A (Rather Disturbing, but Definitely Funny) Look Inside the Israeli Government

November 8, 2008 

Book Review by Daniel E. Levenson

In Shut Up, I’m Talking,  And Other Diplomacy Lessons I Learned in The Israeli Government (Free Press, New York, 2008), author Gregory Levey, has written a hilarious, if at times slightly disturbing, memoir about his experiences working as an English-language speech writer for the Israeli government. While it may not be the most politically deep or lyrical of prose, Levey has written a very engaging and highly-readable memoir about the ups and downs of working for the Israeli government, first as a speechwriter at the Israeli mission to the United Nations in New York and then as a speechwriter in the offices of Israeli Prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.

While this book made me laugh, there were other places where I was definitely cringing – Levey is unsparing in his portrayal of the Israeli diplomatic service and the Prime Minister’s Office under Sharon – and one also has to wonder if anyone who hired him had had an inkling that it might end in the kind of book that discusses such things as the author’s quest to insert references to the television program ”Seinfeld” into Prime Minister Sharon's speeches, or his rather unflattering descriptions of various government officials and functionaries. He doesn’t quite bash these various personalities (some of which seem to be composites of various individuals) but there are parts, such as his description of a meeting with former Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, that do not exactly convey a sense that professionalism is a high priority in the Israeli diplomatic establishment. Levey writes of this encounter with Shalom, “He was wearing a pair of light blue boxer shorts and a thin white undershirt, and was sitting sort of slumped over at a large conference table on one side of his luxuriously appointed private suite. Apparently not embarrassed at all by this situation, he raised himself briefly from the chair and shook my hand limply before settling back down again.”

Levey is very good at these character sketches, and his portrayal of the various individuals who seem to drift in and out of the offices he works in are both funny and disturbing. Take for instance, the librarian at the Israeli UN Mission office who spends each day behind a locked door literally screaming into his telephone at a disturbingly loud volume. Or the man Levey encounters while working at the Prime Minister’s Office who spits sunflower seeds in his face and mocks his beginner Hebrew.  Or the two shadowy individuals he connects with for firearms and counter-intelligence training in Israel (just in case). And the list goes on.

Anyone who has spent time in Israel will appreciate Levey’s descriptions of trying to navigate various bureaucratic obstacles, conversing with opinionated cab drivers, and the general sense of disorder that sometimes seems to prevail in the country. Perhaps it is not such a huge stretch of the imagination to believe that this disorder also exists in the upper levels of the Israeli government, but at times Levey’s portraits seem to stray a bit toward caricature in his lampooning of some of his co-workers, such as his American-Israeli colleague who rants for weeks about an incident involving a baked potato in a restaurant in New York. But the author is not only writing this book to get laughs, he also offers his opinions, albeit briefly, on some of the actions of the Israeli government and the general situation in the Middle East while he was working as a speechwriter. He writes of the controversial security barrier, “It was ugly and depressing, and it had some undeniably tragic effects, like separating families and cutting Palestinian farmers off from their land, but I still believed there was some sound basic logic to it. The Middle East crisis had gone on for too long, and too much blood had been spilled.”  He also acknowledges that at times it seemed like some of the ludicrous behavior he observed was a product of the high-pressure environment in which he worked and the overall level of stress felt by those who were entrusted with keeping the state of Israel.

While Levey’s narrative skills are strong, my one significant criticism of the book is that he doesn’t really give the reader a timeline. For a reader who has been paying attention to the shifting Israeli domestic political landscape for the past few years, it is possible to figure out an approximate time frame in which the events described occur, but for the average reader this may prove difficult. He writes about Disengagement and then tells us near the end of the book that he left Israel shortly before the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and the start of the second Lebanon War, which would indicate that he was working for the Israeli government from sometime in 2005 to the summer of 2006, but it would certainly have been helpful for him to have occasionally mentioned a date or two to help orient the reader.

I was also left wondering why Levey had worked for the Israeli government for so long when it was obviously such an intensely stressful and bizarre experience. He gives a few hints along the way, including the fact that he attended a Jewish Day School in Canada with a decidedly Zionist bent and also that after becoming bored with law school he had taken some initial steps to join the IDF (which he did not pursue after getting the job at the United Nations), but it’s not entirely clear where his drive came from to so vigorously pursue these jobs at the UN and in Jerusalem, and to stay with them throughout what sounds like an almost unbearable level of absurdity. All in all, Gregory Levey has written a highly entertaining account of his time in the service of the Israeli government and in the end, although it may be hard to nail down exactly what it was that kept him there, it is clear that for some reason he felt a strong connection to Israel, and in writing this account he has given the rest of us a glimpse into a world we would otherwise never get to see. The view we get may not always be pretty, but this book has a patina of honesty to it and ample humor, and there is certainly something to be said for that.

Copyright Daniel E. Levenson 2008