Customer Reviews

Shut Up, I'm Talking: And Other Diplomacy Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government--A Memoir

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** AUTHOR'S NOTE **
"As I write this note, things don't look good in the Middle East. I'm not sure when you're reading this, but I assume that things still don't look good in the Middle East, because they never really do."
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The author Gregory Levey at the age of twenty-five-years-old and not even an Israeli citizen found himself sitting alone at the State of Israel's seat at the United Nations General Assembly. An important vote was about to take place, and he not only didn't know which way to vote on the resolution... he didn't even know what the resolution was!

This humorous and almost satirical yet somber situation was all set in motion innocently enough when Greg became bored in his second year of law school. The author being Jewish and a Canadian citizen going to school in New York decided to volunteer to serve in the Israeli army. After he signed up on-line for the army he still had a number of months ahead of him until he had to report to Israel. Unwilling to accept the monotonous months of waiting ahead he decided to apply for an internship at the Israeli Mission to the United Nations. What follows could provide enough fodder for a full season of hilarious sitcom material. As Greg followed up on his application, over and over again, without any positive results, he showed dogged determination and made yet another phone call to yet another person who told him to fax his resume directly to her. After still no response Greg gave up on the whole idea and left for Christmas break.

After he returned to New York in January he got a strange call from a man named Yaron from Israeli security. This led to many, many, phone calls with varying degrees of time between each clandestine call, with questions that ranged from "what side of the street did he live on?" to questions about the Jewish summer camp he attended as a child. Finally an interview was set up with Israeli Ambassador Mekel. The first thing the Ambassador said was: "You look perfect on paper, so there must be something wrong with you." During the interview the Ambassador told Greg there is no internship program but offered him a deputy speechwriter job on a part-time basis, because the regular speechwriter was going to be leaving and if everything went well he could take over fulltime. "Greg accepted the offer, but told him that as a Canadian, he was not eligible to work in the United States. The Ambassador shook his head before he even finished the sentence and said, "I can hire anyone I want. We'll just change your status from student to DIPLOMAT!" "So that was it. From the U.S. State Department's point of view, Greg was going to be an Israeli Diplomat, even though he wasn't an Israeli citizen." Greg had come in the hope of getting an internship and walked out as an Israeli Diplomat.

From there Greg starts writing speeches for Ambassador's in New York and gets noticed by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's staff in Israel, and as a favor writes a speech for the Prime Minister. While working in the Mission in New York he takes a vacation in Israel and takes a course in "combat firearms". He subsequently takes another vacation and goes to Israel and takes an "intelligence and counterintelligence" course, and as part of an assignment has to go undercover as "Joey Shmeltz". He then gets invited to come to Israel and work on Prime Minister Sharon's staff. From there on out the author provides a never before seen "outsider's" view of the "inside" of the tumultuous stress that Israeli's face daily as a people and as a nation with a smattering of rye humor along the way.

In his Author's Note, Gregory says that he wrote his tale of his failure (he doesn't call it that of course) in the service of the Israeli Government because "sometimes it's the comic details that best reflect the gravity of the larger picture." And he certainly wrote a hilarious, page-turner or a sad book. But it was sad for me at least because it was so obvious that Greg just didn't get it.

For years Greg worked for a country whose people and institutions are in profound transition. (And who are not at all sure they want to transform.) The transition is from a kibbutz-style country, a family; to a bureaucratized state with attendant civil institutions. From a big family where the cab driver gives the Prime Minister advice to a place where autonomous individuals take official rules and the arbitrary hierarchy those rules impose very seriously indeed. For years Greg worked (and even lived) in a place that only has the trappings of a bureaucracy but no actual bureaucracy--and for years he didn't see that.

At one point he tells his fiancée that Israel is a big family. But I never got the sense that he stopped to think what that might entail. In a family, you don't have a bureaucracy or rules. In a family, if a bunch of kids want a treat, they just stampede to the grown-up handing the treats out and the loudest ones get it first. In a family, if you want to get hired you don't follow formal protocol; you call someone. As Greg had to in the end call someone to get his job in the Mission.

But Israel, the state, can't just be a family. Because so much attention is directed at it, it is being forced to change. To become more bureaucratic. More like "a regular country". Or at least its civil institutions are undergoing that transition. It is a profound and painful transition--and one that many Israelis around Greg were not at all sure they wanted. That is why Israelis elected Ariel Sharon, a man renowned for his ability to do backward planning (i.e., decide on the goal he needs and on all the little steps needed to accomplish that goal) and that is why there was such a huge hole when Sharon was no longer there.

But Greg missed all that. He was too busy being frustrated; too busy being too young; too busy falling back on comfortable ideological assumptions. And so he failed to do the job he was hired to do: explain the improvisation-in-transition that is Israel to the rest of the world. The tale of his failure makes for a hilarious book that left me feeling very sad for this nice Jewish boy who takes rules so seriously. And when I finished the last page, I remembered that at the beginning of the book, Greg relates how Ambassador Mekel told him, "You look perfect on paper, so there must be something wrong with you."

There was. Greg was too young.

The author, probably because of his youth, shows consistently a superior and patronizing attitude.
Probably due to his "outsider" point of view, he generalizes and presents negative stereotypes from just a few personal unpleasant incidents.
If you read it for laughs or to gain some understanding of the complicated situation of the Middle East, you will be disappointed.
I was.

I could see why Greg Levey's book would be interesting to someone who hasn't spent much time in Israel and doesn't know much about the country. For someone who knows a little about the country, though, less than 25% of the book is particularly entertaining.

Much of the story is that Israelis are Israeli: simultaneously warm and rude, bureaucratic and disorganized, very serious about security and lax about everything else, and always always late. But you can find that out by walking into any Israeli government office to get a visa renewal or a tax exemption. Or from any of Efraim Kishon's books or films from the 1960s, which are far funnier. Levey tells many of the same anecdotes that everyone who has ever lived in Israel tells with humor, but he coats them in bitter outrage. Incidents are told in proportion to his irritation rather than humor: 3 pages cover a co-worker's obsession with baked potatoes, as if there were no eccentric co-workers outside Israel. Likewise "the worst person you'll ever meet" in Levey's eyes is an irresponsible and rude bureaucrat. Inshe allah that should be the worse person any of us ever meet.

Yes, we get it: Levey's sense of humor isn't good enough to allow him to tolerate the frustrations of Israel. He gives only one positive anecdote: workers donating part of their paychecks to help a co-worker with cancer whom none of them know.

Levey's experience taking security courses in Tel Aviv is a side of Israel that most people wouldn't have see, as are those seen from inside the government, though those are sparse. The best of those anecdotes are: Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom holding a meeting in his underwear and whose poor command of English necessitates that the sentences in his speeches be no longer than six words; Raanan Gissin telling Swedish diplomats the reason he was extremely late was that he had ordered from abroad a new pen and had to pick it up at the post office; ABBA's song Dancing Queen blasting on infinite repeat as Gissin did a media interview and drove on the sidewalk; nameless prime minister office bureaucrats leaking intentionally meaningless information to the press who struggle to decypher it.

The worst part of the book is the author's bitterness and ingratitude. At the beginning of the book Levey makes clear that Israel's informality and disorganization allowed him to be hired in the first place. Throughout the book, he interacts with high-ranking authorities and is repeatedly given opportunities beyond his rank and seniority, culminating with a relaxed and informal conversation with the prime minister who tries to find common ground with Levey to the point of asking if they have a mutual acquaintance. Instead of being touched by the informality of even the Prime Minister, Levey seems almost offended by the "tribal" nature of that question. Israel's informality gave him tremendous opportunities, and yet the book is unmercifully critical of the informality in virtually every respect in which the informality does not benefit him personally. The bottom line may simply be that Levey does not want to belong to a club that would have him as a member. He may not like it, but he belongs. I never heard of Levey before picking up this book at my public library's new books shelf, but I do know at least one person mentioned in his book from my college's Hillel and I'm sure that will be true for many readers.

Initially I wanted to write all about how Levey's political opinions seem knee-jerk, shallow, and naively one-sided, even when I agree with his conclusions, but that seems almost beside the point; the book isn't even good story-telling, much less political analysis. Like him, I favored the withdrawal from Gaza, but I'm surprised at his naivite to say that it was "the only hope for peace" and any opposition must be blinded by religious irrationality. As Kassam number 10,000 lands in Beer Sheva, it's now clear to everyone that there were strategic reasons to oppose withdrawal.

The book is mildly amusing. The author frequently repeats how crazy the Israeli Mission is, but offers few examples. There are a few oddballs (a person who periodically screams for no reason, or a secretary with no apparent work), but that hardly makes the place crazy.

I was pretty much fed-up with this exercise in self-aggrandizement by the time I hit this passage at the end of the book:

"There is a common type of conversation mockingly called 'Jewish Geography,' in which one Jewish person gives a name or a long list of names to another to see if there is any mutual acquaintance, on the implicit theory that somewhere in the matrix of interfaced Jewish relationships, the two are connected. This little game had always aggravated me; it seemed primitive and tribal, and vaguely to confirm certain anti-Semitic clichés."

If you, too, are aggravated by Jewish Geography or think that it affirms some anti-Semitic cliché, then maybe you'll like the rest of this book. For me, this passage only confirms what I grew to feel as I got further into the book: That the author, Mr. Levey, is an immature young man who had neither the background nor big picture appreciation for what he was doing.

Having purchased it with considerable skepticism, I read Levey's book almost at one go (the over-used "compulsive reading" is quite appropriate here). It is well written, insightful, and revelatory; and, in a certain way, quite sad. You might find it, as some Amazon customers have, "juvenile" or "patronizing". I have not, but, either way, if you're interested in the politics of the Middle East, it is well worth reading.

Although the book has a number of interesting anecdotes and those who have spent time in Israel can relate to some of the stories and characters described, Levey presents his entire experience in an extremely negative light and comes off as bitter, vindictive, and judgmental. He rarely describes any redeeming factors or positive elements to his experiences, and the reader is left with a bad taste in his mouth at the almost completely negative account of the people and country he worked with.

After reading this book I've looked at Israel's government in a new way. This book isn't satire, it is a demonstration of all the issues that, I'm sure, exist in most governments. I appreciated the circus-like quality of the UN...peppered with a little highschool drama. This is by far one of my favorite books.

Levey is one of the funniest writer's I've read in a while. The best pieces in here are funny to the point that I laughed out loud in public. In fact, the best pieces are so good that you seek to retell it to your friends, yet sadly realize that you don't have the 1/10th the storytelling chops of Levey.

Beyond the humor, Levey is endearing and honest. Indeed, his stories are as funny as they are because they are wrapped in the context of Levey's empathy and thoughtfulness. I've purchased this book already for three friends, and look forward to further giving it away to people who haven't had the pleasure of reading it. If you haven't read this book, it is a must. I am very much anticipating his next work!