah study is a legitimate alternative way of contributing to Israel’s security by sustaining the state spiritually.

“Jews are fighting this war on many fronts, and learning Torah is also fighting a war,” said Rabbi Shimon Hurwitz of the Aish Hatorah yeshiva. “A hundred years ago Teddy Roosevelt said, ‘To educate a person in his mind and not his morals is to educate a menace to society.’ Torah study teaches morality.”

Hurwitz said some staff and students at his yeshiva do serve in the army. His main objection to his students joining the army is the difficulty in maintaining strict levels of Jewish observance, he said.

“We tell the students that there’s a lot of peer pressure not to be religious and it’s very difficult to stand against that,” the rabbi said. “We don’t want them to lose something valuable in terms of their personal and spiritual growth.”

Resentment against haredi army exemptions from Israelis who do serve in the army — both secular and Modern Orthodox — is growing.

“Social justice begins with equally sharing the national burden and army service,” opposition leader Tzipi Livni told reporters this week. “This is a battle for everyone who believes in Zionism and who wants to live in this country.”

The Tal Law was passed initially for five years and extended in 2007. Now it’s up for another renewal, and many Israelis say the law has failed and should be canceled. The Israeli Cabinet was supposed to vote on the law this week, but Netanyahu said he will leave it for the Knesset to decide, insulating himself from expected haredi protests if the law is not extended.

The fight against extending the law is being spearheaded by the same group of Israelis who were behind last summer’s protests against the cost of living in Israel.

They are working middle-class Israelis who serve in the army and find it difficult to make ends meet. They believe they are shouldering an unfair amount of the national burden both in paying taxes and in army service. They say they feel like “friars,” or suckers, something to which Israelis have an inborn aversion.

This week, a group of these Israelis formed a “sucker’s encampment” to campaign against renewing the Tal Law.

“We want the government to legislate a law that requires mandatory service, army or civilian, from everyone — Jews, Arabs, religious and secular,” activist Boaz Nol told reporters.

The Tal Law seems likely to be extended for at least a year, although Barak, now defense minister, insists he will not back it for more than another year. At the same time, the haredi political parties have enormous power in the current coalition. The Sephardic Orthodox Shas Party has threatened to pull out of the government if the law is not extended.

It seems unlikely that the haredi community will join the army in large numbers anytime soon.

“The government didn’t correctly estimate the cultural gap between the haredim and the mere idea of military service,” said Zeev Lerer, a professor on gender and organization at Tel Aviv University. “The Tal Law failed and it will continue to fail. It will take a long and deep revolution to incorporate the idea of military service.”

Even if haredim did decide to join the army en masse, it’s not clear that the army is prepared to utilize them. On one hand, there is a growing manpower shortage. At the same time, the army has to make special accommodations for them, such as organizing all-male units and providing glatt kosher food.

“It really is more of a symbolic issue,” Lerer said. “As the army has become more dependent on women serving, often in more combat roles, I don’t see how they can absorb the haredim. It would mean a complete change in the identity of the army.”

Some analysts say that if the government decides that it is important enough for the state, haredim evenutally could be integrated into the army.

“You would have a tremendous social crisis, and many of the rabbis would tell their students to go to prison rather than serve in the army,” said Ben Meir. “But they don’t really want to go to prison.

“It can be done, perhaps. But not with this government and this coalition.”

Vered Otmy

Four Israeli artists will spend almost two weeks in Tucson next month, giving workshops and talking about their experiences as artists living in Israel.

“This amazing ‘partnership 2gether’ project, sponsored by the Jewish Agency for Israel, Jewish Federations of North America and our local TIPS (Tucson, Israel, Phoenix, Seattle) committee, helps bring people from Israel and Tucson together,” says Guy Gelbart, director of the Weintraub Israel Center. “It fosters our sense of peoplehood and mutual responsibility by creating real friendships and deeper cultural connections. This human touch, the real faces and real people relationship, is what makes this visit so exciting.”

The artists will work with groups from various organizations, including Tucson Hebrew Academy, Handmaker Jewish Services for the Aging and Howenstine Magnet High School. They also will be the special guests at the Israel Center’s “Tu B’Shevat Arty Party” on Thursday, Feb. 9, from 5-6:30 p.m. at the Tucson Jewish Community Center, where they will teach crafts for children.

Vered Otmy, who has lived on Moshav Geha for the last 23 years, specializes in

papier-maché. Her works have been displayed in Tel Aviv, London, New York and Chicago and most recently in Belgium and France.

Saraleh Haitman also lives on Moshav Geha and studied art at the Oranim Kibbutz Seminar. She works in ceramics, paint, jewelry and sculpture, and has taught art, communications and film at Israeli schools and colleges.

Yehudit Orinsky, from Moshav Kochav Michael, is originally from Minneapolis. After volunteering on a kibbutz, she made aliyah 40 years ago. Orinsky studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Her specialty is mosaics. She has taught adults and children and also trains art teachers.

Ada Bouganim

Ada Bouganim, who has lived in Nitzan Aleph for the last 13 years, grew up in Kibbutz Yavne. She has travelled through Asia and Australia and lived for a short while in Los Angeles, where she worked as an interior designer. She now designs events and helps participants design and construct props and decorations.

The Tu B’Shevat Arty Party, cosponsored by Tucson Hebrew Academy, will be held in the JCC’s Heritage Room and Sculpture Garden. Admission is $5 per child under 12. For more information about the artists’ visit, contact. Jennifer Ferrell at 577-9393, ext. 133 or IsraelCen ter@jfsa.org.

On a JFSA mission in 2006, Deborah Kay visits a Kiryat Malachi program for Ethiopian mothers and children

Thousands of protesters demonstrated in Jerusalem Jan. 18 against racism and discrimination toward Ethiopians in Israel.

Some 5,000 protesters marched in front of the Knesset before proceeding to Zion Square for a rally. They carried signs reading “Blacks and Whites — We’re all Equal,” “Social Justice” and “Stop racism.”

One protest organizer, college student Mulet Araro, 26, began walking Jan. 18 from his southern Israel home in Kiryat Malachi to meet the protesters in Jerusalem.

The protest came a week after hundreds of Israelis of Ethiopian descent and their supporters demonstrated in Kiryat Malachi against housing discrimination. A Kiryat Malachi neighborhood council reportedly signed residents to a contract committing that they would not rent or sell to Ethiopian Israelis.

“No such documents have ever been produced,” says Dina Tanners, a member of the TIPS (Tucson, Israel, Phoenix, Seattle) partnership from Seattle who, along with other committee members, spoke to several Kiryat Malachi residents last week. Dvora Attal, a member of the TIPS steering committee who lives near the buildings in question, reported that two people told the Israeli media they would never sell to Ethiopian Israelis, but no one else has publicly agreed with them.

“In truth, three Ethiopian Israeli families live in those buildings,” Tanners said in an e-mail, adding that former mayor of Kiryat Malachi Moshe “Shimi” Shimon, who lives in one of the buildings and runs a nonprofit program for the handicapped, “would never condone such discrimination.”

“Unfortunately, it looks like the media has shaped the news and has definitely harmed the reputation of Kiryat Malachi,” says Tanners. According to the Kiryat Malachi residents she spoke with, at a recent rally in the city in support of the rights of Ethiopian Israelis attended by “over 500 people of all colors,” media representatives refused to photograph a mixed-race group of teenage girls, saying they just wanted photos of the Ethiopians.

Earlier this month, she added, the city of Kiryat Malachi held a special program honoring its Ethiopian Israeli residents who had arrived via Operation Solomon. “A representative of the Ministry of Absorption spoke and said that Kiryat Malachi could be an example for all the country of how to absorb new immigrants from Ethiopia,” she says.

The focus of the demonstrations “is now widening and people are talking about this as a struggle for justice and a better society for Israel,” says Tanners. “The discussion is definitely good, but the way it began, based on the faulty information of two very biased people, was unfortunate.”

In an e-mail, Ira Kerem, the TIPS representative in Israel, said “while there is much goodwill” between veteran Kiryat Malachi residents and Ethiopian immigrants, prejudice does exist. The partnership, he says, hopes to work with Ethiopian leaders and municipal authorities to “promote mutual respect and understanding.”

“The Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona,” he notes, ìhas been the leading federation in funding programs to assist and empower the Ethiopian population in Kiryat Malachi. One simple program that provides the local welfare department with an experienced Ethiopian family and youth counselor has resulted in the saving of marriages and even lives. The Ethiopian community owes a debt of thanks to the Jewish community of Tucson. Together we will investigate how we can continue to improve the situation in Kiryat Malachi.”

AJP Executive Editor Phyllis Braun contributed to this article from JTA.

One made the cut of five finalists, but a Cedar film has yet to capture a golden statuette. In fact, no Israeli film has ever won an Oscar.

Cedar and many of his countrymen are hoping that his fourth entry, “Footnote,” will prove to be the charm when nominations for the 84th Academy Awards were announced on Jan. 24.

Last year was the first in memory that no domestic or foreign film dealing with the Holocaust or the Nazi era was entered in any Oscars category. On that basis, I predicted that the “Schindler’s List” and “Inglourious Basterds” era had passed and that the historical genre would deal with more recent conflicts and genocides.

It took only a year to prove the prophecy wrong with Poland’s entry this year, “In Darkness.” The movie’s settings and emotions are as lightless as the underground sewers of Lvov, where a dozen Jewish men, women and children hid for 14 months during the German occupation of Poland. Their unlikely protector was a rough-hewn Polish sewage worker and part-time thief who knew all the hiding places in the underground system — it’s where he worked and stashed his loot.

At the helm of “In Darkness” is the superb Polish director Agnieszka Holland (“Europa, Europa”), whose forte is to delineate the shades of the human character. As in her other works, the strengths and weakness of the victims, heroes, villains and bystanders vary with time and circumstance.

“I have always been intrigued by the contradictions and extremes in human nature,” she said in a phone interview. “I wonder at how fragile and how strong we are, how evil and irrational under some conditions, and how brave and compassionate at other times.”

With “Footnote,” Cedar centers on the rivalry between two Talmudic scholars who also are father and son. It’s a sharp contrast from the New York native’s previous film, “Beaufort,” a war film with an anti-war message.

“What could be more boring?” I can hear a younger audience moan about “Footnote.” But in the hands of Cedar, 43, the film has more tension per frame than a gun-toting action picture or apocalyptic sci-fi epic.

Both Eliezer and Uriel Shkolnik, father and son, are shining lights in the Department of Talmudic Studies of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where rivalries are fierce. To the two Shkolnik philologists, the stakes in their lifelong studies of the authenticity and meaning of each word in different Talmudic versions and editions are far higher than the struggles of warring countries or the rise and fall of national economies.

The director, himself the son of renowned Hebrew University biochemist Howard Cedar, firmly rejects the assumption that the protagonists resemble his family or their relationships.

“The film’s Talmudists in no way represent my father and myself,” said the younger Cedar, who as an Orthodox Jew is a rarity among Tel Aviv filmmakers. “Actually, their relationship is my nightmare, not my reality.”

Yet “Footnote” explores the balance between uncompromising honesty and family relationships.

“What if my son becomes a more successful director than I am, but makes movies that I hate?” asks Cedar, who explored the gulf between observant and secular Israelis in his first two films, “In Time of Favor” and “Campfire.” “Will I tell him how I really feel or preserve family harmony?”

On a national scale, the insistence on one’s absolute truth contributes to civic violence in Israel, Cedar believes. “We now have a generation that considers ‘compromise’ a bad word, and social harmony has been taken hostage by people who claim to know the absolute truth,” he said.

Although “Footnote” has not yet been released in American theaters, it has received favorable reviews. At the Cannes Film Festival, “Footnote” was awarded the top prize for best screenplay, and in the United States the National Board of Reviews of Motion Pictures placed the film among the five top foreign-language features.

But the Oscar competition in the foreign-language category is rough and the Academy Awards selection committee is widely considered unpredictable, if not erratic.

The Netherlands’ entry, “Sonny Boy,” tells the actual story of two unlikely rescuers, a middle-aged Dutch housewife who runs off with and marries a black Surinamese student more than 20 years her junior. Under the German occupation they hide several Jews in their home. Similar to Anne Frank’s fate, the couple is betrayed and arrested, and they die in captivity.

One trend among foreign film producers is the growing emphasis on such themes as internal conflicts, problems of immigrants and life under the former Soviet occupation of Eastern European countries. Examples are films from Bosnia and Ireland (ethnic cleansing), Colombia (guerrillas vs. the military), the Czech Republic (expulsion of ethnic Germans after World War II), Estonia (Soviet army deserter returns), Kazakhstan (Soviets invade Afghanistan), Italy and Romania (illegal immigrants) and Lebanon (Christian-Muslim conflict).

While many colonials this side of the Atlantic consider the King’s English as a foreign language, this year the United Kingdom actually submitted an entry in the foreign-language category. The film “Patagonia” is set in a Welsh settlement in southern Argentina, and the characters speak Welsh and Spanish.

In both the United States and Europe, the critical favorite is the Iranian entry, “A Separation,” which has won a string of awards at international film festivals.

The film by Asghar Farhadi masterfully combines an easily recognizable situation — an impending divorce in an upper-middle-class family — with the strange atmosphere, pieties and judicial proceedings of an unfamiliar society.

The Oscars will be presented Feb. 26.

When I read about young Jewish immigrant authors from the former Soviet Union, I become conscious of my privileges as a native-born American. But when I read interviews with certain American-born Jewish writers my age, I become aware of my closeness to the immigrant experience. And when I hear these writers talk about how anti-Semitism is irrelevant to “our generation,” I am astonished. When I moved from Brooklyn at the age of nine to a non-Jewish suburb, I discovered country clubs, dancing lessons — and the fact that they excluded me as a Jew.

But these issues don’t get to the heart of the thinking that separates me most from my ostensible peers. That heart is Israel.

In a 2009 Forward column titled “How I’m Losing My Love for Israel,” author Jay Michaelson reported, “It has become simply exhausting. . . . My love of Israel has turned into a series of equivocations,” like, “’I do not support the expansion of settlements, but the Palestinians bear primary responsibility for the collapse of the peace process in 1999.’” Michaelson went on: “I admit that my exhaustion is exacerbated because, in my social circles, supporting Israel is like supporting segregation.” But, he explained, “I don’t think advocates of Israel understand exactly how bad the situation is . . . in liberal or leftist social-political circles.”

I have more than a passing acquaintance with Michaelson’s “liberal or leftist social-political circles.” He is right. The situation there is bad. As open-minded as these “circles” claim to be, they are as quick as their analogues at the other end of the spectrum to judge and scorn. Like Jay Michaelson, I find it exhausting.

But unlike Michaelson, when forced to choose sides, I choose Israel. Unfortunately, for me, choosing Israel often means the opposite of engaging. Because I cannot find a juste milieu, I bow out. I exit.

In 2006 I resigned from the National Book Critics Circle, whose blog had become a mouthpiece for criticizing Israel. In 2009 I unsubscribed from a women’s poetry listserv because it had become a reliable source of condemnation for Operation Cast Lead. I made my choices after speaking up—and receiving abuse online and off. Rarely, another writer defended me. Slightly more often, I received appreciative private emails.

It wasn’t enough. It still isn’t.

These days, my objections are even quieter — for example, unfollowing writers whose Tweets and Facebook posts keep condemning Israel for enforcing the Gaza blockade (which even the UN deems legal). Recently I declined to join the writers, many Jewish, who signed an “Occupy Writers” manifesto supporting “the Occupy movement around the world” — a movement that may include more episodes like “Occupy Boston Occupies the Israeli Consulate.”

And too many Jewish writers go out of their way to broadcast their criticisms. There was a time this year when you could barely avoid pieces like Allison Benedikt’s “Life After Zionist Summer Camp” or Kiera Feldman’s “The Romance of Birthright Israel.” Gil Troy described these essays in the Jerusalem Post as resembling 17th-century “captivity narratives:” After being “force-fed diets of Zionist folk tunes” and “hunkalicious Israeli soldiers,” the writers “courageously flee their brainwashing . . . rejecting Israel while embracing Palestinians, about whom they claim they never were taught.”

But most of my literary acquaintances haven’t read Gil Troy: They consider the Jerusalem Post more “biased” than, say, The Nation, where Feldman’s piece appeared. To suggest that the Jerusalem Post or Commentary merits attention is like recommending Fox News over MSNBC. (But it doesn’t help when Commentary’s chief literary blogger derides the Occupy Writers petition as a “useful list of useful idiots.”)

I know Israel isn’t perfect. I will listen to criticisms arising from a sincere concern for Israel’s health and security. I pause whenever journalist Jeffrey Goldberg criticizes misguided Israeli policy; he writes about Israel with all his heart, soul, and might.

I wish I could do the same. My responses might not remain so visceral. I wouldn’t have to resign and unsubscribe so often. Since I am too old for most programs that provide Israel advocacy training, I was delighted to hear that a version of Write On for Israel would be offered for older writers — then disappointed to learn it would be delayed.

But I’ll keep looking. There has to be a place between the diatribes on the National Book Critics Circle blog and the sometimes equally inflammatory responses from the other end of the spectrum. There has to be a juste milieu.

(This article was first published by Jewish Ideas Daily (www.jewishideasdaily.com) and is reprinted with permission.)

Let’s start with the buses. In the late 1990s, at the request of some Haredim, the Transportation Ministry created bus lines, serving ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods and cities, on which women would enter from and sit in the back, on an officially “voluntary” basis. They were deemed legally permissible because Israeli law allows discrimination when it is necessary to provide access to public services and does not harm the common weal. All the fundamental questions (necessary? common weal?) were left wide open.

Next, Beit Shemesh, which has attracted growing numbers of Israeli Haredim. They have joined the traditional but religiously moderate Mizrahim who arrived when it was a hardscrabble development town and the American Modern Orthodox, who began arriving in the 1980s. In Beit Shemesh, the ultra-Orthodox urban space abuts dissenting populations, religious Zionists as well as American Haredim who are changing Israeli ultra-Orthodoxy, both anathema to the zealots.

Israel’s Haredim are increasing (some predict they will be in the majority by 2030) and are no longer an enclave.  Far from monolithic, they have they have their own internal kulturkampfen Haredi women have made extraordinary educational and occupational strides. The response by some has been to send them, literally, to the back of the bus—and push them out of view elsewhere.

The Haredi-controlled Health Ministry has forbidden women to appear at ceremonies honoring these same women. There have been attempts to enforce separate hours for men and women in government offices. It took a petition to the High Court to get women candidates’ campaign posters onto Jerusalem’s buses. In conversation and on Haredi websites, many Haredim oppose forcible segregation and the accompanying violence. But they have almost no collective voice and no support from Haredi leadership.

The recent furors over women’s singing in the Army come from a less obvious direction. Increasing numbers of IDF soldiers and officers are so-called “Hardali” (Haredi Dati Leumi). Unlike Haredim, they participate in the military and favor the idea of the Jewish state — but reject its integration into Western culture. One element of their program is sexual modesty, or tsniut — not only to prevent the public expression of sexuality, but also as a marker of national identity and a means of channeling romanticism in the direction of the sacred.

Both Haredi and Hardali countercultures seek to maintain the crucial gender divide while dissolving Israeli society’s boundaries between public and private, religious and mundane. Indeed, the surrounding Israeli society has been a key, if silent, player here.

Haredim and Hardalim seeking an ideology and identity distinct from the surrounding society find in gender a powerful source of difference, and their excesses are a reaction to the freewheeling sexuality of secular Israel, whose socio-cultural norms are more European than American. Moreover, secular politicians and secular Israel at large have until recently been thunderingly indifferent. These battles have been waged, in court and elsewhere, by lonely groups of feminists, Reform Jews, and moderate religious Zionists. They have been met with incomprehension by journalists, politicians, and other secular elites who see the segregated bus lines simply as political spoils, the price of coalition politics, and do not understand that the constitution of Israeli public space and civil society is at stake.

In Israel’s early decades, the Mapai Labor Zionist establishment constituted both the state’s ruling body and its civic-religious center. Mapai, with its flaws, offered a governing ethos and a plausible interpretation of Jewish history and identity. Its political eclipse beginning in the 1970s, then its fissile social and cultural collapse in the ensuing decades, left Israeli society increasingly fragmented. One casualty has been the idea of a public, civic space, open to and shared equally by all. Major political parties lay less claim than before to representing the entire public and avowedly sectoral parties are growing.

In that respect, the public outcry galvanized by the broadcast of ultra-Orthodox thugs tormenting Naama Margolese is of a piece with last summer’s economic protests. In both cases, many people, particularly in Israeli middle-class society, who could choose to live elsewhere but who serve in the army, pay taxes, and still feel Zionism in their bones, have shown that they feel the common weal has been sold off in pieces—and that they want it back.

Americans may be astonished that we need to debate whether women should sit in the back of the bus. But in Israel, this debate, unwelcome as it is, can still be a good thing. Proponents of Israeli civil society, religious and secular, must demonstrate that they can mount a principled defense of their core values and their conception of the public sphere.

(This article was first published by Jewish Ideas Daily (www.jewishideasdaily.com) and is reprinted with permission.)

Filipinos light Chanukah candles in their home in South Tel Aviv on Nov. 24, 2010 in advance of the Jewish holiday. (Miriam Alster/FLASH90/JTA)

TEL AVIV (JTA) — With eyes closed, it would have been difficult to guess that the female voice with the amazing range singing a Hebrew classic was a shy-looking, 11-year-old Filipina.

But there was Kathleen Eligado performing Miri Aloni’s “Ballad of Hedva and Shlomik” before a prime-time television audience of a million Israelis. Eligado, born in Israel to Filipino migrant worker parents, is one of the stars of the popular Israeli show “Music School,” a kind of “American Idol” for kids, finishing the season in second place.

Her performance gave new meaning to the quintessentially Israeli song. Lyrics written to describe the culture shock of leaving the kibbutz for the city — “I’m alone in a strange city, as if I have no choice” — seemed in Eligado’s rendition to be the blues of a Third World immigrant who ends up in Tel Aviv.

Yet for Eligado and thousands of other children of foreign workers from the Philippines and elsewhere, Israel is now home — for many, the only home they have ever known. Some came to Israel as children; others were born in the country. Tel Aviv alone is home to an estimated 3,600 children of foreign workers and asylum seekers, according to the city’s municipality data.

As they integrate into Israeli society, the children of foreign workers are crafting identities that are similar yet distinct from those of the country’s Jewish majority.

Of all the nationalities represented among migrant workers, Filipinos are the quickest to integrate, said Tamar Schwartz, a social worker at Mesila Aid and Information Center for the Foreign Community in Tel Aviv.

“Compared to other migrants, Filipinos usually speak articulate English, often are well-educated and have a strong family ethic that emphasizes discipline and respect for elders,” Schwartz said. “And incidents of child abuse are low. As a result, there is less of a gap between them and Israeli society, which makes it easier for them to integrate.”

But while Filipinos excel at integrating into Israeli society, the biggest challenge is avoiding deportation.

In 2006, under pressure from advocacy groups, the Israeli government — in what was billed as a one-time-only measure — provided about 900 children with permanent residency. Their close relatives — parents and siblings — received temporary residency, which would become permanent only after the children served in the Israel Defense Forces.

Among the children who received permanent residency in ’06 is Jewellri Joy, 18, now serving in the IDF Police Corps. Like many children of foreign workers living in Tel Aviv, the Israeli-born Joy, whose mother is from the Philippines and whose father is from Thailand, attended the Bialik-Rogozin School.

Most of her fellow students were children of foreign workers and asylum seekers, along with immigrants from Ethiopia or the former Soviet Union and a few native Israelis. Still, Joy said that growing up in south Tel Aviv made her “totally” Israeli.

While her family attends Mass at St. Anthony’s Church in Jaffa and celebrates Christian holidays, not Jewish ones, she said she would have no problem dating or marrying an Israeli Jew. Joy said that one of the main reasons she enlisted in the IDF was to provide her family with permanent residency.

In 2010, the Israeli government approved the recommendations of an interministerial committee to provide residency to an additional group of children and their families. To qualify, the child had to speak fluent Hebrew and be enrolled in the first through 12th grades of a state school during the 2010-11 school year. The child’s parents had to have entered Israel legally, even if they had since overstayed their work permit.

About 800 children were said to have met the criteria, but they are still waiting to receive their residency status. About 400 children were rejected and thus slated for deportation.

Unlike Joy, the majority of children of foreign workers have yet to receive any sort of legal residency status, Schwartz said.

Janelle Pancho, 16, born in Israel to Filipino parents, wanted to join her 11th-grade classmates at Herzliya’s Harishonim High School on a trip to Poland to visit Auschwitz. But without residency status, she cannot leave the country.

“I went to the local Interior Ministry office to get a special visa, but the clerk rejected my request,” Pancho recalled. “Then she asked, ‘Why haven’t you been expelled from the country?’ ”

Pancho said she thought that she had not received residency because of a bureaucratic mix-up.

Unlike children of migrants in south Tel Aviv, Pancho attended schools where the vast majority of her fellow students were Jewish Israelis.

“Even though I am not Jewish, I feel a part of it,” she said. “I’ve been invited over to my friends’ houses for Shabbat and Jewish holidays. And we even celebrate Passover at home, though not the way it is supposed to be done.”

But without residency status, Pancho will not be able to undergo her peers’ most important rite of passage — army service.

“All of my friends are beginning to get letters from the IDF to prepare for the first stage of draft. But I haven’t,” she said.

Pancho said she respected the Israelis’ desire to maintain a strong Jewish majority in Israel.

“I understand that this is supposed to be a Jewish state and that I am Christian,” she said. “But my parents came to this country as guests. They came to work. They have a right to establish a family. And there was nothing in the law that said that they were not allowed to.”

A survey conducted in November 2010 by Leah Ahdut and Karin Amit of the Ruppin Academic Center’s Institute for Immigration & Social Integration found that 49.5 percent of Israelis said they were in favor of giving citizenship to migrant workers’ children born in Israel while 42.5 percent said they were opposed. Arab, left-wing, secular or university-educated Israelis were more in favor. Religious and haredi Orthodox Israelis were less supportive.

But even after they have received citizenship, completed IDF service and seemingly integrated into Israeli society, some Filipinos still grapple with their split identity.

M., 24, fell in love with an Israeli Jew while serving in the IDF — first as an officer manager for a high-ranking officer and later as a noncommissioned officer tracking down soldiers who went AWOL.

“I hid it from my mother for a year,” said M., who requested anonymity to avoid hurting her mother, who is a devout Catholic.

“When my mom found out she kicked me out of the house,” she said.

Now M., who owns a women’s apparel boutique in an affluent town that is cultural light years from where she grew up in south Tel Aviv, lives with her boyfriend’s family.

“They have accepted me completely, as though I were a member of the family,” she said.

M. said that she celebrated Chanukah with her boyfriend and his family, but they also bought a Christmas tree. She cooked traditional Filipino Christmas foods like leche flan and pancit, a type of noodles that symbolizes long life.

“I also made them Siopao — Chinese buns — but I filled them with chicken instead of pork,” she said. “My boyfriend and his family are Jewish, you know.”

Yair Lapid, alongtime television anchor, is quitting journalism to enter politics. (Yair Lapid's official Facebook page)

JERUSALEM (JTA) — One of the big open questions after Israel’s social protests last summer was whether or not the one-time mass movement would be able to translate its newfound clout into lasting political power.

During the weeks of protests and for months afterward, none of Israel’s political parties seemed able to capture the demonstrators’ voice or allegiances.

But that could change with the entry into politics of one of Israel’s most popular journalists and TV personalities, Yair Lapid, son of the late Shinui Party leader Yosef “Tommy” Lapid, who also was a journalist.

Polls show that the younger Lapid, who is expected to form a new centrist secular political party, could receive up to 20 seats in Israel’s 120-seat Knesset, making him a potent political force.

While Lapid has refused to give interviews since his Jan. 8 announcement, a column he penned in Israel’s daily Yediot Achronot offered a glimpse of what his platform will be: “Where’s the money?”

“This is the big question asked by Israel’s middle class, the same sector on whose behalf I’m going into politics,” Lapid wrote. “Where’s the money? Why is it that the productive sector, which pays taxes, fulfills its duties, performs reserve service and carries the entire country on its back, doesn’t see the money?”

Lapid’s political gambit constitutes an assault on Israel’s politically powerful haredi Orthodox minority at a time of heightened tensions between secular and haredi Israelis. In his column, Lapid had harsh words for haredim, few of whom serve in the army but many of whom are recipients of government largesse.

“For many years now, the State of Israel has been subjugated to extortionist, shameless interest groups, some of them non-Zionist even, which misuse our distorted system of government in order to rob the middle class of its money,” wrote Lapid, who for years has flirted with entering politics.

A day after Lapid resigned from his job as anchorman of Israel’s Channel Two Friday night news magazine to prepare for his run for Knesset, another well-known Israeli, Noam Shalit, declared that he also would be a candidate for Knesset.

Shalit, who became a household name in the five-year effort to free his soldier son, Gilad, from Hamas captivity, will run on the Labor Party list. The soft-spoken Shalit said he wants to give something back to the country that worked so hard to free his son.

Israel’s next elections are scheduled to take place in early 2013, but a vote could come sooner if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls for new elections or if the current governing coalition falls.

In any case, Lapid’s run could dramatically change the Israeli political game, some analysts say.

“This is potentially an explosive transformation,” said Rabbi Uri Regev, the director of Hiddush, an organization that promotes religious freedom in Israel.

A poll conducted by Hiddush found that 43 percent of the general Israeli public and 55 percent of the secular public welcomes Lapid’s entry into politics. One-third of the respondents said they would seriously consider voting for Lapid whether he forms a new party or joins an established one.

“This may be the beginning of the end of the dominion of the haredi parties,” Regev said.

But other analysts said Lapid simply will split the center and left-wing vote even further because he will be unable to make inroads into the right-religious bloc headed by Netanyahu.

“This could galvanize the same 20 to 30 seats that belong to this middle-class, secular, mostly Ashkenazi agenda,” said Guy Be-Porat, a professor of public policy at Ben-Gurion University. “If you have four parties competing for the same votes, even if you divide it differently, it’s still the same.”

Ben-Porat said that unless Lapid can appeal to the center-right Likud, Sephardic and Orthodox voters, there will be no change in Israel’s political constellation.

Efforts to form a secular, centrist party have been tried.

Lapid’s father led Shinui to an impressive 15 seats in the 2003 elections. Shinui promised the public secular marriage and to sharply cut subsidies to haredim. Neither happened, and by 2006 Shinui had split into a coalition of smaller parties, none of which have made it into the Knesset.

Lapid hopes that by tapping into last summer’s social protest movement he can ride an emerging political wave into the Knesset.

Last summer’s protests, which brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis into the streets, focused on the high costs of living in Israel, particularly for young families. Netanyahu responded by forming a government committee led by economist Manuel Trajtenberg to suggest changes to Israel’s tax code, housing practices and social welfare system.

Several of those recommendations have become law, including increases in the marginal tax and corporate tax rates, and the extension of free child education to Israeli children beginning at age 3.

Part of Lapid’s appeal is that he is not a politician. He made the jump from journalism after the Knesset introduced a bill that would have required journalists to take a six-month “cooling-off period” between leaving journalism and entering politics; it was dubbed the Lapid Law. Lapid made his announcement before the law was finalized, and the measure has since been dropped.

Shalit’s entry into politics is expected to make less of a splash.

“After years of public struggle, during which I got to know Israeli society in depth in all its beauty and values, I decided to enter public activity in order to serve the public and be in a position where I can influence the character of Israeli society,” Shalit said. “The Labor Party is a social-democratic party that strives for peace, which is why it is my natural home. I believe that under the leadership of Shelly Yachimovich, Labor can lead important measures for Israeli society.”

Shalit’s announcement was greeted with mixed reactions. Some criticized Shalit for using his son’s captivity as a springboard for entering politics, while others said he could bring a welcome calm to the Knesset.

“Politics is about serving the people, and I believe him when he says he wants to serve,” said Professor Gideon Rahat of Hebrew University and the Israel Democracy Institute. “It’s good that good people are coming into politics.”

Rahat criticized Lapid for trying to start his own party rather than joining an existing centrist party, such as Kadima, which Ariel Sharon formed in 2005 as a centrist breakaway from Likud.

“We’ve seen these ‘flash’ parties come and go,” Rahat said. “They come and say the system is corrupt and they want to change it. But then either they disappear or collapse or split or become corrupt.”

Kadima, which is the Knesset’s largest faction with 28 seats — one more than Likud — remains an exception, though polls show Kadima would lose its leading position if elections were held today.

Several Israeli analysts said Lapid might have more impact if he challenges Tzipi Livni for Kadima’s leadership rather than striking out on his own.

U.S. and Israeli officials confirmed to JTA over the weekend that they had delayed until the second half of 2012 what was to have been the largest-ever joint anti-missile exercise, Austere Challenge 12.

Speaking off the record, officials in the United States and Israel confirmed published reports that Iran factored into the decision. But just how Iran factored in they would not say, and they insisted that the overriding factor had to do with preparedness for the exercise and Israeli budgetary concerns.

A Pentagon spokesman, Capt. John Kirby, said in an e-mail that the exercise was canceled for routine reasons of wanting “optimum participation” by both sides.

“It is not at all uncommon for routine exercises to be postponed,” Kirby said. “There were a variety of factors at play in this case, but in general, leaders from both sides believe that optimum participation by all units is best achieved later in the year. We remain dedicated to this exercise and naturally want it to be as robust and as productive as it can be.”

On background, Israeli and U.S. officials said that “optimum conditions” had to do with defense spending, now the subject of a fierce debate in Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under pressure, after a summer of protests, to increase social safety net spending.

In October, Netanyahu said he would cut defense spending to fund social spending, but last week he reversed course, hiking defense allocations by $700 million.

The fluctuating positions have created uncertainty in Israel’s defense establishment, and U.S. officials confirmed an account originally reported by Laura Rozen of Yahoo News that it was Defense Minister Ehud Barak who requested the delay in December.

Critics of the Obama administration were not buying it, insisting that the delay revealed a fissure between President Obama and Netanyahu over how to handle Iran. Some suggested that the Obama administration feared the joint exercise would further ratchet up tensions with Iran.

Danielle Pletka, vice president of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said the announcement fit into a pattern of what she depicted as the Obama administration’s overly cautious approach to Iran’s aggression, including its threats to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, which would cut off much of the West’s oil supply.

“Now they cancel these exercises with the Israelis and make the Israelis say they asked for it,” she said. “For the Iranians there is only one message here. That is: ‘Our tactics are working!’ ”

One Israeli report, on the country’s Channel 2, quoted unnamed Israeli officials as saying that it was the U.S. that requested the postponement, although U.S. officials and other Israelis have pushed back, insisting that it was Israel that made the request.

Pentagon officials reached out to journalists Tuesday to reinforce their claim that it was Israel, not the United States, that requested the delay. According to an unnamed senior U.S. defense official cited by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Barak requested to cancel the exercise because he feared the Israeli military lacked the resources to carry it out effectively.

The official said that U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta objected, fearing that it would send Iran a signal that Israel and the United States were wavering.

“Panetta’s initial reaction was, ‘I don’t want to take this off the calendar,’ ” Goldberg quoted the official as saying. Panetta, the official said, was unwilling to cancel the exercise but agreed to a postponement.

Still, speculation regarding the exercise’s postponement reflects worries over whether the United States and Israel are on the same page when it comes to Iran.

There have been reports that Obama is pressing Netanyahu not to strike Iran — or at least to notify the United States in advance of such a strike. More recently, the U.S. condemned last week’s assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist, a killing that many commentators suggest was carried out by the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency.

One theory circulating in the wake of the cancellation of the postponement of the anti-missile exercises is that Israel may be retreating from close defense cooperation, in part because of the U.S. pressure to coordinate on Iran.

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. joint military chiefs of staff, is due to arrive in Israel on Thursday and is expected to again press Israel not to strike Iran.

Eitan Barak, an assistant professor of international relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, suggested that Israel’s refusal to commit to notifying the U.S. in advance of any military plans “could be an exercise to employ pressure on the United States to urge it to act against Iran.”

He said that Israel has in the past ratcheted up its defensive posture as a means of pressuring the United States and the West to confront a regional threat. He noted that during the first Gulf War, in 1991, Israel pulled its missiles out of their silos after suffering a barrage of Iraqi Scud missiles. Israel was signaling impatience with the failure of allied forces to take out Scud missile launchers in western Iraq.

“Once the U.S. satellites detected the missiles, the United States took Israel seriously” and started hitting western Iraqi targets, the Hebrew University’s Barak said. “It was a clear signal, if you don’t do something, we will.”

Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born analyst who lives in Israel, said the announcement of the decision to delay the anti-missile exercise could as easily be spun as a tale of closer Israel-U.S. cooperation.

“The preference here is for a negotiated settlement,” Javedanfar said. “Nobody in Israel wants Iran to havea  nuclear bomb — this is one of the few nonpartisan issues — but we are also aware that the war with Iran could have far-reaching consequences, including our relationship with the United States.”

The decision to postpone a robust U.S.-Israel show of strength could be tied to signals that Iran is softening its position on negotiations over increasing the transparency of its nuclear program, he suggested. Western nations believe the program is aimed at building a bomb, while Iran insists it is peaceful.

Iran has invited inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit its facilities later this month, a key U.S. demand, and the Obama administration reportedly is considering a Turkish offer to broker new talks on making transparent Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

“The Israeli way of making Khameini sit with Obama is to make it clear all options are on the table,” Javedanfar said, referring to the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini. “The idea is to get Khameini to return to the table with a serious offer.”