some political

When your only tool is a gun

2010-06-01T08:41:00.000-07:00

Haim Watzman asks the first question I asked when I heard the news: why commandos? Specifically, why Shayetet-13, one of the most elite commando squads in the entire IDF?

And why arm those commandos with live-fire weapons? And why a pre-dawn helicopter drop, designed (I presume) to catch the flotilla off guard? And why board the ship at all, when the navy could just as easily have disabled its engines, or physically blocked its course?

Here is the story we are asked to believe: that Israel was surprised by the violent resistance of some flotilla members. We are asked to believe that this intelligence failure put Israeli commandos in a position from which they had no choice but to shoot their way out.

If Israel was not expecting violent resistance, why were these protesters engaged in this manner? And even if Israel were expecting violent resistance, we might ask the same question. Why this violent confrontation, when so many less-confrontational options presented themselves?

Spokespeople for the army and the Israeli government, some of them friendly people with whom I've worked in the past, say without a trace of irony that this flotilla represented a challenge to the "legitimacy" of Israel, that it is yet another in the endless chain of "existential threats" to the country.

This week they can learn two lessons: when every threat becomes existential, every response will be ugly and disproportionate. And when a government's only tool is its arsenal, a lot of problems start to look like terrorists.

"Free Gaza"-style naval missions like this flotilla have been going on since the establishment of the blockade, with varying frequency. I covered one such mission for the Post, and for that story I spoke with some of the members who became part of this most recent delegation. My aspiration (never fulfilled) had been to join one of these missions myself -- not because I supported them, but because they represented a volatile new permutation in the evolving role of Gaza in the Israeli-Palestinian process.

This week we have seen the complete realization of this form of protest as a political tool, magnified, I am certain, far beyond the wildest dreams of its organizers. In the next couple of weeks we will have a clearer idea of just how badly Israel has been damaged. I would not be surprised if this single incident does more damage to Israel politically than the entirety of the Gaza war. And if Israel's increasingly clueless diplomatic corps (both its official branch in the IDF, and its unofficial wing in the US) cannot find a way to start putting out some of these fires, we could be looking at the beginning of real sanctions.

At the very least, here are just some of the consequences I would expect:

Renewed calls for commercial, academic, and cultural boycott and divestment around the world, likely with serious outcomes
Suspended (if not severed) diplomatic relations with Turkey
Suspension of proximity talks with Palestinians
Suspension of proximity talks with Syria
Some new set of concessions by the Netanyahu coalition on settlement growth
Multiple nonbinding UN resolutions condemning Israel
Renewed resistance from Iran on its nuclear program, and new resistance on sanctions against it

I wish I could force everyone defending Israel's actions on Monday to take a long, hard look at that list. Those outcomes are the fruits of mindless, dogged support for a coalition that has combined the worst impulses of Israeli politics with the worst excesses of Israeli governance. When it comes to Israel, neoconservatives have devolved into a state of pure reaction. They constantly argue against the obvious, and in so doing set Israelis up for further political damage. They are totally engrossed by a war of values that exists primarily in their own minds, and as a result they neglect the actual war proceeding around them. This is the mentality that undid Iraq, and unchecked it will undo Israel.

I have to believe that the writers who refuse to admit a moral error on Israel's part are sincere, because I can't imagine the endorsement of the murder of ~15 civilians as a purely political maneuver. But they are as complicit in the slow destruction of Israel as any of its other enemies, and while they may not be murderers in the way that members of Hamas are murderers, they are certainly stupid in the way that members of Hamas are stupid. There is no counter-factual counter- enough to wake them.

Commandos on a ship, alone but for one another, are set upon by violent activists who -- from what video we have -- appear intent on killing or badly wounding them. Backed into a corner, fearing for their lives, the commandos open fire, and it is fair to say that most soldiers from most countries would have done the same.

But that is where the comparison must end. Because most countries in the first world would never find themselves in such a situation. Most liberal democracies do not impose an economic blockade on over 1.5 million people in order to minimize random rocket fire that is, itself, in response to that blockade. Most countries that count themselves among the liberal order (or the "west" or whatever we are billing ourselves) do not respond to protesters with pre-dawn commando raids on the high seas. Most countries are not in Israel's position, and, increasingly, Israel has no one to blame but itself for that position.

So while I can excuse those individual commandos for making a difficult decision under extremely stressful circumstances, I cannot and will not excuse the government that gave them their orders. The brutality I saw yesterday looked like something that should have happened in Thailand or North Korea, but it is a logical progression in the course of a brutal, dangerously unempathetic and illiberal occupation.

A personal note: I turned 24 last week, and in all of those years, this is the first time that I have felt deeply, personally ashamed to be a supporter of Israel. The 2nd Lebanon war, the bombing of the Syrian reactor, even settlements and the Gaza war -- as politically and morally perilous as those events have sometimes been, I have always been able to see the opposing view. When I disagreed with a decision, this disagreement could take place for me in the political world, an acceptable disconnect in a democratic regime.

But I am now truly lost. I don't understand how the wholesale murder of barely-armed protesters is defensible, and I can't and really don't want to peer into the minds of those who feel otherwise. I read the news yesterday morning and I spent the day sick to my stomach. Writing in a blog that I closed is my pathetic little attempt to alleviate some of the symptoms.

This blog is closed

2010-02-04T14:46:00.001-08:00

Dear friends:

After many months of pretending it was not true, I have to admit that I just don't have the fighting spirit to keep this little blog going. The conversation about Israel in the US and Europe (not to mention in Israel itself) has become so depressingly polarized that I really can't see myself mustering the effort required to even document it, let alone add my own opinion.

I can honestly say that after my year spent there, I care more about Israel than I ever have before. It is that outlook that makes bowing out of these conversations both as difficult and as necessary as it is. Israel is too important to me to tune in every day to hear it slagged by a left wing that has understood nothing about it, or a right wing content to use it as a political football and accelerate its destruction in the process.

I am now wholly immersed in drug policy, which I honestly believe will be one of the defining issues of this new decade (which I couldn't be more pleased about), and even conversations with insane DEA people seem tame compared to debates about Israel. I'm content to inch forward what few good ideas I have in this realm, and to hope that Israel continues to do what it has always done best, either as a people or a country: see to its own preservation, keep its own house and its own counsel.

Thanks to those who were reading, semi c-list prominent bloggers among you. I appreciate the support, the challenges that here at least were always respectful, and especially the opportunity to grapple in public and with openness with one of Israel's more difficult wars. This was a meaningful experience and not one that I will forget.

If you want to keep up with me or drop me a line, you can reach me via Facebook (Max Socol) or Twitter, where I am @mbsocol.

On Palestinian Unilateralism

2009-09-07T19:27:00.000-07:00

The always-savory bitterlemons is especially interesting this week: four essays that seem, for once, to converge in agreement. The topic at hand is Palestinian unilateralism, specifically as hinted at by both Abu Mazen and Salam Fayyad. The agreement is in the utility of a more unilateral Palestinian approach.

Of the essays, Alpher's is best at outlining and anticipating the consequences of Fayyad's plan to begin building up state infrastructure in preparation for a de facto statehood to be declared in two years -- assuming the failure of negotiations. As the essayists mention, this is not the first time that Palestinians have attempted this route, having tried and failed in 1988, and threatened a second time just prior to Oslo. But those were gestures undertaken by Yasser Arafat, whose disorganization and corruption made such declarations threatening only (or at least mostly) in the abstract.

Fayyad is a different animal: a competent technocrat, seemingly incorruptible, deft at more than just political gamesmanship. When he threatens (if that can even be the word) to build up infrastructure, he does so as nearly the only Palestinian official with the drive to follow through.

Israeli officials and supporters ought to be welcoming Fayyad's plan with open arms. Israel has nothing to fear from an organized and structurally sound polity in the West Bank. On the contrary, this is precisely what we have been hoping for: a credible and strong central government, capable of reigning in Hamas and other disparate extremists; curbing Islamic fundamentalism; and continuing to assume the security burden now carried largely by Israel.

A unilateral Palestinian action would complicate issues of territory, and possibly force Israel to work under pressure to make difficult decisions regarding larger settlements. But the upshot, as Alpher points out, is probably worth it: "[unilateral action] would seemingly free Israel of any further need to consider the refugee issue since it would have been delinked from bilateral territorial questions between two sovereign states. Indeed, UDI might reflect Palestinian recognition that the insurmountable refugee problem has to be bypassed."

This would be a tremendous revelation on the part of the PA. For those within the pro-Israel camp who take a more reasonable and sympathetic line with Palestinians, granting them the territory they need, refugees are the only really impossible demand. The establishment

Ironically, if we are to believe Alpher's description, it may be in the best interests of this camp to do very little while Fayyad maneuvers. If he really does follow through with his two-year plan, Israel the Territories both stand to gain in the short term. And a unilateral declaration in two years that releases Israel of the refugee burden while enforcing 1967 territorial claims is just about as reasonable a deal as anyone could hope for.

But then there is FM Lieberman, who, as they say, never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity, declaring that "Israel will respond" to any hint of Fayyad's plan going into action. Why, exactly? This is coming from the man who ostensibly favored territorial trades in exchange for the cleansing of Israel's Arab minority, and its transfer to the West Bank. Isn't Fayyad laying plans that would align rather nicely with these? Is it possible that Lieberman knows something we don't? Or perhaps the "thuggery as foreign policy" strategy that served the US so well for eight years has now migrated to the office of the Israeli PM.

AIPAC's responsibility II

2009-08-21T07:57:00.001-07:00

In case it wasn't clear from the below what I meant by AIPAC getting more in line with the state of advocacy today, the ever-helpful Joel Katz has passed along this link. NIF obviously represents a powerful organization at a very different segment of the political spectrum when it comes to Israel. But that's really the exact problem. AIPAC shouldn't be running from dialogue like this -- it should be fostering it.

Does AIPAC have a responsibility to American Jews beyond advocacy for Israel?

2009-08-19T08:47:00.000-07:00

A question that has been preoccupying me lately, after reading about this job listing (yes, still searching) on their homepage:

"[The senior political analyst will] work with AIPAC's regional offices to: track and provide analysis for congressional races; schedule candidate meetings and obtain pro-Israel position papers."[my bold]

One of the most frustrating aspects of critiques of AIPAC by Andrew Sullivan and others is that they confuse the responsibilities of the lobbyists with those of politicians. When congressmen stick to their guns on pro-Israel positions that are of dubious benefit to Americans, this is treated by Sullivan et al not as a political failure, but assomething to be laid at the feet of the lobby, amid accusations of illicit dealings.

Beyond the uncomfortable overtones of Protocols-era anti-Semitism lurking in such talk, the fact of the matter is that AIPAC is essentially being punished in commentary for being effective at its stated goal: to build US support for Israel. When other lobbies succeed in pushing legislation, they are considered powerful. When AIPAC succeeds, it is not powerful but manipulative. It is only a short leap from such a characterization to start seeing the "Lobby" behind all sorts of political decisions over which it has actually exercised no influence whatever. A conspiracy theory is born -- or a dozen.

While it is today a certain segment of "realist" commentators pushing this meme, in the end AIPAC probably has neoconservatism's eight years of rotten harvest to thank for its worsening public image. Whether it can properly be considered part of that political philosophy is up for debate, I suppose. I tend to think not; AIPAC's purpose is too singular, and the neocon demagoguery of the Israel issue too pervasive, to produce anything but a false positive.

(It's interesting, by the way, to compare AIPAC's public image to certain other lobbies routinely flogged for their competence. I mean the "death lobbies," those representing tobacco, alcohol, and firearms. A success for these groups is treated (rightly?) as a failure for the public wellbeing. I see a similar attitude emerging among "realists" with regard to AIPAC. But if there are medical studies proving the health risks of Israeli success, I have yet to see them.)

AIPAC may be in a position to do right by Americans in rethinking its short- and mid-term lobbying goals. But it has no responsibility to do so. It is a lobbying group whose affairs and objectives are there for all to see. And if that sounds cold, imagine the temperature of the politicians shirking their manifest duty to the public, the better to toe the line on a contentious foreign policy issue.

The question of AIPAC's responsibility to American Jews, however, is a little different. With or without their express consent, Jewish Americans are part of what may well be the most interesting and risky cultural/national experiment to have begun in the 20th century. By virtue of being Jews, they are invested in Israel. By virtue of being Americans, they shoulder more responsiblity for Israel's successes and failures than Jews living elsewhere in the diaspora.

AIPAC may be a thorn in the side of "realists" fed up with what they see as a counterproductive alliance with a controversial foreign power. But in that view, AIPAC is one piece of a much larger puzzle.

In the American Jewish community, AIPAC is something bigger. It has for many years set the tone and agenda for discussions about Israel, through community events and literature, lectures, and a reputation as the authority on advocacy earned on its merits. AIPAC is supported by a tremendous number of Jewish philanthropies, and in turn supports programming all the way down to the micro level, designed to shore up American support for Israel among what must always be its base -- the Jewish community.

Organizations like J-Street are beginning to challenge AIPAC's monopoly on dialogue within the community. J-Street has recently hired a few campus coordinators to begin to develop competitive university programming, traditionally an easy win for the larger organization. (Full disclosure: I applied for one of these positions and did not get it; a friend did.)

College campuses are an obvious choice: political activism there tends to be more liberal, and Jewish students are already living in an environment where, like it or not, they are forced by Arab students to confront some of Israel's negative portrayals. Though it makes no apologies for a pro-Israel stance, it stands to reason that J-Street will benefit from comparisons to AIPAC in the college world. But this is less than a dent in AIPAC's wider influence, and even if the program succeeds it is not clear to me where else J-Street can turn.

Like other lobbies, AIPAC doesn't just lobby the government -- it lobbies everyone. Unlike other lobbies, though, AIPAC has this natural captive audience which appears to me to be more and more confused by the dissonance between what AIPAC is saying in synagogue events and what a growing number of political commenators are saying on the Internet.

When AIPAC searches for a senior political analyst in DC, they are unquestionably seeking someone to operate on Capitol Hill -- a lobbying position, in other words, political and influential and certainly not involved in community organizing.

But on the local end, AIPAC is attempting to shepherd American Jews using the same tricks in a country whose hostility toward the lobby, and perhaps the cause, is growing in volume. My questions to AIPAC, then: do you need to acknowledge this? And do you need to respond? And how would you?

It's too early to say whether AIPAC's control over the conversation about Israel amongst American Jews is going to weaken. But some of J-Street's own polling suggests the ground is shifting, a process that has been sped up by the recent political turn within Israel itself. It may be time for AIPAC to consider treating the Jewish community less as a lobbying target, and more as an equal party to decisions about American support for Israel. If they fail to do so, they run the risk of cutting their base off entirely from the majority.

That would be nothing less than a crisis for Israel advocacy in America, on par with the current chaos dominating the remains of the Republican party: hijacked by conspiracy theorists and clowns, and careening full-tilt toward irrelevance.

The responsible decision for AIPAC would be to shift its rhetoric and its treatment of the Jewish community, to try to bring itself more in line with the state of advocacy today. Embracing the reality of American Jewish doubts and fears about Israel, instead of denying their existence, is the only way to maintain a strong base capable of interacting with the wider American community.

The end of settlements?

2009-06-29T12:45:00.000-07:00

I intended to wait longer before responding to Marc Lynch's newest offering on settlements, in part because it wasn't bringing much to the discussion that we don't already know, and -- I have to admit -- in part because some of it annoyed me. (At the very least it's in poor taste to suggest that his writing on Israel might earn Lynch “special attention” at Ben Gurion – I know of no instances of Israeli authorities harassing journalists because of their writing, and unless Lynch can point to a case it's an irresponsible assertion.)

At the very least, however, Lynch was right to interpret the Netanyahu government's announcement of additional settlements as a challenge to President Obama's stated desires for the region, though in my opinion it falls well short of “brazen.” (I struggle even to imagine how the government could have more timidly challenged the issue than its chosen path of a low-key bureaucratic notice of continued construction. Anything less would fail to constitute a challenge at all.)

But then this came up, and now the story has transformed from mundane accusations and theories into something real. We should hesitate to declare settlement expansion over in any permanent sense. But this is the kind of leak – immediately prior to a high-level meeting between Defense Minister Barak and Envoy Mitchell – that generally heralds a real change in attitude. I have spent all morning wondering what, precisely, was said to Netanyahu by the Obama administration behind closed doors. I honestly have no idea; but I suppose it must have been persuasive.

In Israel, Netanyahu is famous for his (forgive the phrase) “flip-flopping,” and I imagine that, had Bush not ended his term as one of the most hated presidents in US history, last winter's candidates in Israel's election might have employed the same Rove-speak in their campaigns against the current Prime Minister. (Israeli politicians, like those in much of the rest of the world, tend to take their cues from American campaigns; Netanyahu himself built a campaign website that was nearly identical to Obama's.)

This newest development represents a characteristic Netanyahu flip-flop: he begins by taking a hard line in a situation in which many observers think it untenable; and at the first sign of real pressure, he folds, often sloppily. He has and has always had a genius for pleasing no one, even beyond his cohorts in the rudderless Israeli political scene, and today will count as no exception. I say this in part as a way of explaining my lack of alarm at Netanyahu's “major address” a few weeks ago, during which he rejected a settlement freeze – provided that Obama was serious, it was only a matter of time before he came around.

Now we have arrived at the threshold, what supporters of Israel can only hope is the beginning of the end of the settlement project. Good riddance to it; and should it bring down the Netanyahu coalition in the process, good riddance to that, as well, and to the man himself. I can take a bitter sort of pleasure in the repudiation of those who blindly support what has certainly been the costliest, deadliest, and most dangerous boondoggle in Israeli history.

If I'm not yet excited, it's because I see coming around the corner a rude awakening for analysts like Mr. Lynch, who have built up elaborate fantasies in which Israeli settlements are somehow the lynchpin of the entire peace process. What will these writers say when, as the settlements are coming down, Palestinians still cannot reach a unity government? What new single issue will suddenly ,become the totality of the conflict when Israelis and Gazans continue to trade fire?

It is no contradiction to recognize the tremendous moral and logistical problems of the settlement project while simultaneously acknowledging that it is far from the biggest obstacle in the peace process. Yet Lynch, for all his experience in the Middle East, falls into exactly such false distinctions: only in an imaginary world can Obama see “his administration's credibility on Israeli-Palestinian issues shattered forever” simply out of failure to act on the settlements. What of developing a functioning Palestinian political process? Or coordinating an effective regional response to Iran and its terrorist proxies? In short: how is it possible that a region fraught with such tremendous problems can see its defining moment come in the form of Israeli settlements?

Lynch and I both want to see the same thing happen, so perhaps this is just splitting hairs. But now that we may be on the way to seeing the real end of settlements, it seems that everyone could do with a healthy dose of skepticism, if only to keep us focused on the tremendous number of problems that lie ahead.

Update: Lynch's fellow traveler Brian Katulis brings a refreshing sense of proportion of precisely the sort I was hoping to see with a post on Salam Fayyad's role (or lack thereof) in the Palestinian negotiations.

What is happening in Iran

2009-06-22T12:02:00.000-07:00

This is a very brief return to writing and should not be expected to herald a restarting of this blog. I am still in the midst of summer camp duties, and we are having some extra-special difficulties this summer, about which you may have read. (Incidentally, everyone is recovering just fine, including me.) That aside, keeping up with the news from Iran as I am able has been especially fascinating in this setting. Ramah Darom is a Jewish and (perish the thought) Zionist camp in northern Georgia, and I work side by side with thirty to forty Israelis, all of whom have a personal investment in the Iranian political climate, whether they like it or not.

My interest was further piqued by a book which I happened to have been reading when the revolt broke out: Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt (more popularly referred to as The Banality of Evil). I was reminded of the book this morning, when I read this analysis from Jeffrey Goldberg:

The Iranian regime has exposed itself as interested mainly in self-preservation. Netanyahu told me earlier this spring that Iran is run by a "messianic, apocalyptic cult." But I think there's an argument to be made that Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are grubby men mainly interested in perpetuating their power. In other words, they seem to behave like rather quotidian dictators, not religious fanatics. A confrontation with Israel would certainly threaten the stability of their regime, and the stability of their regime is something they quite obviously cherish.

I think Arendt would find much to unpack here, from the casual assumption that a regime can have a singular purpose (and that it can be exposed!) to our ease in assigning the status of "cult" to anything Islamic.

In Arendt's account of the final months of World War Two, she takes pains to emphasize just how preposterously self-destructive the Nazis' "Jewish policy" really was. Critical army transports of personnel and supplies were interrupted in order to move more Jews, more quickly, to death camps. Huge amounts of military manpower were expended pulling surviving Jews deeper and deeper into the Reich, in an effort to murder them before the coming surrender. And weeks were spent dismantling camps and burning documents in an effort to conceal the activity, all of it time that might have been spent on the war effort.

We are habituated to thinking of the Nazis as terrifyingly rational and efficient, though they were nothing of the sort. Why is this? Because of their early successes? Their totalitarian aesthetic? Their propaganda? That they were, in fact, an apocalyptic cult was so easily concealed by the regime that even today, with all of the facts available, few people understand the extent to which Nazism was sacrificed for the sake of killing Jews.

That Iran has come to surprise anyone, including Goldberg, with an instinct for self-preservation probably says much more about our perceptions of Islamic theocracies than about Iran itself. Indeed there may be something racial at the basis of this commentary (in general, not singularly from Goldberg) that allows us to more easily find hints of messianic extremism in Middle Easterners than in Europeans. That's not to suggest that such things don't exist in Iran, since they certainly do. I mean only that these strains of political thought should have been expected to exist in tension with an instinct for self-preservation, and thus they should have surprised no one. It will perhaps be a lesson to all concerned that there is yet a small bit of value to the "one-worldism" that teaches us to expect some similarities in the outlook of foreign peoples, rather than endless differences.

The other point of interest in Goldberg's post was his impulse to do away with the distinction between Iran's treatment of its internal political situation and its treatment of Israel. And this, more than anything else he has said, can probably be used as proof of his lack of sympathy for Netanyahu's worldview. For what self-respecting Israeli hawk would for a moment imagine that the Ayatollah's comparitive rationality in dealing with a political uprising within his country would have any bearing on his approach to Israel? We are, after all, talking about an Islamist death cult, yes? And while insane martyrdom may not be prescribed for quelling "reformist" uprisings within the country, they are most certainly the order of the day when it comes to an attack on Israel.

The "Iranian Lens"

2009-05-12T16:35:00.000-07:00

Caught this via Andrew just now. Marc Lynch at the FP blog:

The Israelis are going to try to argue that the U.S. can't do Israeli-Palestinian peace until after "solving" Iran, while many Arabs and others are going to argue that the U.S. can't solve Iran without first addressing Israeli-Palestinian issues. Both are wrong, or at least over-stated. The two issues are only loosely related, the much-trumpeted alignment of interests between Israel and Arab leaders is wafer-thin, it's important to move towards an Israeli-Palestinian two state solution for its own sake, and there is absolutely no logic to "sequencing" the two since both will take long, painstaking diplomacy.

I'm going to have more on this in the next few days, but this is a bizarre assertion that needs immediate comment. It says a great deal about Lynch's point (whatever it may be) that his assessment of the logic of "sequencing" itself seems lacking in logic. Because both processes are lengthy diplomatic issues, it is illogical to understand one needing to follow the other? Is this supposed to pass for conflict analysis?

I'm the last to shill for Netanyahu's continued policy of indefinite foot-dragging when it comes to a Palestinian state. But make no mistake: the connection to Iran is real. Hamas is building its military capability in the West Bank, as Ghassan Khatib notes in this week's Bitter Lemons:

Second, there are increasing indications that Hamas is building its military capabilities in the West Bank. These, at the moment, appear related to Palestinian divisions rather than Israel, but that could change any minute. The nature of the preparations (including for example, hundreds of military uniforms discovered in different parts of the West Bank) shows that there is serious potential in this regard.

There's no crystal ball that can tell us how Hamas will shape up in the West Bank, or whether Iran would risk the hand-off of weaponized uranium to a group crazy enough to use it. But to assert that there is "no connection" here--to assert, in essence, that there is no risk of such a transaction--is simply ludicrous. Lynch is one more in a long line of commentators to fail to do even the basic homework.

At the League

2009-05-01T13:07:00.000-07:00

I have a guest post up at the League of Ordinary Gentleman, a response to ED Kain's most recent on two-state. I'll include an excerpt below, but please head their way and read the whole thing. While you're there, look around. More than anyone else, the League has come to fill in a gap that Culture 11 left behind, and they have always been particularly kind to myself and this little blogging enterprise.

Excerpt:

The PA under Fatah lasted in Gaza a little less than two years before it was overthrown by Hamas, after its refusal to recognize the results of the Palestinian election. Their head of Gaza security, Mohammed Dahlan, was supposed to be an unstoppable strong-man. He fled to Egypt before fighting had really even begun, where I believe he remains.

This was the moment that ultimately discredited the Israeli left in the eyes of its constituency. Even though Kadima is a centrist party, withdrawal (”disengagement” as it’s called here) has always been understood politically as a left-wing agenda item, just as the Iraq war will be owned by Republicans despite its continuation under a Democratic president. The collapse of Gaza is seen as the ultimate proof that leaving Palestinians to their own devices will produce nothing but violence and unrest on Israel’s border. It has come to represent a repudiation of some of the left’s most basic assumptions about the way forward for Israelis and Palestinians.

Eldar maintains that Sharon saw all of this coming. That, contrary to popular perception, Sharon was not an enemy of the settler movement, but its greatest friend. He read the writing on the wall: the settlement project could not continue unimpeded in both Gaza and the West Bank — not even the Israeli polity would allow such a thing. So Sharon gave up the smaller territory to save the larger; he made use of history to vindicate a policy that otherwise appeared terminally flawed under even the barest scrutiny.

The fact that Gaza is not the West Bank matters about as much to Israelis as whether or not Sharon really did act knowingly — which is to say it doesn’t matter to them in the least. They have their object lesson. If anyone reading doubts this, allow me to refer you to Israel’s most recent election, where Labor — the left-wing party that founded the country, and supplied most of its prime ministers — came in a distant forth, a death-knell far more decisive than anything the Republicans have pulled off in the US this cycle.

New numbers on two-state

2009-04-26T06:43:00.000-07:00

At TPM Josh Marshall is talking about a new poll released by some Irish guys about the two-state issue in Israel and Palestine. The numbers are interesting, but Josh is right that the analysis is bad. (For one thing, what is this crazy conflation with something that is "essential" as something that represents a person's first choice, and something "unacceptable" as their last? I'm pretty sure these words don't admit of such an interpretation, whether in Hebrew or Arabic.)

It seems ludicrous that, more than 15 years after Oslo, we are supposed to take comfort in the fact that bare majorities of both populations are prepared to accept a two-state solution (a solution which, by the way, is filled by each side with caveats and conditions wholly unacceptable to the other.) Two-state is the oldest of old news, and I suspect that many of the respondents indicating their acceptance of that plan are doing so almost reflexively, as it remains the one credible solution to the conflict they have heard over the past several years.

Peace here would be a lot easier with a groundswell of support for separated states. A significant majority of Palestinians ready to live side by side with Israel would greatly ease the latter's security burden. Likewise, a reasonable Israeli position on settlements and refugee compensation (if not resettlement) would give the Knesset, the only government entity in this conflict with real room to maneuver, a little breathing room to start making the necessary withdrawals.

But you can forget about both. These numbers aren't just discouraging -- they're often downright absurd. I guess I respect Marshall's desire to stay positive, but come on! 58% of Israelis think it "unacceptable" to give abandoned settlement infrastructure to Palestinians? 51% of Palestinians think it "unacceptable" that refugees who do not want to return to Israel should be settled elsewhere with compensation? This isn't just adorable Middle Eastern haggling or wishful thinking. It's honest-to-God nonsense. These are positions held by majorities on both sides for no other reason than a deep-seated ressentiment that seems only to be growing.

How appropriate, then, that Atlantic corresponded Robert Kaplan should suddenly drop this little editorial, questioning the sincerity of Palestinian desire for statehood. Kaplan actually does take a moment to distinguish between the incompetent Palestinian governing apparatus and its constituency, so I have a hard time dinging him for it quite as hard as I want (though that title sure is obnoxious.) Semantic frustrations aside, however, it's quite clear from the data at hand that Palestinians want a state in the same way they have wanted one since Arafat made the PLO a household name: that is, precisely the kind of state they will never get.

Piling on, Jeff Goldberg finds this flip little remark from Ha'aretz editorialist Bradley Burston:

If they [Palestinians] insist on a one-state solution, then it is a one-state solution that they will get, and that state will be Israel.

Zing! Boy, those Palestinians sure are dreaming!

But in seriousness (if still bitterness), the question before us is whether insistence on a supposed "two-state" solution that is guaranteed to be rejected by the opposition actually constitutes a passive insistence on a one-state solution. (Whether there is sincerity to be questioned is rather beside the point.)

When it comes to Israelis, this seems to be precisely true. Israel's pattern of negotiating behavior is clear from even the barest glimpse of its recent history: when there is violence, negotiation is impossible because security is threatened. When there is peace, negotiation is unnecessary, or at least not urgent, because there is no violence. Rinse and repeat for 100 years, or until such time as Palestinians go away.

The Palestinian position is, if you can believe it, even more short-sighted, because it has been designed and implemented by the PLO and associated terrorist/resistance groups, who collectively comprise one of the world's most helplessly-myopic governing bodies. Kaplan is correct with this much: Palestinian concessions for the sake of a state represent an actual challenge to govern, which it has never been clear that the kleptocratic PLO is able to do. The will for a state, however impossible, does seem to rest somewhere within the Palestinian polity. But the ability to find a leader capable of sharing this will? That has yet to be detected, as slavish posthumous adoration of Yasser Arafat in the West Bank will attest.

With this milieu in mind, it is all the more difficult to understand how Marshall (remember him?) can find, not only hope for two states, but also the impossibility of one:

One point the poll seems to make pretty clearly is that, contrary to what some say, support isn't slipping away from a two state and drifting toward a one state solution. Neither people wants to live in a one state with the other.

Actually, on second reading, it's not so difficult. Marshall is simply misunderstanding what one-state advocates (or, in my view, one-state predictors) are saying. It is not that Israelis and Palestinians actually want a single state. It's that their overwhelming animosity toward one another makes anything but a single state completely impossible. Israelis will not find the political will to halt settlement expansion, and Palestinians will not be able to build the government necessary to concede the refugee issue. Presto change-o: one state, from the Jordan river to the sea. Thank you Bradley Burston, prophet of doom.

The net losers here are the Palestinians, who at some point are going to stop just being disenfranchised, and start being permanently homeless. As networks of settlements continue to develop across the West Bank, the notion of "Palestinian sovereignty" is quickly going the way of "Native American sovereignty." When political leadership fails them, Palestinian popular support has the power to turn the tide. But when both fail, as this polling suggests, it's time to stop thinking of this issue as Rolling Stones song (I mean, Jesus, really?) and start to recognize where this population is headed. It's not a pretty picture.

Which is why the Israelis are going to lose, too. As I find myself -- incredibly -- having to remind settlement advocates, Palestinians aren't going to go away. At a certain point in the (ever-nearing) future, Israelis are going to have a national decision to make with regard to their indigenous Palestinian population. Extend them the rights of citizenship, ethnically cleanse them, or just go full-Apartheid? This is not an imaginary scenario. As these numbers ought to demonstrate, it is very much the likely scenario, one which we can expect within a few decades. I won't wager which option Israel chooses, as I honestly do not know. But do you see one that appeals to you? Or that will appeal to them?

On the ground in settlement Anatot

2009-04-20T03:31:00.000-07:00

Anatot is 20 minutes outside of Jerusalem by car, perched over a canyon northeast of the city. Residents are urban and secular, and meeting them in a bar or restaurant, you wouldn't have any idea they were settlers. Hours later, invited to back to their home for tea, watching the white terraces of Pisgat Ze'ev stream by outside the car window, you'd be caught off guard by the sudden appearance of the separation barrier, and your vehicle's sudden sharp turn into the checkpoint.

Elsewhere in the world, Anatot would be a sleepy, 300-family bedroom community, a suburban housing development embodying the natural relationship between wealth and boredom. Kids ride their bikes up and down the steep streets, each steering with one hand as he tries to eat ice cream with the other. Teenagers stroll aimlessly through the neighborhood, or meet at its one coffeeshop, waiting for the weekend. At home, their parents relax in modest two- or three-bedroom homes, watching TV or making dinner after another day of work at a job somewhere in Jerusalem.

But Anatot is not elsewhere. It is here: a little under 15 kilometers inside the West Bank, located six kilometers north of Ma'ale Adumim, the largest settlement in the area. From Anatot's strategic location at the top of a cliff, visitors and residents can see Kfar Adumim and Nofei Prat, two more settlements that have hilltops of their own four kilometers further east. 20 kilometers beyond Kfar Adumim lies the Jordan river, the end of the West Bank.

Scattered amongst these settlements, generally in the valleys between them, are Arab villages. It takes a bit of practice to discern what kind of town you're seeing when you gaze out over the Bank, but with patience you can learn the tricks. Settlements are built at high altitudes so that they can be easily defended. Their houses have red rooves and are in orderly rows. They are invariably surrounded by razor wire and fences, and have gated entrances with armed guards.

Arab villages are found in the valleys. They tend to be older than the settler conflict, and therefore poorly placed for defense--the valleys were chosen because they were an easier place to find water, and a more convenient place to build. Arab homes are undecorated concrete. At night they're easy to spot: a village of any size will have a mosque, whose tower is lit with green light.

Setting aside the politics for a moment, the West Bank is a fascinating glimpse into an Israel/Palestine that existed before colonial rule and modern development--an endless vista of rolling, sparsely-vegetated hills, unbroken by any building larger than three stories. Looking out over the land, the overwhelming feeling is one of emptiness. Compared to Jerusalem's crowded interior, the West Bank seems like a ghost country, something from the Bible come back to haunt its modern counterpart.

The best view is from the coffeeshop, which serves hot drinks, pizza, and ice cream. The owner looks and sounds Israeli, but she was actually born and raised in Chicago--you can order in English, if you like. Though it's on the opposite side of the settlement from the canyon, the coffeeshop has found its own little cliff, and from a seat on its porch it's easy to imagine you're sitting at the end of the world, enjoying the last ever cup of tea as you wait for the distant Jordanian mountains to crumble.

The ten or fifteen kids running around take no notice of this phenomenon; they're used to it. They will, however, notice you, a face they don't recognize in their insular community. In between chasing one of the settlement dogs or pouring individual packets of what looks like Kool-Aid into cups of water, they'll cast the occasional glance your way. So will their mothers, middle-aged women enjoying a cup of coffee before going home to get dinner ready, letting their youngests burn off some energy in preparation for early bedtime. The summer heat arrived just a week ago, and the children are wild and intoxicated with it.

Sitting there, it's hard to believe that these are the people who so many claim are jeopardizing Israel's future and robbing the Palestinians. Their lives don't appear to be so different from suburbanites in Herzliya or Atlanta. They aren't marching out to destroy Arab homes or groves. Many have been in this settlement since it was founded, 25 years ago. They keep to themselves, as do their neighbors. On the weekends, they see movies in the city.

Yet between Anatot, Ma'ale Adumim, and Kfar Adumim, a triangle of 10 kilometers has been unilaterally sliced out of land that Israel has repeatedly promised to the Palestinians. And these are only three settlements in a much larger local network, concentrated around Ma'ale Adumim and running between Jerusalem all the way to Jericho. The ultimate goal of this string of settlements? To slice the West Bank in half, effectively ending the chance for the formation of a Palestinian state. Grove-burning or not, it's a cruel and dangerous plan.

Apologists for Palestinian terrorism and rocketry (and of course, those perpetrating these acts themselves) are eager to portray the settlers as bloodthirsty, or lunatics. This is the retreat of extremists, the refusal to engage with one of the fundamental paradoxes of the settler movement: that many of them are not cruel people on a personal level, whatever their ideological motivation; or, failing that, that many of them are not settlers of choice at all, but rather children, or to poor to leave.

Yet there is another extremist tendency running counter to this one: the desire to portray settlers as harmless suburbanites, devoid of the slightest malice, morally unimpeachable because they build their homes in nice rows and keep their gardens growing. This, too, is a canard: the settlement project is malignant, its members engaging in, at the very least, an active repression of conscience and good moral practice in the hopes that one day those pesky Palestinians will just "go away." Where? Who knows! But "away," that's the point.

Outside Anatot, its children are obscured by political dogma. Inside, they are instead used to obscure it. Both extremes engage in this contemptible practice, and so neither is able to defuse the extremism of the other.

It is a testament to the failure of leadership in Israel and Palestine that this manipulation occurs at the highest levels of government. Hamas and the PLO treat settlers as abstract demons, as if they had crawled out of the earth, a whirlwind of teeth and claws. How can one not advocate for or commit violence against such creatures?

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu calls for the continued expansion of settlements, couched in the phrase "natural growth." Anyone who questions the wisdom of such a policy is brow-beaten for failing to think of the children. After all, what kind of monster wants to keep parents from having kids? To keep some sad-eyed 8-year-old from finally getting his own room?

Until the moderate center of this issue is able to have an honest debate about what is to be done with settlers, there will be no progress toward peace. It almost goes without saying that is not a dialogue that is going to start in Israel, the place where respectful political conversation comes to die.

After a year here in Israel, I am more convinced than ever that a solution to settlements will have to be developed in the United States, and ultimately implemented as much by American Jews as by Israelis. Israel and Palestinians are facing a crisis of leadership that, outside of a miracle, looks set to last for the next decade. That is not an amount of time that either side can afford to lose. For their sakes, American Jews are going to have to remember both the children in Anatot and Anatot itself.

Prosecute

2009-04-17T02:35:00.000-07:00

The memos have been released, and there should be no question in anyone's mind what transpired at CIA black sites. Those still denying that these actions constituted torture have taken to the old canard: "our enemies are worse!" The people employing this line of thinking have locked themselves in the tower; they are not coming down.

Let's be clear: part of our national identity is at stake. We are being told by those on the right wing with the stones to even comment on this behavior that as long as we don't cut the heads off our enemies, we have yet to cross that uncrossable line. Never mind that many of the men and children imprisoned at these sites were never our "enemies", so much as they were civilians in the wrong place at the wrong time; even assuming otherwise, this "policy" is the product of the sickest moral compass. That any pundit feels comfortable standing up and saying such a thing is itself a black mark on a country where once such sentiment would have been grounds for ostracizing.

It says something about the ludicrous right-wing reaction to these memos that so many of its pundits seem simultaneously to be claiming that these torture techniques are 1. "no big deal" and 2. "so important that widespread knowledge of them endangers our national security." Which story is true? For these hacks, does it even matter?

But forget about them. Our focus should remain on the one act of moral courage left to the American public: prosecute these war criminals.

Some are hesitant to press charges against CIA agents themselves, who were acting under orders, to which I say "fine." The truly guilty parties here are the lawyers, who purposefully misread the law in order to open the door to torture:

Indeed, the entire Bybee memo (which was likely written by John Yoo) is shockingly conclusory in its reasoning. One obvious torture technique after the next is quickly dismissed as not generating a sufficient level of suffering to constitute torture. But there's no attempt to back these conclusions up or explain away possible objections to them. No attempt to address the wide array of contrary precedent. And there's virtually no evidence that the author of the memo even spent much time imagining what it might actually be like to be subjected to some of these techniques.

As I've said many times here before, the most culpable parties in this whole disgusting affair are the lawyers. Their job was to stand up for the rule of law, to tell the Dick Cheneys of the world that what they wanted to do was clearly illegal. They didn't do that. Indeed, they went to elaborate lengths to give their legal blessing to conduct they had to have known was illegal.

Spencer Ackerman is calling for a congressional investigation into who at the CIA (or in the top tier of the Bush administration) was pushing for torture to be taken up. That's fine, and I hope we see it happen. But we now have more than enough evidence to suggest that Bybee and Yoo purposefully obscured this country's laws in order to allow it to do something illegal and truly disgusting. Enough with the pussyfooting over "partisan backlash." Those who still refuse to acknowledge the clear criminality on display here will never acknowledge it. It's time for moral leadership that rejects these meaningless equivocations and begins the work that needs to be done.

My name is Max, and I am a recovering protester

2009-04-16T02:58:00.000-07:00

I was dismayed to see, via Facebook, that a few friends had attended the so-called "tea parties" yesterday. I'm trying to be fair to them, and I'm worried that I may have formed some kind of emotional attachment to this administration that's causing a reflexive reaction of disgust.

But looking at a few pictures of the DC event, I can't help it. The folks at these things are incoherent at best; at worst, they're racist and frightening. (NB the charming guy at that link calling for the lynching of a number of congressmen.)

I was still in high school when we invaded Iraq. I remember watching the invasion on TV for the first few days (thanks, public school) and being overwhelmed with the need to do something. It was not easy to be against the war at the time, as many have said. In a small southern city it only got harder. I found support in the Quaker community, which I've felt close to ever since because of that time. I organized with them, passed out flyers and bumper stickers, used (inappropriately) my position at the school newspaper to focus our editorials on a liberal, anti-war viewpoint that certainly pissed off more people than it persuaded.

But I rarely protested. My last protest came soon after the beginning of the war, at a candlelight vigil held outside the Quaker meetinghouse, on a busy street corner in the city. Everyone linked arms, (and held candles simultaneously, which was difficult) sang, and chanted anti-war slogans. At first, I felt lifted up by the event, a sense of relief that finally the passive right-wing masses in the city would have to face the fact that we had launched a stupid, ugly war.

Not too far down from where I stood in our chain, a car pulled over. A couple of young men leaned out the window and began heckling some of the protesters, calling them "liberals" (remember when that was a dirty word?) and other such insults. One of our own, an older man with a large beard, a prominent local Quaker, began to defend himself. I don't remember exactly what he said, but the thrust was that he was a Vietnam war veteran, an experience which had taught him a hard lesson about going to war too quickly, or for the wrong reasons. He tried to speak calmly, but the young men repeatedly shouted him down until he, too, raised his voice. Pretty soon they were screaming at each other, and then the car abruptly drove off.

The experience remains a vivid one for me, as it was the moment that I soured on protests for good. I recently read (though can't find the link right now, sry) that studies have shown protests to be an effective means of social change because, at sufficient size, they force politicians to renew conversation on a certain topic. Yet my experience had been different. Politicians seemed unreachable on Iraq, and in any case I didn't care as much about them. I wanted the people around me to see that I could care about my country and want the war to stop, and I wanted them to reconsider their support. Instead, our vigil seemed to be driving them further away. Those whose support had been nominal were inflamed by what they saw as sour-grapes from the left wing of the country. I left the protest that night abruptly, and didn't attend any more. Slogans and posters didn't seem like the way to begin a conversation.

And anyway, I didn't feel effective during the Iraq protests -- nor do I think I was. Anti-war demonstrations, however well organized on the ground, were confused in their cause; they became places for liberals to go and be pissed off together, rather than an outlet for those of any political stripe to express their doubts about a dangerous war.

I provide this little story in the hopes that it proves I am at least a bit self-aware when I call out the tea parties for what they are: horrible nonsense, sour grapes that have hyper-fermented into a nationwide temper tantrum.

If anything, the tea-partiers, no matter how sincere they feel, have it worse than I did back in the early aughts. At least, billing ourselves as 'anti-war' protesters (which we all unfailingly did), our primary issue was clear, no matter how divisive all of our associated causes were. The tea partiers, in their quest for symbolism, have sacrificed even that. No one really knows what it is they're so mad about. Government spending? Where were they for the past eight years? Taxes? Tax levels are lower than in Reagan's era, and have been cut for the vast majority of Americans. The bailouts? Show me a Republican with a single better idea. Gay marriage? Sorry, but your time has passed.

Instead, what we see is a hodge-podge of conspiracy theorists ranting about the federal reserve, or Barack Obama's birth certificate. Racists, (some of the parties have been organized by Stormfront, the white pride movement) Glenn Beck fans, (i.e. people worse than racists) and survivalists fill out the ranks. The whole menagerie makes the anti-war movement seem tame by comparison.

I did attend one more protest. My freshman year of college, as an exercise in cultural anthropology, I tagged along with some pseudo-anarchist friends to a World Bank protest in DC. I found myself surrounded by anarchists, (the left-wing equivalent of survivalists) Cuba and Hamas apologists, and conspiracy theorists certain that 9/11 had been perpetrated by Zionists.

But we could only muster about 500 of these horrible people for our march to Dupont Circle. So what's the right wing's excuse for 250,000? What is it, exactly, that is sweeping their ranks?

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: the Sarah Palin of Iran?

2009-04-13T16:32:00.000-07:00

There's a lot to unpack and think about in this nice profile of Ahmadinejad in the New Yorker. Some of my favorite bits:

This winter, President Rafael Correa, of Ecuador, a protégé of Chávez, came to Tehran to sign a number of trade deals. At the ceremony, Correa, a big man, arranged himself on a sofa in an expansive, loose-limbed way. Ahmadinejad looked scrawny beside him; he wore a cardigan and a rumpled gray suit. He smiled at odd moments, and seemed awkward, unsure of what to say. They were like a mismatched bride and groom in an arranged marriage. Correa struck all the right notes for a foreign leader hopeful of obtaining financial credits from Iran. “We consider Iranians a heroic people who knew how to rid themselves of a bloody dictatorship that was backed by the West,” he said. “This example inspires us in Latin America.” Looking pleased, Ahmadinejad turned to Correa, embraced him, and exclaimed, “I’ve found a new friend, and I am not going to lose him now.”

“At the university, Ahmadinejad was very active in the Basij organization, and when the reformists came to power in 1997, with Khatami, he used to make problems for the professors and come to class with a kaffiyeh, to show his solidarity with the Palestinian cause,” Hadian said.

A senior Iraqi politician who has met Ahmadinejad a number of times said that, at a meeting in Tehran two years ago, Ahmadinejad spoke about little but the Mahdi. The politician heard from others that Ahmadinejad had blueprints for a planned triumphal superhighway and reception point in Tehran, to be built for the Mahdi’s eventual arrival.

Mohammad Ali Ramin advises Ahmadinejad on the Holocaust and is said to have shaped the President’s views on the subject. One morning this winter, Ramin met me and an interpreter on the campus of the Message of Light University, in Tehran, where he teaches comparative philosophy. We sat outdoors, in a cabana, with cement stools that were made to look like tree stumps. Ramin is a tall man in his fifties, unusually fair for an Iranian, with thinning blond hair and a clipped blond beard. He lived and worked in Germany for many years—as what, he wouldn’t say.

Ramin explained that the prevailing history of the Holocaust was unfair. The West, he said, had transferred its “Jewish problem” to the Middle East. “But it seems that the U.S. and other Western governments have finally decided to get rid of the Jews,” Ramin said. “By bringing Hitler, and by taking the Jews to the Muslim world, they have created a situation in which the Jews will be destroyed. They have created a situation where, because they are killing Palestinians, the Jews are more hated than ever.” He put on his glasses, and, for the first time, met my eyes. “And so you can see that Israel has been created to destroy not only Muslims but the Jews themselves.”

It had grown cold, but Ramin was reluctant to bring us to his office. Finally, looking unhappy, he led us in, glancing around as he entered. As we sat in front of his desk, Ramin informed me that the Jews had carried out the 9/11 attacks. “The Zionists have blamed it on the Muslims so that they have an excuse to attack some Muslim nations,” he said. But it was all for naught. The Jews had also helped Nero, and it had not saved the Roman Empire from collapse.

A large bookcase ran the length of the wall behind Ramin’s desk. A couple of pictures propped up on one of the shelves caught my eye. One was of Imad Mugniyah, the Hezbollah commander, who was killed in a car-bomb explosion in Damascus, in February, 2008. The other depicted a group of men, Orthodox Jews, silhouetted against a yellow background. Loops of Farsi script ran in red across the base of the picture. When Ramin was called to the door for a moment, I asked my interpreter to quickly translate the words on the picture. He said, “It says ‘money-grubbers, bloodsuckers.’ ”

And, from the "realist" standpoint, perhaps the most important passages:

How much power Ahmadinejad actually wields in the complex structure of the Iranian state is not transparent at all. There is no one more powerful than Ayatollah Khamenei, who has been Supreme Leader, the country’s paramount religious and political authority and the commander-in-chief of its armed forces, since Khomeini’s death, in 1989. Ahmadinejad requires the approval of the Majlis, or parliament, to pass laws; Khamenei can issue a fatwa. After his election, Ahmadinejad publicly kissed Khamenei’s hand, demonstrating his fealty. Hossein Shariatmadari, who is the Supreme Leader’s representative and the editor of Kayhan, the newspaper of the clerical establishment, said, “Mr. Ahmadinejad, you know, is only the head of the implementation in Iran.”

Their relationship is more complicated than that. On one visit I made to Tehran, with Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani, in December, 2006, Iraqi officials who were present for the highest-level meetings told me that Ahmadinejad had been deferential with the Supreme Leader, but that the two men clearly worked closely together. One of Talabani’s senior aides recounted a significant moment. Talabani had given a blunt assessment of the situation in Iraq; at the time, Shiite-Sunni sectarian killings were at their height, and Iranian-backed militias were heavily involved. As Talabani described the violence, Khamenei repeatedly exclaimed, “Oh, how terrible! We are praying for you.” Finally, Talabani interrupted him: “What we need is not prayers, we need medicine.” Khamenei replied, “I will provide the prayers and he”—he gestured to Ahmadinejad—“will provide the medicine.”

“We can guess ourselves silly about the intricacies of Iranian politics,” Lee Hamilton said, “but we will never really know the truth.” Vali Nasr added, “Even Khamenei’s authority is constrained by a whole web of relationships.”

Thomas Pickering, a former Under-Secretary of State, who has been meeting with Iranians in an effort to help formulate a new U.S. policy approach, said, “In talking with the Iranians for several years, we have discovered that it’s difficult to know for certain the Iranians’ internal political architecture. There’s no way to have the tight intelligence to know when the right or wrong time to try talking with them might be. With the opacity of their system, it’s always going to be a kind of crapshoot.”

It's clear that, whatever your personal feelings about the Iranian president, he is a complex individual. And it also seems hard not to consider that a serious drawback when it comes to dealing with Iranian nuclear ambitions.

There is a consensus I see developing among blog-people that Iran doesn't really want a nuclear weapon--that they mean what they say when they promise to use nuclear technology for energy purposes only. That consensus has been built on a few precepts, among them:
1. That Ahmadinejad's rhetoric advocating violence against Israel is just rhetoric, or that if it is not, anyway he has no actual power in the Iranian government; and
2. That despite some appearances Iran is a sensibly-governed, democratic state that has nothing to gain from a nuclear weapon, because it recognizes the futility of a nuclear strike on Israel; and anyway
3. Even if Iran does desire a nuclear weapon, we have no clear path to stopping them, and therefore we are better served distancing ourselves from a hard-line Israeli government too prone, in the proud Middle Eastern tradition, to shooting its mouth off.

Number three is indisputable; fine. But we certainly have a lot to think about when it comes to these other assumptions. That Ahmadinejad is a fundamentalist is no well-kept secret. But was I alone in understanding his role in the actual governance of Iran to be extremely limited? I seem to recall repeated references to his position as "figurehead" of Khameini's regime--a description that seems wholly ridiculous, if this profile is to be believed.

I'm no fan of Benjamin Netanyahu, or the Likud generally--but his interview with Jeff Goldberg last month looks a bit less war-mongery in light of some of this reporting, I think.

Culture at the end of nature

2009-03-28T12:43:00.000-07:00

Daniel Larison has an interesting post on what we mean (or ought to mean) when we speak of cultural differences. The sweet, nutritious center:

Recognizing vast, significant differences between cultures and religions is sane and necessary, and I can understand very well the impulse to push back against the fantasies of universalist theories that hold that these differences are superficial and unimportant, but... Essentialist arguments betray their basic hostility to history and culture in that they are blind to the possibility of change over time within and across cultures, they cannot fully accept that culture is a human invention, and hold instead that cultural difference must be rooted in essence rather than in will, which in turn denies the importance of human agency in history and endorses one of a variety of determinisms.

About a month ago, on a short trip through Jordan, I spent a lot of time writing about the conflict between what Larison is here terming 'universalism' and cultural distinctions, in an attempt to grapple with some of my own prejudices. Walking down the street and seeing "There is no God but Allah" on one side and on the other a Coca-Cola ad is enough to send any aspiring universalist into reverie.

It's conventional to assign touchy/feely universalism to a liberal or progressive point of view, although in fact it seems more of a consequence of capitalism. (What could be better for globalized business than confidence in a worldwide desire for a decent paycheck, TV, and central air?) I can tend too far in the opposite direction, labeling as a right-wing nut anyone who dares assign primary cause to cultural roots.

So Larison's distinction appeals to me, insofar as it seems like a respectful acknowledgment of cultural diversity that also gets pretty close to what I find so frustrating about the "culture warriors" against whom I find myself railing so often. Daniel wants to return the question of cultural influence vs. one-world hopefulness to a dignified place: human agency.

Nonetheless, even if I can respect the moral impulse, I'm skeptical of the usefulness of such a framing. Daniel says that "essentialists" deny that culture is a "human invention." Is this right? My impression has been, in the more typical diatribes that are less extreme than that of the Peters column to which Daniel is referring, that what the so-termed "essentialists" are ranting about is not the human origin of culture, but rather the inability of individuals to rise above its influence. When Andrew and others fret about "alien culture," they're not worried that Afghanis and Pakistanis are genetically incapable of understanding the Western world; rather, they fear that individuals, caught up in the overwhelming influence of their environments, will be unable (or will prefer not) to see past them.

I think it is ultimately no more than a comforting ellision to say that those who subscribe to theories of cultural warfare therefore do not understand that culture changes over time. Quite likely many of them do. What they are pointing out, sometimes xenophobically, is that when a culture "changes over time," it often takes decades or centuries to see real change -- making cultural change a process that takes place outside of the existence of the individual.

There can be no question that the people Daniel calls "essentialists" and "universalists" lack respect for people of other cultures in their fundamental assumptions: either good, Western people are to be defended from the savages at all costs, or the savages are to be saved from themselves at all costs.

But in Daniel's formulation, what remains unanswered is the urgent, political question of culture: what motivates the individual, the man who is so small that he essentially lives outside the slow-moving tide of cultural history? In the globalized world, it is in no way sufficient to say that the Jordanian man-on-the-street is essentially Jordanian, or essentially capitalist. He is a mixture of both -- even though, in many ways, the two aspects are in tension.

I pay a cab driver to take me on a tour of Petra, an enormous canyon considered to be one of the wonders of the world. He is a native of the small town just above the formations, and he knows them like the back of his hand; he has been giving informal tours for years. He also knows that I am Western, because of my skin and hair and language. He knows I am Jewish and came to visit his village from Israel because I told him so. We are together in the canyon on a cold weekday afternoon, an off-day for hiking; there are no other tourists. By all appearances my driver is a friendly, law-abiding citizen of his country -- but we are two weeks out from the war in Gaza.

Suddenly there are substantive reasons to care about the relationship my driver has to his cultural and capitalist heritage. On the one hand, I represent business and, in my own small way, prosperity for his village. On the other hand, I am the very image of the callous Western thug: an arrogant American Jew, wandering carefree through a foreign country that has had less than a century of peace with my current home, in the wake of a bombing campaign that the vast majority of Muslims here consider to be an unspeakable crime.

It would be melodramatic to suggest that this man would physically assault me, even in if the situation were more extreme. But what is to stop him from simply leaving me in the canyon? He could easily return to his cab and drive back to town without me. It would take me an entire afternoon of strenuous, dangerous hiking to get back to the village -- assuming I didn't get lost. The driver would forgo his fare, and in exchange be able to take some small part in punishing international Jewry for its role in Gaza. How does he make his decision?

It is the question of culture at this level that concerns me -- and many others writing on the subject, I suspect. How do world capitalism and local or regional heritage interact in the individual? When, as Americans, we engage with the individuals outside our immediate cultural understanding, with what, precisely, are we engaging? These are not questions that lend themselves to easy answers, and no amount of well-intentioned respect on our part will solve them. But they are precisely the questions that matter most when we talk about the perceptual impact of American presence, military or otherwise, abroad.

The quiet

2009-03-22T06:43:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick note to apologize for the lack of activity around these parts over the past few weeks. I am now beginning in earnest re-entry procedures for my return to the US: selling furniture, trying to get my apartment rented out, organizing plane tickets, and of course struggling against the grim course of history to find -- of all things -- a job. (By the way if anyone reading this has one of those laying around, feel free to drop me a note.) That's necessarily translated to a fall-off in activity, which I'm sad to say is probably only going to continue for the next few weeks, perhaps even months. But I will be back, job or no, at some point in the not-too-distant-future. You don't have to stay tuned, but don't write me off.

Yours,

Max

Jon Stewart's uncensored interview with Jim Cramer

2009-03-13T03:21:00.000-07:00

This is probably going to be all over the net today, but just in case it's not: you can't afford not to watch the unedited version of Stewart's interview with Jim Cramer.

And while we're at it

2009-03-08T05:50:00.000-07:00

Can Andrew Sullivan please tone it down a bit? Taking, of all people, Charles Krauthammer at his word when it comes to Israeli foreign policy is more than a little bit credulous. Last I checked, Israelis were not a monolithic entity hellbent on "apocalyptic war," and Sullivan would do well to remember that.

Appoint Chas Freeman

2009-03-08T03:26:00.001-07:00

I would be remiss if I did not weigh in on Mr. Freeman, who has suddenly become the pet topic of every blogger with any interest in Israel. There's not much more to say that Larison hasn't said already -- Freeman is being recommended as an intelligence analyst, not a policy-maker; his views on Israel, although I do believe they are unfair, shouldn't disqualify him.

Awhile ago I wrote a post I never ended up publishing on 'sinat chinam,' which is Hebrew for 'baseless hatred.' Judaism doesn't have cardinal sins, but if it did sinat chinam would certainly be one of them. Rabbis teach that the second temple in Jerusalem was destroyed because Jews felt sinat chinam toward one another, and the post was going to tie that in to the nasty fight between Glenn Greenwald and Jeff Goldberg, two good writers who seem to have sworn to talk past each other indefinitely, at least when it comes to Israel.

I bring it up now because Greenwald, in a lengthy tirade against neoconservatives last month, suggested that their 'smear tactics' were coming to an end. At the time, I doubted it, and I imagine Greenwald would accept the Freeman debacle as proof enough.

I differ with Larison, who suggests that the purpose of the resistance to Freeman is to force the Obama administration to tack rightward on Israel in other matters. I do believe that many of Freeman's critics truly believe (as I do) that his public remarks about Israel have been unfair and unsettling. And while I disagree with them when they say that those remarks make Freeman unfit for his assignment, I nonetheless believe that they believe that's true. But I don't extend the benefit of the doubt to everyone. When The New Republic, once (I'm told) a really excellent magazine, returns for the nth time to demolish a politician or appointee it perceives to be anti-Israel, does anyone still believe the charges? I doubt it -- and that those charges are in this case very likely accurate just makes the situation worse.

Greenwald was wrong to think that with a new administration comes the magic reformation of political discourse in the United States. (Just as, incidentally, he was wrong to think that it's only neoconservatives who engage in smear tactics.) But he was perhaps not wrong to wish for it. I think it will be a long time before Israel advocates start to feel pressure from the country at large to moderate their demands, because the country is still by-and-large pro-Israel. But Jon Chait and others may want to consider whether Freeman is worth the expenditure of so much social capital.

The View from Ramallah

2009-02-28T09:23:00.001-08:00

I'm back from a short visit with some friends of mine who live in Ramallah, the West Bank's cultural capital and current seat of the PA government. They're both employed by a private high school as a college counselor and an English teacher, and are finishing their second year living in the WB. (And, to my surprise, considering a third.)

I first visited Jeff and Glenn (names changed for my personal amusement) late last year, when they were fresh from summer break. We had a great time, and I felt immensely lucky for the chance to see the West Bank from the inside. We went to a hip-hop show at Ramallah's new(ish) convention center, poked around some of the expat/foreign-worker community's favorite bars, and drove across the city and surrounding villages, taking stock of the restricted roads and settlement development. It was a pleasant visit that largely reinforced my own notions of how the peace process could and should proceed, and a great opportunity to catch up with some friends I've known for years.

Going back was different. There was the usual hospitality. The tours of upper- and lower-crusts in the city. But during dinner, our talk turned to the political, as it often does, and I was shocked by the tenor. Where only five or six months ago we seemed to be on the same ideological page, at some point Jeff and Glenn and I seemed to have seriously parted ways in our understanding of the conflict.

I'm still trying to deal with the overall experience of the conversation, but I think I have to describe our opinions as having 'radicalized' (with all the baggage that term brings.) In particular Jeff, who always enjoys asking me blunt political questions, (our relationship goes all the way back to high school, where I was the outspoken editor of the school paper -- a role from which I don't think he's ever quite separated me, years later) was eager to get my take on Gaza.

As readers of this blog know, I was an early supporter of the Gaza operation, offering a spirited defense that has been, to date, the only thing anyone seemed interested in reading about around these parts. But even this cold human brain has a heart beating somewhere below, and as the death toll mounted I, too, felt some doubt about the moral status of the operation.

Suddenly, sitting in a restaurant surrounded by Palestinians, waited on by Palestinians, being quizzed by an American friend who had lived amongst and felt intense sympathy for Palestinians, my own defenses for the Gaza war seemed at best academic -- at worst, glib and even unfeeling.

Jeff, for his part, was prepared to believe that IDF claims of having targeted militants were essentially lies. Although he repeatedly claimed he felt no ill-will toward individual Israeli soldiers, nonetheless it was his impression that they operated within a system that compelled them to fire indiscriminately and lie about their targets. (That there might be incentive on the Palestinian side to engage in the same behavior seemed to him irrelevant.) Operating from that first principle, it's no surprise that Jeff understood the war as an essentially criminal enterprise, devoid of morality, utility, and oftentimes even sense. He bitterly recounted anecdotal stories of aid trucks not being allowed into the territory.

To my ears, even the sympathy that Jeff expressed for the suffering of rocketed Israelis sounded perfunctory. But I was in any case beginning to doubt my ears, as well as my voice.

What had happened to us in the space of only a few months? Again and again, Jeff came back to his theme for the evening -- that the Gaza war had exponentially swelled Gazan bitterness toward Israel, underwriting violent resistance for years, perhaps decades, to come.

Looking at the two of us -- same age, same nationality, same friends, same home town -- I had to agree. We seemed to have been taking stock of two entirely different wars. For Jeff, 1300 mostly innocent people had lost their lives in a plot hatched by Israel six months ago. 25 kilometers away, I saw civilians caught in the midst of a pitched battle between a fundamentalist Muslim regime and a state that had been targeted by such regimes for decades.

Jeff spent the war immersed in the images and rhetoric of the Palestinian cause -- I spent it in brooding over a worldwide outburst of anti-Semitism and hypocritical international rhetoric.

Which of us was right? Or were we both unable to see the big picture? I prided myself on having a "realistic" outlook on the conflict -- a fact-driven analysis that shunned ideology in favor of policy solutions. Now I doubt myself. My "realistic" outlook allowed me to accept massive civilian death. Do I want to subscribe to an analysis that makes such compromises? Is there any way in which that kind of acceptance is not, ultimately, driven by ideology? And isn't it incredibly dangerous to treat one's own terms as those of "reality," in opposition to objections like Jeff's? Presumably, Jeff believes his outlook to also be based on reality, or he would find another outlook to have.

Tomorrow I'm headed to Jordan for a few days to meet another old friend studying in Aqabah. I'm still wrestling with this conversation and I'll have more to say when I return later this week.

Simply incredible

2009-02-17T10:47:00.000-08:00

If anyone can offer an explanation for this that doesn't admit that UNRWA does not seriously consider Hamas to be a terrorist organization, I would love to hear it.

If the UN's level of commitment to conflict resolution here consists of allowing Hamas militants to guard a weapons cache unsupervised, it seems fair to ask what organization on earth can free us from the endless violence.

Morning in Jerusalem

2009-02-12T02:48:00.000-08:00

I picked up a copy of the Post on my way into the magazine this morning. On the bus, I was able to glean the following concerning coalition building:

I am not knocking the Post at all -- coverage all over Israel reads the same way. The fact is that nobody has any idea how this thing is going to end, including the politicians themselves. They're playing a chess game, except that they can make as many moves as they want as fast as they want, except that they're blindfolded. Or, to dodge the laborious metaphor, we can satisfy ourselves with a quippy Jeffrey Goldberg:

The Arab world doesn't have enough democracy; Israel has too much.

Memo to Lieberman: join Kadima

2009-02-11T12:07:00.000-08:00

My op-ed urging Avigdor Lieberman to join Kadima will appear in tomorrow's print edition of the Post; for now you can read it here. Key graphs for those just looking for the argument:

You believe in building a Palestinian state to preserve a demographically Jewish Israel. That may not be the primary concern of the international community, but two states for two peoples will satisfy their concerns as effectively as yours.

If you are serious about building such a state, as you say you are, you have the opportunity to make history as the leader who finally brought a conclusion to decades of bloody fighting over the Palestinian issue. With a willing partner in the Obama administration, and Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah, you have the tools to begin the process of building a final-status agreement that will establish a home for Palestinians in the West Bank.

BUT YOU must build a coalition with Kadima. Binyamin Netanyahu was not serious about negotiations with Palestinians in his last tenure as prime minister, and is not serious about them now. His position as leader of the traditional right wing means that he will be required to waste time pandering to pro-settlement parties that will demand the impossible from their government. Netanyahu is far more likely to drag his feet indefinitely, in the vain hope of pleasing all the people all the time, than to take any concrete steps on the road toward building a Palestinian state.

Kadima will have no such burden. Tzipi Livni, following Ehud Olmert, has much more ideological flexibility in pursuing a two-state solution. Her base, not made up of settlers, will not desert her because of perceived weakness on the issue. Livni, entering power at the same time as a more flexible, more involved US administration, has the best chance to make real progress on the issue.

And you can be a part of that historic moment, one that will likely take more than one Knesset term, and one that therefore you yourself will have a chance to see to its conclusion.

Read the rest.

The results are in...

2009-02-10T14:32:00.000-08:00

Somehow, Livni is pulling it out. The official tally won't be in for another few hours, but if these numbers hold, it will be an impressive night for Kadima. Somewhere Netanyahu, who refused a public debate with Livni, Barak, and Lieberman based on strong internal polling, is kicking himself.

One of our political reporters had a nice analysis of the potential fallout from this election a few days ago. His overall thesis was that a durable coalition was not in Israel's immediate future; in our editorial meeting, he predicted another election within a year and a half. Kadima's upset victory will no doubt increase the possibility. (An interesting side-note: Netanyahu may yet get the nod for PM from Peres. Livni, after all, had the opportunity to form a coalition just three months ago, and failed to do so.)

The speculation concerning coalition-building now begins. I'm sad to say that Noah Millman, leading off for the American Scene, has a not-too-sharp post that misreads a number of the factors here. A few points:

*With regard to a national unity government, the concern is certainly not Avigdor Lieberman. (By the way, while I find Lieberman reprehensible, he is not advocating 'stripping Israeli Arabs of citizenship,' but rather administering some sort of 'loyalty oath' which he and his supporters have yet to even define, let alone implement. This is merely red meat for the Jewish right; the real problem with Lieberman is his promise to redesign the High Court so that judges are elected, rather than appointed -- a serious blow to a healthy democracy.) Additionally, the concern is not the West Bank. Netanyahu certainly has no interest in freezing or scaling back settlements; Livni's interest is nominal at best. Right or wrong, Israelis feel no urgency in this matter.

Folks, the name of the game is Iran, plain and simple. Despite Larison's wishful thinking, for Israelis Iran is not 'misdirection' to keep the international eye off settlements. It's very real to people who live here, up to and including government officials. Israelis are counting the days until Iran builds its first nuclear weapon, a milestone widely expected to be reached within the first term of the new Knesset. This is the only reason, outside of electoral necessity, that anyone is talking about national unity.

(By the way, I don't know how many NY Times reports the average conservative requires to start believing in the reality of an Israeli strike on Iran, but I wouldn't be betting against it, if diplomatic progress isn't made within the year.)

*I'm also surprised that Millman is optimistic for a national unity government at all, considering that Netanyahu has clearly stated that he won't join such a government with Kadima. My guess is that he would only consider the option if Livni agreed to step aside and allow him to fill the prime minister role. How likely is that? If Livni feels she can build a coalition, even at a bare-bones 61 seats, I'd put the chance at an even 0%. If she does the math and doesn't see an option, then I could see it happening.

*What's funny about Millman's misconception of the coalition process is that he believes there's even some impulse on the part of the three 'traditionally' large parties to shut Lieberman's Yisrael Beitenu out. But the opposite is likely true. Lieberman has been careful not to say which party he would join in a coalition, leaving himself open to be courted by both Kadima and Likud -- a process that is certainly taking place even as I write this. Let's do the math:

Both the centrist Kadima and center-right Likud will certainly join with Labor, putting them at around 41 and 43 seats, respectively. With Yisrael Beitenu, both parties get within 5 seats or fewer of a majority -- an immensely attractive proposition, and one that is far from out of the question: Lieberman holds his own PM aspirations, and might be willing to temper YB's more extreme planks in order to have sway over the majority.

From there, either party is easily within striking distance of 61. Kadima picks up lefties Meretz, Hadash, and United Torah Judaism. Or Likud picks up UTJ and Jewish Home, and maybe even National Union. Both hypothetical coalitions are able to walk away from the (immensely-unpopular) Arab parties, as well as (interestingly) Shas, which, contrary to Millman's assertion, is not even in the same ideological galaxy as Yisrael Beitenu, its leader having informed the Orthodox community that those voting for YB would surely bring a curse from God on their families. (Behold the dangers of flattening the bizarre and often senseless world of Israeli politics into a simple 'left-right' dichotomy. This is not your mother's two-party system.)

By the way, even if Millman was right to group Shas and YB, (which he wasn't, but still) the fact is that neither Livni nor Netanyahu could have brought them into a coalition anyway. Livni's position on Jerusalem -- give the Arab part back to Arabs (shocking, I know!) -- was why Shas wouldn't join her original coalition. There's little chance she's changed her mind. As for Netanyahu, he stopped making friends in Shas when he flattened the child tax credit that was, up until that point, allowing religious families to collect enormous sums of government dole for their children, without requiring that the parents be gainfully employed. Unless either potential PM gives up these sticking points, Shas is going to find a home in the opposition. And with YB's support, the math works without the Haredim -- so don't look for anyone to be courting Shas anytime soon.

So here's my prediction for how these results play out: Livni goes to Lieberman with some kind of policy compromise to try to bring him on board, likely including a prominent cabinet role for the man himself. I think Lieberman will say yes, as I'm sure he'd be as happy to stick it to Likud as Kadima. If he doesn't, Livni makes a quick attempt to cobble something together between the left-wing and the Arab parties, but she fails. Netanyahu is then given the offer to form a national unity government in exchange for the PM-ship. He goes to YB to cut a deal, threatens to lock them out of a unity government, gets their support, thumbs his nose at Kadima and forgoes national unity in favor of a right-wing coalition including Likud, YB, Labor, UTJ, and Jewish Home.

The power, in other words, lies with Lieberman. It will be up to him to decide whether he thinks he can get a better deal from Kadima or Likud.

Reopening Gaza wounds; war crimes trials in the works?

2009-02-02T03:40:00.000-08:00

UPDATE: You can also catch this post at Jewcy. Feel free to comment there.

Though rockets continue to land in Israel every day, and Israel continues to drop bombs in Gaza, most of the media seems to have gotten bored with the situation and moved on to other things. Welcome to intractability! Where the exciting becomes deadening.

Two groups have not lost interest yet: the Spanish court system (?) and the Hague, both of which are laying the groundwork for pursuing war crimes cases against Israel. The allegations surround the use of white phosphorous, which some Palestinian and international groups claim was inappropriate. Ha'aretz has details:

The IDF is itself currently investigating whether a reserve paratroops brigade made improper use of phosphorus shells during the 22-day offensive against Hamas in Gaza.

The brigade fired about 20 such shells in a built-up area of northern Gaza.

Aside from this one case, the shells were used very sparingly and, in the army's view, in compliance with international law.

No one knows yet what exactly happened in that instance. It's important to note that white phosphorous is not itself illegal under international law, and that the Red Cross has so far sided with Israel in the public debate (ie that Israel only used the agent to light up combat areas, not directly against enemy combatants or civilians).

The question: if they are found to have used white phosphorous inappropriately, should these soldiers be prosecuted for war crimes?

Argument for: White phosphorous is an incredibly inhumane weapon. It burns clean through anything it touches, including human flesh and bone, unless its oxygen supply is cut off. It is indiscriminate and extremely difficult to escape -- if it was used as a weapon it likely injured or killed many civilians. Israel, in compliance with international law, explicitly bans its use in this fashion. Any soldiers who were using it this way violated the laws of their own country as well as the laws of international human rights. In other words, this was not an innocent mistake -- the soldiers knew that they were breaking the law, and they chose to proceed anyway. As a western-style democracy, Israel has an obligation to give these men and women up to the ICC.

Argument against: The legacy of "Cast Lead" is still indeterminate. The 2006 Lebanon War solidified for Israelis a feeling of impotence and helplessness that very much contributed to its Gaza operation. War crimes trials for Israeli soldiers would seal the fate of "Cast Lead" for the public as one more failure. Trials would give credence and support to the paranoia of the far-right in Israel, and their incoming governing coalition would be immensely strengthened. At a time when moderates have so much hope that Obama will part ways with Bush, Netanyahu may part ways with Olmert, leaving us with the same situation, the roles merely reversed. While those soldiers may be criminals, a prosecution by the ICC (or, again for some reason, by the Spanish) represents a potentially catastrophic failure to see the big picture. Israelis will not make concessions to Palestinians if they feel that their ability to defend themselves has been jeopardized, period. ICC prosecutions, no matter how justified, must be postponed indefinitely.

Honestly, I don't know where I stand on this one. The pragmatist in me would prefer to see guilty parties prosecuted within the Israeli system. That would be a fair compromise, except that the Israeli court's record of actually convicting guilty soldiers is, well, not good. Basically, either decision will mean giving something up. The question we'll have to ask ourselves is whether we give up the Palestinian ability to seek justice, or the Palestinian prospects for statehood in the next four to eight years; a bit of the Israeli soul, or the prospect for a lasting peace.

Maybe folks out there don't believe me, or think that we could have it both ways: submit to the ICC, and still get Obama to find a way to put some muscle behind the peace process. And that may be correct; I don't think anybody ever made a lot of money betting against the President's political skill.

But I met Benyamin Netanyahu yesterday. He came to the Post and sat with us for about an hour and a half, answering questions and laying out his vision for the future of Israel. While the meeting was off the record, and so I can't actually quote him on anything, I will say this: Netanyahu is looking to build a "big-tent" Likud. And as reprehensible as I find many of his policies to be, I'll say it again: I don't think anybody ever made a lot of money betting against the man's political skill.

Netanyahu's path to victory has been very clear. Play to Israeli fears of impotence, then reap the benefits. The more that the international community interferes with what Israelis perceive as personal business, the stronger Netanyahu is going to get, and the bigger his tent is going to become. And as in any multi-party system, a big tent is not just about winning the next election. It's about the act of governance itself. If Netanyahu builds a broad coalition -- if, for example, the country is shifted far enough to the right that Kadima has no choice but to join such a coalition -- Netanyahu will essentially be given carte blanche.

What's scariest about this prospect is that Netanyahu made if fairly clear that his focus is going to be on Israel's (ailing) domestic system. He wants to talk about taxes and education reform. The "national security" and "Palestine" portfolios may well end up with another party in the coalition. Can you guess who that might be? I've been thinking about it all day, and I have to say I give the edge to Yisrael Beitenu (Israel our Home) over Kadima. That, folks, is not just a temporary bump in the peace process. It's a shock to the system.

Maybe this will all go another way. But building something good out of the bad is going to take a light touch, not the Hague. I don't think that those who are serious about the success of the peace process can afford to squander some of the opportunities that have been presenting themselves: reports that Hamas is considering a one-year deal, that a pragmatic wing, more interested in governance than war, is beginning to emerge in the party.

Make no mistake: a strong Netanyahu will squander these opportunities, purposefully, and with relish. I know that it's not for the ICC to take a political stance. But I hope that the US and the UN will see their way to at least putting off any talk of a trial.

Round-up of RS McCain's hilarious drubbing

2009-02-01T01:09:00.000-08:00

It's always nice to log in at the desk and find that somebody is kicking Robert Stacy McCain's ass. I'm going to have an immensely satisfying day.

DOUBLE BONUS: McCain trying to play it off in the comments to Freddie's post. I guess you've hit the big-time, Freddie, you've got this guy on the run!

Is it even possible to end the culture war?

2009-01-31T03:03:00.000-08:00

Damon Linker and Peter Beinart have the blogs chasing their tales with a couple of op-eds in TNR and the Daily Beast, in which they each put forward the possibility of Obama ending the culture war. Linker's piece is lengthy and deserving the full treatment, so I'll leave him for the next post.

Beinart's piece is more of a survey, in which he seems to suggest that the "gist" of Obama's policy is that he is anti-culture war. Ross Douthat was able to pick apart the problems here fairly quickly:

Beinart's argument is shot through with the characteristic liberal conceit that the culture wars are a one-sided affair, in which right-wing culture warriors start fights and peace-loving liberals try to avoid them. In reality, what makes Obama promising to liberals isn't his potential to "end" culture-war battles - it's his potential ability to win them, by dressing up the policies that Planned Parenthood or the Human Rights Campaign or the ACLU or whomever would like to see in the kind of religiose language and fuzzy talk about consensus that swing voters like to hear.

This has been a complaint about Obama's rhetoric from those on the right since his inaugural address, and one which appeals to me in principle. Concerning the stimulus in particular, it's a nasty political trick to portray opposition as illegitimate. I do believe that Obama enjoys considerable consensus from economists for his plan, and I also don't for a moment credit today's GOP with the fiscal conservatism that they so hypocritically want to claim for their own. Nonetheless, there are healthy arguments to be made against the stimulus in its current form, and it's a dangerous move on Obama's part to pretend otherwise, both for the country and for hope of an enduring liberal majority.

But I will part from Ross in equivocating over the blame for the culture war. It's certainly true that liberals have a place in that war, most fully expressed in abortion, public religious displays, and gay rights. And it's no secret that left-wing vitriol, especially in the wake of proposition 8, can meet or exceed much of what comes from the far right.

But participation in the culture war is not the same as propagation of the culture war, and Ross lacks perspective if he thinks both sides are equally culpable. To be blunt, the right in general, and Republicans in particular, stand guilty of extending the culture war outside of purely "cultural" issues. Whether Democrats failed to do so because they're just not as good at it, or because their coalition was less likely to appreciate such politicking, is an open question. But for Republicans, the abuse of culture has been their primary vehicle of power since, in some sense, Nixon.

It was Nixon who birthed the drug war, which continues today to destroy innocent lives, eat away at the foundations of foreign countries, and trample federalism at every turn. (Something Ross, as an avid Wire fan, should have a sense of.) Is there any purer manifestation of culture war taken too far? Drugs and drug addiction were a medical issue, surrounded by questions of rehabilitation and control. Today, that should be the conversation we still have about drugs. But thanks to Nixon's rabid anti-Hippie campaign, drugs are an issue of punishment and war. This is the quintessential Republican abuse of culture war: take a real issue, develop a stance on it fueled by little more than frustration and resentment, and then lie about it to your base. Next stop: White House.

Lest anyone think that such tricks were isolated to anti-Hippie reactionaries, look no further than global warming for today's newest iteration of culture war outside culture. The world appreciates broad, transparent, and reasonable scientific consensus that man-made climate change is a problem that needs to be confronted seriously and immediately. Yet the far right continues to pretend that global warming -- despite its place in a worldwide conversation -- is somehow a plot of American cultural liberals, designed to neuter the right permanently. The odious phrase "liberal fascism," used to discredit honest, conservative attempts to reign in American environmental excesses, is the hallmark of culture war. Suddenly, environmental issues aren't about the environment; they're about the other guy, who wants to impose a new way of life on you and your family.

Should I continue? How about the way that the right has infected American foreign policy with the "war on terror," the newest subversion of smart diplomacy and military force in favor of "us v. them" culture war? Certainly, the left bears culpability in this newest fiasco as well -- Democrats' failure to oppose the Iraq War was an act of nearly-criminal cowardice. Yet Democrats may at least point to Obama's first days in office as an honest effort to confront and roll back the worst excesses of the new culture war. Whither the right? When even today Republican senators are trying to extract illegal promises of the new attorney general that he will not prosecute anyone in the previous administration, should constitutional violations be brought to light, is this the language of a movement that is repenting for past mistakes? Or is it the rhetoric of an ideologue?

I'll readily concede that culture war, when truly focused on culture, is a real give-and-take. The liberal position on abortion is no more coherent than the conservative position; and while I lean toward the liberal side of the gay marriage debate, there's no question that the way the message is delivered is nasty, intractable, and as much about "the other guy" as it is actually about gays. And yes, even I find the ACLU annoying sometimes.

But the notion that liberals somehow bear equal responsibility with conservatives for the sheer extent of the culture war today is a joke. There's a reason that Democrats are now governing with a broad coalition, while Republicans are left with nothing more than the red meat-eating base: one party has at least been trying to develop an actual stance on the issues of the day; while the other has consistently relied on culture war to make whatever temporary gains it could.

Bellwethers

2009-01-29T06:58:00.000-08:00

This morning, I found out that the House GOP failed to deliver Obama even a single vote on his stimulus package, regardless of meeting after meeting with the new administration, during which Obama was said to have done his best to open up the stimulus plans to debate -- a magnanimous gesture, considering he neither required Republic support, nor often found it curried from the previous administration, when he himself was a congressman.

It's a political statement, to be sure. But what the content is I do not know, and I suspect that most Americans are feeling the same way. Ten years ago, the GOP could have made the issue about spending, and perhaps they want to reclaim that mantle. But I won't be convinced, after the largest and most reckless spending increase in US history was presided over by that party. And at a time when most Americans are asking for government intervention, I have a hard time imagining what the Republicans think they're going to get out of being, as Mike Allen put it in this morning's Playbook, "the party of No."

I guess that Boehner and company decided that if they didn't stand up to the Obama plan, they would look like a bunch of sissies. This is the RedState model of goon politics: oppose because it's the other guys. Don't offer your own vision for the future (since you don't have one). Play the game like you played in your clubhouse when you were a kid: nobody else was allowed to come in -- it didn't matter that once you were inside, all alone, you were totally bored.

I bring all this up because, even as dialogue on Capitol Hill seems to have screeched to a halt, we plebes out here in the nosebleed section have also suffered a serious loss: Culture 11 has announced it is folding, due to lack of funds.

I don't have much to say about C11 that Freddie didn't already mention. I think he's right to point out that perhaps its most exhilarating success was the feeling that it was a bunch of regular guys, talking right alongside a bunch of famous (politically speaking) guys. (I still remember the excitement I felt when Conor was the first to ever leave a comment on this blog, back when nobody was reading).

I'm glad to have been able to read C11 for as long as I did (which was daily for the last six months or so). It opened the door to a whole world for me, where intelligent conservatives were carrying on a lively political debate well outside the mainstream intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican party.

I'm trying not to be angry about the closure, but it's really hard for me to understand how a site like that can't find donors these days. Amidst all the talk of how the right needs to re-conceive itself, I can't help but feel a connection between the failure in the House and this failure. Here we had an incredibly vibrant community, made up of many young conservatives and many curious young liberals, who were daily exposed to great essays and reporting from a conservative point of view. A place where up-and-comers in intellectual conservatism were operating comfortably in a new media environment. Are there no Republicans out there willing to shell out a few bucks for such a phenomenon? Isn't Culture11, in its own small way, exactly what GOP leaders claim to be looking for?

It's only too fitting that the end of C11 should come as the GOP remembers how to be the bunch of worthless hacks it has been for so many years (and their commenting class starts doing things like recommending Rush Limbaugh to the NYT.) At C11, you might have thought they had a chance. But I suppose not. (It's perhaps a measure of their true integrity as conservatives that, should any of C11's editors be reading this right now, they're most likely vehemently disagreeing with the idea that their demise is somehow a bellwether for the conservative movement's near future. God bless'em for this.)

I can't help but quote that incredible Vanity Fair piece (in which David Kuo, the C11 founder, had a prominent role) one more time. It's the headline for the Culture 11 obituary:

"MISSED OPPORTUNITY. MISSED OPPORTUNITY."

Before I forget

2009-01-28T11:17:00.000-08:00

I wanted to quickly link to this great little Q&A that Jeff Goldberg did with Martin Indyk.

Also, Dierkes came through with a great documentary (available on YouTube!) on life for Israeli soldiers and Palestinian citizens of the West Bank. Make sure to check them both out.

Can hostilities be eased under intermittent fire?

2009-01-28T01:28:00.000-08:00

I went to bed last night with news that an Israeli soldier had been killed by a roadside bomb near the Gaza border. I woke up this morning to find that Israel had retaliated with strikes on three smuggling tunnels used by Hamas, and a strike directly against one of the Palestinians responsible. That, apparently, is not all:

"Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said late on Tuesday that the killing of the man on the motorcycle was only an initial reaction and that Israel's full response was still to come. "

Whether the bombing of tunnels constitutes the "full response" I don't think anyone -- perhaps even Olmert himself -- knows. As usual, Israel has more power than plan. But I can hardly fault them; I don't know myself what the proper decisions are.

Will Israel be able to ease the blockade on Gaza while it is still under occasional fire? (In addition to the attack on the soldiers, one Qassam landed in an unpopulated region of the Negev.) I've been harping on the political implications of violence against Israelis in the south for awhile, and my boilerplate has become that unless Israel can put a stop to that violence, the nation as a whole will never stop trending to the far right. Consequence: settlement expansion and militarism will continue to be the order of the day in Israel.

I still believe that, but I tempered my expectations when I allowed for a certain number of rockets to continue to fall during any ceasefire. The idea was that, since Hamas would likely remain divided over negotiations with Israel no matter what, it would be counterproductive to expect total quiet. And since a lifting of the blockade is in Israel's long-term interests, it's worth absorbing a little pain now to get the benefits later.

Now I'm beginning to worry that the government here has not seen things in the same light. True, when a soldier is killed, the response is almost always going to be more harsh -- part of the price of living with a mandatory draft is that the government must send a clear signal that it cares deeply for the life of every enlisted soldier.

But the rhetoric coming from Olmert and his cabinet sounds to me like a message to Hamas that reads two words: 'new day.' They have perhaps decided that overwhelming force will now be not a one-time event, a but a daily occurrence. I fear that they have accepted the right-wing conventional wisdom circulating the country today, which is that if Israel had only responded harshly to every single attack, "Cast Lead" would not have been necessary in the first place.

It's not that I don't see any logic to that belief. But that worldview is concerned only with history up to now -- it does not look to the future. It may be true that if Israel responded to every rocket, a large-scale op like "Cast Lead" would not have been needed (although I suspect that embracing the one to avoid the other would not have resulted in significantly less loss of life.) But there's no future in that path, not then, and not if Olmert chooses to adopt it now.

When I talk to American Jews about Israel (something I used to do much more often before I got so tired of it) I always make a point to ask them where they see Israel in five years, or ten, or fifty. Israel itself is an news-obsessed culture (at the market, in a cab, on a bus, wherever, every hour when the news update broadcasts, everybody turns it up and tunes in), and most foreigners invested in the conflict are the same. It makes focusing on the future difficult.

That's a question Israelis, from the Prime Minister down, need to be asking themselves today. It may make sense from the perspective of the news bulletin to strike Hamas every day. But is there a future in that? Is Israel tomorrow better off with a reoccupied, more-radicalized Gaza? I don't think so.

Counterpoint: don't prosecute the Bush administration

2009-01-26T11:15:00.000-08:00

Now here's a solid argument against putting Bush administration officials on trial:

I think that many people underestimate how incredibly difficult it would be to prove any high level Bush administration official guilty of war crimes in a court of law. The non-lawyers (people like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld) will point to the fact that all of their orders and directives were given the legal blessing of DOJ lawyers, lawyers who graduated from Yale and Harvard and currently hold faculty positions at prestigious law schools. They'll bury the court in an avalanche of motions to dismiss and to suppress evidence, trotting out every conceivable constitutional or executive privilege objection. And they'll parade in witnesses to testify about the dire threats they were facing and all the legal advice they sought and received. Convictions would be enormously difficult.

As for the lawyers themselves (Yoo, Addington, etc.), while I think they are the most to blame in this mess, it's hard to see how they could be prosecuted criminally. They didn't order anything or engaged in any acts of torture. They just provided really bad legal advice. But it's the same stuff they write law review articles about, so it's hard to see how you can make a criminal case out of it. They'll just claim they interpreted the law differently than others.

I realize that a lot of you think a "Truth Commission" is insufficient. But isn't it preferable to a series of high-profile acquittals?

I admit I hadn't thought about these challenges very carefully. I think Anonymous Liberal is right that prosecutions risk the validity of the case against the Bush administration. Even if the President and his advisers are acquitted on technical grounds, it would be easy for Bush partisans to spin the acquittal as a victory for a policy of torture and illegal detention. Is that a risk that Americans can afford to take?

Yet my criticism of AL remains similar, in a way, to my criticism of Schweber: namely, that I don't get the sense that either man has properly balanced the seriousness of the violations with the risks of prosecution. Both assessments have instead given a great deal of weight to partisan rhetoric; far more weight, in fact, than has been given to the actual violations of civil liberties perpetrated by President Bush.

We're not talking about minor infractions in the service of God and Country. This is 1984-level stuff -- the rules that Bush et al invented gave them the power to completely destroy anyone they felt merited such treatment. The fact that they resisted the urge to do so does not change the fact that they opened the door to that dark world. The fact that damage to bipartisanship is even entering this debate as a serious consideration indicates to me that AL and Schweber are still experiencing a fundamental disconnect between what actually transpired during Bush's tenure, and what his violations could (and still can cause) in the future.

If we revise the scale to match the risks that President Bush took, rather than the lives he actually destroyed, a prosecution suddenly seems as though it could still be worthwhile. But I admit I'm no longer at all sure. Perhaps a compromise might be for Holder and the DOJ to conduct an internal investigation, and then advise Obama on the chances of a conviction. Based on that assessment, the department could either pursue criminal charges, or establish a "truth commission" which would simply make public whatever information could be collected.

But that still doesn't answer the central question, which now reads: what percentage chance of a successful prosecution should President Obama consider actionable? 70%? 90%?

Prosecute the Bush Administration

2009-01-25T16:11:00.000-08:00

At Jewcy, Howard Schweber is trying to make the case against prosecuting the Bush administration for war crimes. His bad argument can be divided into two essential ideas:
1. President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, and other administrative officials did not intend to violate the law, therefore they should not be considered culpable if they did, in fact, violate the law.

2. Partisan politics are threatening to consume our national dialogue, and an ugly trial unleashed by Democrats on Republicans is the last thing we need.
Corollary to 2: the peaceful transference of power is itself threatened when Presidents are led to believe they might be prosecuted upon leaving office.

Although #2 appears reasonable, it is actually a much more dangerous line of thinking than #1. But to go in order...

How shall we judge the intent of Bush administration officials? Mr. Schweber never answers (or even asks) that question, yet half his argument rests on the assumption that the past administration believed itself to be operating within the legal bounds of the constitution.

At the center of the question are the John Yoo memos, which originally authorized 'coercive interrogation' and the suspension of habeas corpus for terror suspects. Since being revealed to the public, they have been condemned as faulty by nearly every legal expert who has seen them -- perhaps most infamously by Yoo's own alma mater, Yale Law, which assisted one of the victims of the memos in suing their author. Yet there was one distinct body of legal scholars who found no fault with Yoo's reasoning. That would be the Bush administration, led in this case by John Ashcroft.

How do we measure intent to follow the law? If we cannot rely on the public statements of the White House, and we also cannot rely on its ability to correctly parse the Constitution, what do we have left?

Nothing. There is no way to measure intent, nor should there be. More importantly, White House officials know this. Anyone who thinks John Yoo, a Yale grad, a Berkeley law professor, didn't know he was taking his career in his hands when he penned those memos ought to sit in on a class at Yale, and decide for themselves how stupid somebody can be to make it through. Yoo knew what he was doing, just as Ashcroft and Cheney (and perhaps even Bush) knew. Perhaps they believed it was for the good of the country -- perhaps not. That's a separate argument to be made. But given the number of instances we now know of wherein the administration directly lied to the country in order to advance a set of foreign policy objectives (speaking of which, please do read the above link), can Mr. Schweber credibly make the argument that somewhere, deep down in the core of this mess, an honest attempt was being made to follow the law? I don't think so.

At best, Mr. Schweber can fall back to the claim that no amount of inference can prove that the administration new it was operating outside of the law (at least based on the documents available to us today). Which proves the point. Intent cannot be used as a measure of legality. This is not a criminal prosecution of a single individual. It is by nature the investigation of a conspiracy, and that precludes any notion of intent.

The irony of Mr. Schweber's other argument, that Washington is too obsessed with partisan politics, is that such an obsession seems fully to have possessed Schweber himself. How else could he stand to write off the potential crimes of this administration purely for the sake of bipartisan camaraderie?

Let's be clear: putting the former White House on trial would certainly polarize Washington, and maybe the country. But since when was nasty debate more frightening than illegal wiretapping, imprisonment, and torture? For how long will we pretend that, because none of us was personally imprisoned, it's therefore somehow acceptable that other American citizens were? There are certainly Americans out there who truly believe that every inmate at Guantanamo, or any CIA prison, is guilty. But that should only encourage a reasonably informed individual like Mr. Schweber to stand up in defense of the truth. There are bigger things at stake than a descent into bitter campaigning.

Nowhere is Mr. Schweber's failure to see the forest for the trees more clear than in his suggestion that the peaceful transference of power would be threatened by a fair trial. Can anyone even follow the argument anymore? Somehow, it's not the overwhelming concentration of illegal power in the hands of the executive that threatens peaceful transference. It's the attempt to put a stop to that process. This is so backward it's almost painful.

Look, no one is suggesting that everyone from Bush on down be thrown into a secret prison, without trial, where Barack Obama could daily piss on the face of the former staffer of his choice (though God knows the precedent has all but been set). We are asking for a fair trial. If the President, Vice-President et al have nothing to hide -- if they acted within the law -- then nothing will come of such a trial. Would it be a partisan affair? Yes, that can't be helped. But it would be lawful, and no future executive would have anything to fear from such a process provided that he or she acted within the law.

And isn't that precisely the point? The message that Bush-Cheney sends, right now, is that with enough bureaucratic shuffling, and enough burnable lackeys, the President can get away with anything. If all you have to do is survive for eight years, even a fool could find a way to make use of the confusing rules surrounding the White House to protect himself.

That message needs to change. Not because Bush and Cheney deserve it (though they do), but to protect the office from future exploitation. If President Obama is serious about realigning the executive branch with the Constitution, he needs to pursue the Bush administration with the full force of the law.

The merits of writing policy

2009-01-24T05:08:00.000-08:00

Not to beat a dead horse, but this is a terrific example of the value of attempting to explore the limits of policy, rather than only its moral implications. Consider that I, as an American citizen, had few concrete ideas about how I wanted our government to treat Iran. Though he may not have fully convinced me, Mr. Djerejian has absolutely provided me with food for thought on a fresh Russia perspective:

Regardless, let us think seriously for a moment. Who really believes the Iranians, as if in some re-do of Islamic hordes charging the Gates of Vienna, are set to perpetrate missile strikes against Europe? And while it is true the Shahab-3 missiles have a range of some 1200 or so miles (enough to reach Bulgaria or Greece, say) do we really believe they are keen to attack Athens, Bucharest or Sophia? Or indeed if they roll out a Shahab-4 with longer-range in coming years, that Vienna or Berlin will suddenly be in their sights? Why would the Iranians do this? Please let us not pretend in ribald fashion because they are but ‘mad Mullahs’ or some such, with a collective suicide wish. As I said, this is farcical, and displays an ignorance of the complexities of Iranian statesmanship and the behavior of the Iranian nation-state.

Given this back-drop, we therefore might forgive the Russians not believing us that the true rationale for the contemplated missile shield system is really about Iran—or some other to be concocted Middle Eastern rogue hell-bent on lobbing missiles into central Europe--rather than as is more likely another 'legacy' containment tool aimed at Moscow. (Nor does it help, indeed it adds rather a good dollop of insult to injury, that such anti-missile shields are to be based in former Warsaw Pact nations under Soviet dominion not so long ago.)

It may never reach the eyes or ears of President Obama. But if it reaches enough Americans, either directly or by proxy, they may begin to change their minds about what they want from their government.

Responses to ED, Freddie

2009-01-23T07:25:00.001-08:00

Meant to write this earlier, but I think the League was having some ordinary server trouble, which kept me from being able to reread their responses. Now that they're back up, I'm going to respond to the two separate arguments that have developed: the role of moral v. political discourse in Israel/Palestine; and specific proposals put forward by both these fellows.

Here's Freddie:

To put it simply, those who say “let’s talk policy, not morality” are always, in fact, talking morality, they’re just privileging their own vision of what’s morally significant and pretending that they aren’t. All politics is moral; some people just like to do away with moral consequences because, you know, that’s easier. To say that I’m ignoring policy for meta-speak is, I’m afraid, just a dodge, an empty feint away from the fact that the way we talk about things has enormous salience for what our policy actually is. People don’t want us to talk about our national conversation, presumably, because they don’t want it to change, and that inevitably benefits the blind devotion to a certain thin strata of Israeli politicians and American members of the media who have long ago decided that fidelity to the project of Israel means war and occupation.

Harsh. I'm lucky to be comfortable enough in my anti-occupation credentials to not need to feel threatened by the more imaginative sections of this accusation (and there are many.) I actually do take Freddie's point, broadly. Policy has moral roots, and all political problems are moral problems that have transcended the sphere of the individual -- I would never argue otherwise.

Luckily, I'm pretty sure that's not what I was saying in the first place. Here I am, earlier:

Moral arguments concerning Israel and Palestine may be of incidental interest...but they do not have a place in the larger dialogue about solutions for the region. Moral arguments being made from that perspective are the province of extremists only -- either those who believe Jews have no right to Israel and represent a murderous imperial force, or those who believe that Palestinias/Muslims/Arabs/other-enemy-of-the-day are moral degenerates, destined to war with the "civilized" West...
The moderate stance regarding the fundamental morality of Israel is clear: Jews and Palestinians both have rights to the land. They must find a way to live together, either in one country, or two. All other moral considerations are, in light of the search for a solution, ultimately superfluous.

The source of the confusion lies in Freddie's insistence that, when discussing the fundamental moral issue of Israel/Palestine ("who owns the land"), I was also making a statement about the place of morals in politics generally. Not so. I really am, like I said, just talking about this one issue.

Freddie may disagree with the way I have framed that "fundamental" moral issue, or he may think that there are more than three positions to be taken (ie more than "Jews," "Palestinians," "Both"). But if that's the case, he's going to need to explain to me just what the issue is, or what those previously unknown positions are. For myself, I haven't the faintest idea. When one accepts as valid both Israeli and Palestinian moral arguments to possession of Israel, what else is there to accomplish in this sphere?

As for the rest of that particular argument, I'll make it totally clear that I never, ever chasten Americans (a population of which I am a proud and red-blooded member) for wanting to get involved in the Israel/Palestine issue. As I recall, I left Freddie a number of comments at his old haunt praising his desire to participate. Only good can come of Americans trying to learn more about a country which their government so avidly supports -- for both Israelis and Palestinians. I only reserve the right to engage them when I think they're lacking information.

It's worth noting, by the way, ED's comment to Freddie's post. I take issue with basically all of it. I wonder, first and foremost, why ED does not see policy formulation as also being essentially theoretical? More to the point, I wonder at the dichotomy he sets up between policy proposals, which apparently must have someone important reading them in order to be worthwhile, vs. more abstract considerations, which have some mysterious, innate value. Don't get me wrong; I was a liberal arts major, and I can abstractly theorize with the best of the worst of them. But is it a healthy blogging attitude to relegate oneself permanently to the idle realms of moral speculation, for fear of coming off half-cocked?

But both Freddie and ED humored me with policy nonetheless, so as promised, I will engage with it. Freddie's suggestions are fairly run-of-the-mill. He surprises me only here:

I want a land bridge apportioned between Gaza and the West Bank, because “artificial contiguity” or whatever other euphemism is currently in vogue doesn’t work, and no one would accept it within their country. The amount of land used in the land bridge would be apportioned from the West Bank and ceded back to Israel so as not to reduce the size of Israel.

Presumably Freddie simply missed the contradiction and sees it now, but to emphasize: whichever party is granted a land bridge automatically saddles the other side with "artificial contiguity." I won't claim that Israel shouldn't necessarily be so saddled. But what's the argument, one way or another? (I know mine, actually, but I'd like to hear from Freddie.)

Personally, I think Freddie makes Dierkes' same mistake in trying to talk about a broad peace process without taking into account the politics as they stand today. Hamas is there to stay in Gaza, as everyone now seems to recognize. Barring radical political developments either there or in the West Bank, it seems rather more likely that it will indeed be the Palestinians who are ultimately saddled with "artificial contiguity--" necessitated not so much by Israeli intransigence as Palestinian political division. Something to think about.

Freddie also decries the security fence/wall. I have similar sentiments, but I wonder if it's realistic to expect Israel to give up the wall (which, ugly or not, has certainly cut down on violence within Israel) upon the creation of a Palestinian state. It may be more likely to talk about a phased destruction of the barrier, which could be implemented as security benchmarks are met in the territories.

Finally, Freddie surprises me in his reluctance to take East Jerusalem head-on. I'm happy to say it out loud: East Jerusalem must, must, must be returned to the Palestinians, to be their capital. Demographically, it is Arab by a supermajority. Israelis have no business keeping hold of it, especially when it hasn't seen any violence since the intifada. (As I believe I mentioned earlier, I visited the Muslim Quarter and East Jerusalem during the height of the Gaza war to get lunch, and it was as calm as it ever is.)

As to the accusation that Israel and the US have "blocked this plan at every turn," I take issue only insofar as the sentiment behind those words seems to be that intent was malicious. It certainly was for certain segments of the population -- the burden of any democracy. But to act as if the Hamas takeover, or Iran's growing regional influence, have not contributed to Israel's reluctance to engage peace issues head on, is, as a wise man once said, "an example of rhetorical bad faith."

ED's broad point that diplomatic action in Gaza must be accompanied by renewed efforts in the West Bank is immediately granted. The resistance amongst West Bank Palestinians to calls for a new intifada should be rewarded by the lifting of a substantial number of internal checkpoints, or at least turning those points over to Fatah's paramilitary (ultimately the same thing.) In addition, Obama should exert maximal pressure on Israel to halt settlement construction, starting with E-1 -- a particularly nasty project that would go a long way toward dividing the West Bank in two, and an area where the new mayor of Jerusalem has publicly stated he intends to build. (Memo to Obama: this guy is a punk and careerist, and can be bullied into ditching these plans almost instantly.) Obama should threaten to withdraw military cooperation and some portion of foreign aid if settlement construction does not cease. And he should make that threat public, to put pressure on the Knesset to get real about Israel's future.

So there you have it. In Israel, moral judgments = wheel-spinning. Policy judgments = also debatably wheel-spinning, but at least they've got pictures.

And now for something completely different: US alcohol policy

2009-01-22T14:23:00.000-08:00

Formulated over beers with my 19-year-old sister at a wonderful bar in Haifa:

The Amethyst Initiative, a coalition of college presidents in favor of lowering the legal drinking age to 18, has once again slipped into the news. This time, pundits and reporters are wondering: will an Obama administration create a legislative environment ripe for a shift in US alcohol policy?

From the perspective of the college campus, legalized drinking for 18-year-olds has a great deal to recommend it. Today, universities are grappling with rampant underage drinking, a phenomenon that many believe stems from legal taboos associated with alcohol. The Amethyst Initiative makes an argument of Zen-like simplicity:

"A culture of dangerous, clandestine "binge-drinking"—often conducted off-campus—has developed.

Alcohol education that mandates abstinence as the only legal option has not resulted in significant constructive behavioral change among our students.

Adults under 21 are deemed capable of voting, signing contracts, serving on juries and enlisting in the military, but are told they are not mature enough to have a beer.

By choosing to use fake IDs, students make ethical compromises that erode respect for the law."

Amethyst's argument does highlight a real problem. According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, roughly 60% of underage college students drink alcohol regularly, with a slightly smaller number engaging in regular binge drinking. The result has been a death toll estimated by the NIAAA at 850 underage students per year – in addition to far greater numbers of students allowing alcohol to lead them to poor studies, unsafe sex, and criminal charges. Those who dismiss Amethysts' desire for a new discussion about the risks of prohibition are doing so at their moral peril.

But Amethyst's focus on the college campus considerably dims any hope of a successful policy proposal. In 2006, 3.3 million students were considered high school drop-outs by the US Census. Their data claim that only 58% of high school graduates ages 16 – 21 were enrolled in any college program, either full- or part-time. Those numbers are only slightly below the Bureau of Labor Statistics' estimate for 2007, which reported that 67% of students graduating that year would be enrolling in any college program.

Roughly, we are talking about over 16 million young Americans suddenly allowed to drink, without the benefit of a campus community to help channel that freedom. This is a widely dispersed group of young people that some BLS estimates show to be at nearly 20% unemployment.. Amethyst, and its supporters, have failed to explain or justify the effect that a change in alcohol policy would have on such a large segment of the population.

The conventional wisdom of the Amethyst Initiative – that legalized drinking for 18-year-olds would allow the university to engage with the culture surrounding alcohol, in an attempt to moderate it – is an innovative and worthwhile idea; but it has nothing to say about what such a lifestyle change would mean for a young person not currently attached to a university community. High school drop-outs and graduates who don't enroll in university go on to serve a wide variety of roles in the workforce, primarily in in minimum- or low-wage positions that offer little prospect of advancement. They live with their parents, or in poorer neighborhoods on their own. They are at-risk for alcohol abuse, drunk driving, and arrest.

They are most certainly not part of a community that can reinforce responsible drinking habits. Are the college presidents of the Amethyst Initiative willing to take a chance on the judgment of these young people, without the ability to reach out to them? Are the American people willing to take such a chance? I doubt it.

But that should not close the book on the idea of a lowered drinking age. In fact, the substantial number of high school graduates choosing not to enroll in any university or technical school program is a policy opportunity.

The Amethyst Initiative should revise its goals. Instead of advocating for a lowered drinking age for all 18-year-olds, it should propose a lowered drinking age only for students who can prove that they are enrolled in a university or technical school program.

The process would be as simple as presenting a student ID to a bartender. Most college IDs today are fully readable by infrared scanner, thanks to partner programs between schools and off-campus restaurants. These IDs are already part of regularly-updated campus databases that keep track of a student's purchases – as such, they already provide enrollment data. Universities and technical schools not currently issuing such IDs would, under proposed legislation, be eligible for government funds to upgrade their systems, a worthwhile project in and of itself

Part of the President's task, in rehabilitating the economy, is going to be the provision of incentives for young Americans to seek out higher education, in whatever form that most attracts them: a four-year university, two-year associate's degree, or other technical training. While it may seem crass, for many high-schoolers the ability to legally consume alcohol will not be last on their lists of reasons to continue their education.

Nor should it be. While critics of this proposal will complain that it binds alcohol too explicitly to the university, thereby glorifying it, the truth is that such an explicit bond already exists in the public perception – the statistics of undergraduate alcohol abuse cited above should leave no doubt about that. All that is left for the university to do is to subvert the dangerous social pressures that accompany such a bond.

That means calling alcohol what it actually is to so many young students: the badge of adulthood, the last significant societal barrier to being to being taken seriously as a full citizen. Young people who have taken it upon themselves to enroll in university or technical school are making a serious investment in their own futures, one that merits they be recognized as adults. A policy of legalized alcohol consumption for this age group accomplishes that goal.

Other critics will say that legalization for college students only creates an unfair tier system, in which those who do not have access to strong high school programs are discriminated against. Legislators backing this proposal will be able to respond in two ways:

First, today there is an incredible range of post-high school programs available to students of almost any academic standing. Technical and vocational schools serve a vital role in the ability of the American workforce; it should be a national priority to fill their enrollments.

Additionally, the considerable population of high school drop-outs could be accommodated by a similar privilege extended to any 18-year-old enrolled in a GED program. These programs are inexpensive, and can be completed while working part- or full-time – they are well within the reach of any young person driven to succeed. The underlying purpose remains the same – to encourage young Americans to stay in, or go back to, school.

Today, it seems unlikely that the Amethyst Initiative will gain much traction. But as belts continue to tighten in the US, more and more students will be reconsidering their post-high school paths. Adding one more incentive to a college education can only improve the competence and health of the rising American workforce – an additional benefit that would fit in well with Amethyst's current proposals.

Getting beyond the talk about the talk about Israel

2009-01-22T13:20:00.000-08:00

It's almost too felicitous that even as I began to despair of finding a conversation around the blogging world not totally preoccupied with a meaningless, utterly ceremonial occasion in which we build a discomfiting cult of personality around what is supposed to be a bureaucratic leader (not, by the way, Obama's fault -- he's only bringing out what's already in us), this new joint venture should begin with a rip-roaring discussion on the Middle East.

Freddie led things off with his boilerplate on biased media coverage over Israel, about which he is not wrong so much as simply wasting his breath. Either way, the post is miss-filed in "Middle East Politics;" it should have gone under "Media Studies" or "American political climate," or something similar. ED was quickly caught in the endless sinkhole of that discussion, as well, and Payne did some short paleo thing advising against American involvement. (Good luck with that one -- maybe three more presidents down the line.)

That left Dierkes on his own to broach the more interesting, and far more vital, point: what, exactly, is America to do about this mess?

In a series of earlier posts, I all but begged anyone reading this to get involved in a discussion of policy. As only one fellow bit (and it was really more of a nibble), I'm going to slightly reorganize my argument.

Arguments concerning perceptions of Israel and Palestine, unless they are made briefly and with the object of returning the conclusion immediately to the policy at hand, are useless. The different parts of the world will continue to maintain their respective, slow-evolving biases, gratifying some and irritating others. The consistent inability to see beyond these details is just grievance.

Moral arguments concerning Israel and Palestine may be of incidental interest (i.e., did Israel commit war crimes in Gaza? Who is to blame for civilian casualties, those doing the shooting, or those putting the civilian bodies in front of the bullets?), but they do not have a place in the larger dialogue about solutions for the region. Moral arguments being made from that perspective are the province of extremists only -- either those who believe Jews have no right to Israel and represent a murderous imperial force, or those who believe that Palestinias/Muslims/Arabs/other-enemy-of-the-day are moral degenerates, destined to war with the "civilized" West until the destruction of one or the other. (The kind euphemism for this is "culture warriors.")

The moderate stance regarding the fundamental morality of Israel is clear: Jews and Palestinians both have rights to the land. They must find a way to live together, either in one country, or two. All other moral considerations are, in light of the search for a solution, ultimately superfluous.

That is the simplified core of my desire to move past the moral debate, and into a discussion of policy. Freddie is an intelligent mind, lost in the endless pirouettes of equivocation and ethics. There is no ethical side to take in Israel and Palestine. There is only what is on the ground, and what it can be turned into. If you think that sounds nihilistic now, well -- try living here for awhile.

That brings me to Dierkes, who is at least making a stab at a policy formulation, though it's broad, and he's gotten off on the wrong foot. Like me, he has first made the mistake of equating Turkish withdrawal with Syrian withdrawal. They are not equivalent. The Syrian track remains open, and a vital part of US goals in the Middle East, for reasons already mentioned.

Dierkes is eager to understand what America can do for the peace process -- but he is getting ahead of himself. As he says, a durable ceasefire in Gaza is step one. But such a ceasefire is by no means guaranteed. The real question that we should be asking right now, and one that I have started trying to answer, is how the US can forge and guard such a ceasefire. I hope that now, in this new conversation, one of the "Ordinary Gentlemen" will take up the yoke of writing such a proposal, or critiquing mine.

A new venture

2009-01-22T04:22:00.000-08:00

Friend of the blog ED has found himself a new position, over at a joint blogging effort called "The League of Ordinary Gentlemen." It's an interesting collection of thinking people -- make sure to take a look.

In other news, I'm stepping away from the blog for, I don't know, say two more days -- just until everyone shuts up about the inaugural address, and goes back to talking about something - anything - that actually matters.

Speaking of which

2009-01-20T03:48:00.000-08:00

Here's the new Bitter Lemons issue, having a go at everything I was just talking about. I see that Alpher's position has not changed from the way I described it. (I was surprised to see that he believed the Syria relationship had emerged unscathed, as I thought I remembered seeing a couple of aggressive quotes attributed to Assad in the media. But Alpher's take appears to be right.) The core of his argument:

"The conventional wisdom in some quarters holds that the Gaza war will oblige Obama to award the Israeli-Palestinian peace process higher priority on his Middle East "to do" list than he originally might have intended. I doubt it. Obama will quickly discover that the war weakened Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). And Israel's Feb. 10 elections are liable to produce a new Israeli government less interested in removing settlements and negotiating a final status agreement than its predecessor or, if interested, no more capable.

Meanwhile, Syria beckons. The prospects for a Syria-Israel peace process weathered this war well; the only casualty may have been Turkish mediation, reflecting the vociferous anti-Israel pose struck during the war by Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan. If the ranks of militant Islam in the Middle East were struck a blow in this war by the damage done to Hamas and by Hizballah's refusal to open a second, northern front, a successful Israeli-Syrian peace process would make a far larger contribution by blunting Iran's drive for hegemony in the Levant, weakening Hizballah, contributing a quiet Syrian-Iraqi border to facilitate a US withdrawal from Iraq, and removing Hamas' headquarters from Damascus. "

It's tough to dispute an argument that good, but elsewhere in the issue, Alon Pinkas (formerly of the Israel consulate in New York) makes a valiant attempt:

"[The Gaza crisis] positions the Israeli-Palestinian issue ahead of the Israeli-Syrian track. Many in the incoming foreign policy establishment in Washington entertained the thought of a "Syria first" policy. Syria is a country with which, supposedly, Israel has only a territorial dispute. Negotiations are seemingly simpler, the contours are clearer and the issues have already been more or less explored, studied, negotiated and exhausted. The Syria-first option's relation to a possible "isolate Iran" policy is almost self-evident. Simply put, all the administration has to do is to wipe the thin layer of dust off the December 2006 Baker-Hamilton "Iraq Study Group Report" and adopt it verbatim.

However, the Gaza crisis notwithstanding, the Obama-Clinton administration will quickly find out that Israelis in general, and the new prime minister elected in February in particular, are more inclined to deal with a Palestinian process than with Syria. Evacuating 85-95 percent of the West Bank is perceived as a political and demographic imperative by roughly 70 percent of Israelis, including substantial parts of the political right, provided the agreement is durable and sustainable. The Golan Heights are a different story. Israelis feel they understand the concrete value of the Golan and value the price of relinquishing control over it, but find it naturally difficult to envision the amorphous positive strategic returns, a much more intangible concept called "peace with Syria". They also feel no urgent need to do so at this moment. "

Pinkas is right about Israeli skepticism over Syria. The Golan is an incredibly valuable resource to Israel. It allows Israel to control its only natural source of fresh water, provides ample farm space, and is a strategic backstop against a Syrian incursion -- or random Syrian sniper fire, which in the past was a serious problem for Israeli civilians in the north. These advantages coalesced more than ten years ago in a national movement called "Ha'Am im ha'Golan" ("the nation is with the Golan") that today remains the dominant psychological force for most Israelis when it comes to that region.

But Pinkas is, I hope, wrong to project Israeli misgivings on an American administration. We don't yet know how Obama will interact with Israel. But part of the point that Pinkas himself is making is that Obama will want to depart from the Bush strategy of "provide money and weapons; activate unconditional 'green light.'" Presumably, under Obama, the Israel "security game" is going to get some new rules. And I suspect that those rules are going to be prejudiced toward the US's undeniable interests in bringing Syria into the fold.

As Pinkas says, Obama has about 75 days to make something happen before a new PM, presumably from Likud, is installed. It would not surprise me to see, after a few weeks of humanitarian packages to Gaza, a sudden pivot from the State Department to Syria, one which perhaps cuts Turkey out of the picture altogether. As I said before, Palestinians, and Israelis who want to focus on the Palestine track, have only one real chance to make their problem the priority: gift-wrap it.

How can Israelis and Palestinians get onto Obama's agenda?

2009-01-19T12:15:00.001-08:00

I remember many months ago, sitting at a panel discussion between Israeli and Palestinian strategists and diplomats. The panel had been asked to discuss Israel's negotiations with Syria, and how they might impact negotiations with Palestine. One of the panelists was Yossi Alpher, a former Mossad agent and foreign policy strategist who has been on the rise as an opinion-maker in Israel for the last few years. (I keep his website, Bitter Lemons, on my sidebar, and it's worth a weekly read.)

Alpher is an engaging but very dry speaker, incredibly well-versed in Middle East military-diplomatic relations, as his career has necessitated. He was sitting on the panel with an Israeli historian, a Palestinian professor, and an old-school member of Fatah, who had been around during the heyday of the PLO in Lebanon, and had since transformed himself into a party hack of the sort only Fatah seems able to produce.

Alpher's assessment of the impact of Syrian negotiations on the "Palestine track" (as those in the much-maligned "peace industry" dub it) was blunt: Palestinian negotiations would be off the table until Syria was finished. His reasoning was simple, and I'll sum it here. (Should negotiations with Syria ever resume, I may dig back into my old notes and take a more in-depth look, as well.) The Obama administration's primary strategic interests in the Middle East lie in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran. Pakistan is a close second, barring the complete failure of that state (whereupon it becomes a very arresting number one). Only after those countries does Israel/Palestine make the list. Syria, because of its border with Iraq, and its ties to Iran, will be of immense interest to Obama. A deal between Syria and Israel, brokered by the US, severely undercuts the Iranians, while at the same time giving a big boost to an ally that could use one. It also goes a long way toward preventing another mysterious nuclear silo incident. Finally, it's a great reward to offer Turkey, and a way to legitimize its (much missed) cooperation with Israel. It is/was too good to pass up.

Watching Alpher go through all the details, I suddenly became aware of growing agitation coming from the Fatah politician. During his turn to speak, he barely said anything, only appealed to our collective moral duty to create a Palestinian state. I certainly agreed with him, but I couldn't help but feel how lame his talk was compared to Alpher. He clearly had not been connecting the same dots (or, near as I could tell, any dots at all). It was my first sense that the Palestinians might be left out in the cold once more, outside of any game-changing events here.

Today, with our collective Gaza hangover, some writers I like are asking whether the most recent war hasn't sent a loud-and-clear message to Obama's team that Israel/Palestine will not be ignored. Amidst all the speculation over whether Israel's strike was politically motivated for approaching elections here, I did not hear anyone entertain the notion that perhaps Hamas, too, had political motivation to step up the frequency of their rocket attacks. Not that Hamas is exactly peering longingly into the window of the peace process. (It is, but in one hand it has a hammer, and in the other a hand grenade.) But Hamas's Gaza escalation could be read as a shot across the bow to Obama, with no more distinct a message than "we are still here."

Among peace advocates in Israel, and Palestinians more broadly in the West Bank, there is hope that Obama will take a different, less-hamfisted approach to the conflict. And now, that hope has found new purchase in the feeling amongst these same people that Obama can't possibly ignore the tragedy in Gaza and southern Israel. I'm not persuaded of either idea. I see in Obama, before all else, a pragmatic sensibility not interested in gambling on Middle East policy, especially in light of the other pressing challenges in the region.

So how can Israelis and Palestinians coax a substantial American interest out of Obama? If indeed Hamas was trying to refocus the Israeli portion of the Middle East conflict on Israel/Palestine, instead of Israel/Syria, they succeeded only in halting (temporarily, God willing) the Syrian negotiations. That's a start, but like any good trick, it needs a "prestige" -- a reason that this isn't just a hiccup on one side, but a real opportunity on the other.

Below, I laid out an extremely vague proposal outlining what a long-term ceasefire might look like between Israel and Hamas. There's countless reasons to dislike it. (Although I would really love it if all those who read it and found something to hate would propose their own versions, so that we could have a break from moralizing and instead try to get something done.) But in spite of its flaws, a realistic timetable is, I believe, what the Obama administration needs to see. Israel, and especially the Palestinians, cannot will themselves to be more strategically valuable to the US than they actually are. All they can do is hope to make Obama an offer he can't refuse, so to speak -- a chance to actually solve one of the world's most pernicious foreign policy boondoggles.

The only way to engage the White House in a serious, deep commitment, is with a regional political environment that is demonstrably tending toward a lasting peace agreement. And at this stage in the conflict, that means one thing: a durable ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.

What will the conditions of a prolonged ceasefire be?

2009-01-18T13:35:00.000-08:00

We may now be beginning to exit the woods, although part of why I kept mum yesterday (aside from my now-broken promise to get away from Gaza for a bit) is that I'm not totally ready to believe it yet. Where do goals and expectations stand now for both sides?

Israel wants violence to cease, so that it can withdraw its forces after a successful, if messy and possibly inhumane, campaign. Israel wants Hamas to commit to an open-ended truce that will guarantee the security of its souther region. Israel wants Gilad Schalit back. Israel expects the international community, led by the US and Europe, to take a more proactive role in shutting down Gaza smuggling, with the ultimate goal to weaken Iranian influence in the region. Down the road, Israel wants to find a way to destroy Hamas. Israel does not expect to be forced directly to the table with Hamas.

Hamas wants time to rebuild its organization, and most likely to rearm, as well. Hamas wants Israel to open the Gaza border so that it can more easily bring goods, and probably weapons, through the crossings. Hamas wants to find a way to declare victory in this conflict, as Hizbullah did in 2006. Hamas wants to reinforce its ties with Iran, and to find a way to work with Egypt, or bring the Muslim Brotherhood into power there. Hamas wants Abu Mazen to step down, and for new elections to be held in the West Bank, where it hopes to claim victory. Barring that, Hamas wants to take over the West Bank via some other means. Hamas may also still be seeking the destruction of Israel, although its confused stance on ceasefire negotiations seems to suggest that there is some internal division over this.

Their fears:

Israel fears that Hamas will be able to continue smuggling through Egypt the supplies it needs to build more rockets. Israel fears that within a few weeks or months, Hamas may begin firing again. Israel fears that an opening of crossings in Gaza will only increase the speed of Hamas's rearmament. Israel fears that, in the event of another attack, it will have no choice but to re-occupy Gaza, no matter the world outcry. Israel fears that if Hamas can prove its resistance bona fides to Iran, their ties may deepen. Israel fears that removal of Abu Mazen, and any weakening of Fatah. Israel fears a weak Mubarak. Israel fears that Gilad Schalit may be unreachable.

Hamas fears that Egypt may actually commit to its anti-smuggling promises, and that the rocket game may really be coming to an end. Hamas fears the serious lack of empathy on display in the West Bank. Hamas fears the coming comparisons to Hizbullah, which will note that Hamas failed to live up to Hizbullah's strategy in almost every way -- and the damage this will do to its ties to Iran. Hamas fears a reoccupation of Gaza, and it fears Fatah's hold on the West Bank. Hamas fears that Israel may find an excuse not to open up the border crossings. Hamas may not, but should, fear that its support will wane in the event of open borders and a higher standard of living in Gaza.

***

Israel will never believe that Hamas would voluntarily lay down its arms, because Hamas is permanently established as the enemy. Hamas will never believe that Israel would honestly seek to improve Gaza, for the same reason. This is why a timetable is absolutely necessary. Both sides need to be able to look at a clear list of expectations to reassure themselves that, in good faith or not, they are being dealt with as they were promised. Here's what that timetable should look like:

1. For the first two months, Israel fully opens the Karni crossing, which is used primarily for transport of goods and cargo into Gaza, and is vital to providing supplies to Gazans. All shipments into Gaza are fully inspected by Tzahal before entry. Any renewal in hostilities from Hamas does not involve in a closure, but rather an immediate military retaliation by Israel.

2. At the end of two months of unbroken quiet, Israel opens the Erez crossing to limited foot traffic in and out of Gaza. Shin Bet monitors the crossing, with no Hamas members allowed to enter or leave under any circumstances outside of negotiations with Israel. No one is allowed to enter Gaza who does not already live there. All those who leave Gaza are given only one or two days before temporary permits expire. Gradually, over the course of SIX MORE MONTHS of continuous peace, the amount of traffic allowed through the crossing is increased, and restrictions on the length of visits outside the strip are eased. Special permits and exceptions may be issued to students, or those wishing to travel abroad.

3. After eight total months of continuous peace, the Rafah crossing may be opened to limited foot traffic, under the same conditions governing Erez. This is the critical test. Assuming that Egypt has kept its promises regarding smuggling, the question becomes whether Egypt is capable of acting in good faith with a Hamas which is likely still bent, ultimately, on the destruction of Israel. Restrictions on Rafah are eased in the same manner they were in Erez, over the course of the next six months. By the fourteenth month, full foot traffic and partial permits are allowed through all border crossings.

If, at any time, Hamas or one of its secondaries should resume violence against Israel, the process rolls back one step. (Rafah closes, but Erez remains open; Erez closes, but Karni remains open; Karni remains open, but Israel strikes militarily.) "Resumed violence" in this case does not mean a single rocket, or two or five, but rather indicates one week of continuous or extremely frequent fire -- or one month in which Hamas fired on average one rocket every two days, or more.

This is as far as I've gotten so far. But coming soon: elections in the territories, settlement removal, and more.

Further adventures in useless grandstanding; and a short break

2009-01-16T07:26:00.000-08:00

Here's Khaled Meshaal, washing his hands of responsibility and rejecting outright any ceasefire that doesn't begin with total Israeli capitulation in Gaza. We might not have expected anything more from Hamas -- suicidal policies beget suicidal rhetoric, and that, it seems, eventually becomes suicidal action.

But you would think that the UN would have a suggestion with a bit more creativity to it, one that could be lauded as having at least one foot on the ground. But no, here's the truly extraordinary Ban Ki Moon:

"I strongly urge Israeli leadership and government to declare a ceasefire unilaterally," Ban said in Ramallah. "It's time to think about a unilateral cease-fire from the Israeli government."

Allow me to translate. "it's my job to stop the killing, but since my entire organization is intellectually bankrupt when it comes to the Middle East, here's our best plan:
Step 1 - Israel stops shooting
Step 2 - ?
Step 3 - Peace!"

I can't overstate it. The UN is supposed to be the diplomatic center of the world. Its job is to develop realistic, workable solutions to conflicts as they arise. A unilateral ceasefire meets neither of these criteria. It has as much a chance of being accepted by the Israeli leadership as it does of persuading Hamas to forgo further armed resistance.

I'll be waiting for news from Cairo, but with Meshaal traipsing about the region, proudly rejecting proposals before he has even seen what they say, I don't know that anyone can hope for much from Egypt. Collateral damage: the Syrian track, which daily seems more remote as Erdogan and Assad continue to alienate a country (see both those articles for what I'm talking about) that was their negotiating partner a little more than a month ago.

In the meantime, I'm going to take a short break from Gaza (if I can), because it's really just driving me nuts. What's Obama doing? Anybody know?

Cairo plan is on the rise. Hope?

2009-01-15T07:18:00.000-08:00

Today's news is once again all about Egypt, meaning that somebody, either Israel or Turkey, walked away from that particular proposal (or was never a part of it to begin with). The news from Cairo is lukewarm, at best. Likely terms, from the Post:

"• An immediate cease-fire

• A withdrawal of IDF troops

• Discussions with the Egyptians on the mechanism to prevent arms smuggling into Gaza

• Discussions on when and how to open up the border crossings.

One of the key elements to be determined is the duration of the cease-fire, with Hamas wanting another six-month cease-fire and Israel wanting something much longer."

What's not to love? A lot, for both sides. Israel only obtained 'discussions' with Egypt on ways to prevent arms smuggling; Hamas has only obtained 'discussions' on the opening of the border crossings. In other words, after over a thousand people have been killed, and countless more wounded and traumatized, both sides are agreeing to maintain the status quo, with the slightest of modifications.

There may be a real miracle at the negotiation table once the ceasefire is in effect. But what are the odds? As countless critics of the current operation have noted over and over again, Hamas is not weakened by harsh conditions in Gaza. The corollary is easy to see: it's not truly in Hamas's governing interest for life to significantly improve in Gaza. That they only want a six-month truce tips their hand -- they will regroup, and this whole thing will play out again. What can Israel do in response? Agree to six months of border crossings? Is there even any point?

A small glimmer of hope comes from this Ha'aretz report, which suggests a much deeper US investment in border security than many were expecting. Israel, apparently, hopes to gain the following:

"# A U.S. declaration calling on the international community to deal with the smuggling of arms from Iran to terrorist groups in the Gaza Strip.

# Intelligence cooperation between Israel and the U.S. for identifying the sources of weapons, with focus on the network linking Iran, the Persian Gulf and Sudan.

# An international maritime effort along the smuggling routes to find ships carrying weapons to the Gaza Strip, possibly with the involvement of NATO.

# An American and European commitment for the transfer of technologies to Egypt that will help it uncover tunnels.

# Plans for the economic development of Rafah, with particular emphasis on the Bedouin to undercut the financial motivation for building and operating tunnels. "

If the US has a vested financial interest in the success of the Cairo plan, it may be able to pressure Egypt into really working to maintain a truce. But even then, Israel's proposal still admits of a solely-Egyptian force on the Gaza/Sinai border. There's no love lost between the government of Egypt and Hamas, especially these days -- but will Israel bet the bank that sentiment in the Egyptian army is the same? That the army's competence, even with international tech, will be able to shut a notoriously difficult border? How sure is the Israeli government that Egypt is even capable of shutting down Hamas smuggling, let alone willing?

If I were to take this news like a real optimist, I'd say that any chance to legitimately and voluntarily lift the Gaza blockade is a chance worth taking. It's nice to see that critics were wrong to believe that the prospect was still years, at least, down the line. But I can't help but feel that a lifting of the blockade now won't matter in the slightest if, in six months, Hamas musters another rocket barrage. And the impatience, and useless indignation, from the UN and the world has done nothing but increase the chance of just such an event. It has forced both parties to rush to the table before anything was decided, and with doubts and ulterior motives still lingering.

The circumstances surrounding the Gaza war, and the possibility for a solution, remain the same today as they were three weeks or two years ago. The only chance to build support for a free and open Gaza is for Hamas to be permanently disarmed. If these "discussions" of counter-smuggling measures yield nothing more than further "discussions," absolutely nothing will have been achieved. And this time, it will not be Hamas or Israel that stands guilty for the wasted deaths of a thousand people. That weight will rest fully with the short-sighted and incompetent conflict management of the international community.

Goldberg gets it right (and wrong) in the Times

2009-01-14T02:23:00.000-08:00

When it comes to expertise on Hamas, there are few writers in American journalism as authoritative as Jeff Goldberg, the only Jew in the world who has spent years having all his self-loathing done for him, by the terrorist leadership, directly to his face. (He has, if nothing else, proved that their was nothing shy or polite about Rantisi or Rayyan when it came to bashing Jews.)

His op-ed in the New York Times yesterday serves as a great counterpoint to those of us advocating for a lifting of the siege on the grounds that it might moderate Hamas. Key graphs:

"There is a fixed idea among some Israeli leaders that Hamas can be bombed into moderation. This is a false and dangerous notion. It is true that Hamas can be deterred militarily for a time, but tanks cannot defeat deeply felt belief.

The reverse is also true: Hamas cannot be cajoled into moderation. Neither position credits Hamas with sincerity, or seriousness."

This is a great point, and worth remembering. As much as those of us hoping for a moderate Hamas like to write off their charter as mere bombast, the fact remains that the entirety of Hamas's spiritual leadership, and a substantial portion of its secular leadership, continue to be committed to the destruction of Israel. The idea that a more lenient policy would dissipate their dedication is largely fantastical. It's easy to forget this simple fact, and I'm glad Goldberg is taking the time to remind us.

I do, however, think he fails to do justice to the basic argument for a blockade lift, which isn't about the Hamas leadership at all, but about the lowest tier of Hamas members, and the citizens of Gaza generally. We're arguing for a change in Israeli policy to change the minds of those not totally committed to the ideology of Hamas, a not-small segment of the Gazan population. In that quote above, Goldberg is right on both counts in and of themselves. But he sets up a false equivalence by suggesting that, because neither option is a complete solution, they are both equally bad.

It should be an Israeli objective, not only to weaken Hamas, but to weaken popular support for Hamas. As we have seen, punishing Gazans economically for their stale election does nothing but further entrench this Islamists. But I continue to have hope that an easing of the blockade, if it does not soften the Hamas leadership, will nonetheless soften their popular support. And even if Goldberg disagrees, it's certainly no longer possible to claim that the siege is doing Israel any good. At the very least, a conditional opening of border crossings would discontinue the damage that Israel is doing to itself, if not immediately begin healing the political bent of Gazans.

Goldberg's other line of reasoning, that as long as Hamas is in thrall to Hizbullah, it will never renounce violence, falls short of the facts today; it's telling that his background on Hizbullah is mostly from 2006. To read the op-ed, you would never know that, since the 2006 war, Hizbullah has been fully integrated into and in many ways controls Lebanon. You might also not know that, despite a few minor incidents, Hizbullah has remained almost entirely quiet in the north. Nasrallah, of course, hasn't missed a TV appearance to threaten and intimidate Israelis. But Hizbullah hasn't launched an offensive, despite being armed, ready, and verbally committed. Did anyone, in 2006, believe such a miracle would be possible? Is there any chance that sudden governing responsibility is helping Hizbullah grow up? Goldberg doesn't address these questions, but his argument requires that they be answered.

Sometimes, I think Goldberg and top journalists like him are victims of their own success. He has unprecedented access to the Hamas leadership -- and that access seems to have helped him forget that opinions on the nature of the resistance within the lower tiers of Hamas may be very different. (What's particularly unusual here is that Goldberg makes precisely this point with regard to Hamas's perception of Hizbullah and Iran, without extending it all the way to what Hamas's resistance might mean to the "working-man terrorist.") His brief description of the Gazan rocket team is incredibly compelling, but I wish he had taken a moment to ask those men whether they thought there could have be a permanent end to hostilities with Israel.

Backpedal

2009-01-13T11:25:00.000-08:00

But then again...

I'll just be straightforward and say that I really don't know what Israel's play is, here. I think we're all asking ourselves the same thing right now: how much of Erdogan's talk is what he needs to do to prove his bona fides to Turks, and how much of it is real vitriol? To an extent, it's valuable to have a private ally in a leader who knows how to bring his people along on something they might object to, if they knew where his feelings lay. But how are Israelis supposed to differentiate? How big a chance do they want to take on Erdogan?

One step closer

2009-01-13T06:57:00.000-08:00

Hamas is reaching out to Turkey. This is a much more blatant overture to Israel than the statements I was just talking about. Turkey has a history of friendly relations with Israel, although recent harsh comments by its president against Israel's Gaza operation -- combined with a turning tide of popular sentiment that I briefly explored yesterday -- are taking their toll on the relationship.

Still, Turkey remains one of Israel's best friends in the Arab world. Although it has lately been exploring further integration of Islamic law into its government, it remains one of the most secular Muslim countries in the region, to the extent that it has often been considered for membership to the EU. Turkey was also the mediator between Israel and Syria in the now-derailed negotiations over the Golan. And while its recent statements have hurt Israelis, who expected a more moderate response, the fact remains that those very statements may be the only reason that Hamas feels comfortable reaching out to the sometime-ally of Israel.

I think Israel ought to take this deal, integrating as many of the other proposals I mentioned as it can. It's true that Turkey isn't 100% trustworthy, but it's equally true that any Arab force in the region would be guilty of the same. The best Israel could hope for is this kind of presence -- a moderate Arab country made up of Sunni Muslims, with an interest in preserving its reputation in Europe. In many ways, Turkey is a better option even than Egypt, as any further negotiations with Syria are going to require Turkish pressure and assistance. Accepting a deal with Turkey would be a show of goodwill from Israel. It would ease some tension and maybe contribute toward getting the Syrian track restarted.

The way forward

2009-01-10T15:19:00.000-08:00

Hamas spokesman Khaled Meshaal is in the front pages today, denouncing the Israeli assault in Gaza as a 'holocaust,' and confirming that Hamas will not agree to the France/Egypt truce currently under construction in Cairo.

As usual, to know what Hamas actually wants, you have to dig deep. It's underneath the angry rhetoric, the empty calls for intifada, and even underneath most of the demands. Meshaal wants Israel to stop shooting, withdraw from Gaza, and lift the blockade? No kidding! Why didn't he say so sooner?

Most of the news organizations are only going that far in their coverage of the rejection. But Haaretz has this interesting tidbit:

Meshal said that any international monitoring force would be treated as an occupation force and Hamas said that before any negotiations could take place, Israel had to halt attacks, pull out of the Gaza Strip and lift the siege of Gaza.

He also insisted that Hamas be included, together with the Egyptians and the Europeans, in any monitoring system on the Rafah border.

Now that is a demand. Clear, focused, and perhaps even realistic. It comes to us alongside this similarly-worded dispatch from another Hamas higher-up:

The status of Gaza's borders with Egypt and Israel has also been a sticking point in the cease-fire discussions. Hamas has said it won't accept any deal that does not include the full opening of Gaza's border crossings and a role for Hamas in monitoring the borders.

I've been searching for details on how, precisely, Hamas wants to be involved with border patrol, to no avail. But the fact that they are only demanding a "role" in that process, rather than exclusive oversight, seems to suggest that it's a serious point of negotiation.

Hamas knows that Israel isn't going to withdraw from Gaza for at least the next few days -- not while rockets are continuing to fall in heavy numbers. (20 today, a lower number overall but still not exactly "safe".) They also must realize that a fuller ground operation is likely on the horizon. Israel knows it can't remain in a holding pattern forever, and the IDF is optimistic about its chances in the denser areas of the cities, even if the government is not.

In other words, it is now indisputably in the interest of Hamas to find a solution at the negotiating table. This graph, from the same article, seems to suggest they know it:

But a Hamas delegate in Cairo with colleagues from Gaza and Syria for talks with Egyptian officials on a truce said the group was not rejecting the initiative outright.

"If that was so, Hamas would not send delegates from inside [Gaza] and outside [Syria] to talk with the brothers in Egypt," Ayman Taha told Al-Arabiya Television. "The initiative has positive constructive points, though there are other points that need more discussions."

So, Hamas probably wants an agreement. So does Israel, according to sources within the Cabinet. But who wants it worse? That's the question that Israelis and Palestinians ought to be asking themselves as the prospect of a re-annexation of Gaza looms.

I'm no politician. But in a game of political chicken, I don't know that I'd want to be opposite an organization committed to suicide attacks (and regular attacks that are suicidal in their consequences). Hamas may ultimately be destroyed by a Gaza takeover. But long after they're dead, it will be Israel that has to live with a new occupation.

It's therefore in our interest to make the ceasefire workable, before a messy invasion. Israel ought to concede to allowing Hamas to maintain oversight of its borders, alongside Israeli forces on their respective border, and international forces along the Egyptian border. I don't know what harm there could be in such a concession, as long as non-Hamas monitors still have access to everything coming in and out. And in exchange for this concession, Israel can demand that international forces be stationed within Gaza, rather than Egypt. Egypt, (which has nearly as much of an interest in concluding this mess, as it is nothing but a daily public relations disaster for Mubarak) for its part, should exert serious pressure on Hamas to accept this trade. And if it is unable to do so, Egypt should accept a multinational force in the Sinai, as a good faith gesture to make up for Hamas's intractability.

In exchange for the total cessation of rocket fire from Gaza, Israel should agree to a formalized schedule for lifting the blockade. This is in any case in Israeli interests, as many have pointed out that miserable conditions in Gaza have done nothing to damage Hamas, and may in fact have strengthened the organization.

This schedule should include penalties for renewed violence from Hamas or its proxies, a framework which would make continued rocketing extremely disadvantageous, while at the same time preventing Israel from manipulating minimal attacks into cause for over-reaction. The timetable should also include bonuses, such as expedited border crossing, for good faith agreements made and held with Fatah, towards the formation of a unity government. Finally, as this timetable is very much desired by the international community, the UN security council should agree to a statement that, should Hamas reach a certain level of violence against the Negev, Israel has the full right to re-enter the Strip and clean house.

Last of all, in exchange for recognition as the governing authority of Gaza, Hamas should agree to hold regular elections, to be watched by international monitors -- with the first election scheduled for one to two years from the date of the ceasefire.

Such a global ceasefire agreement would address Israel's immediate security concerns, while also giving Hamas enough recognition, and enough incentives to the future, to keep it from resorting to random acts of violence. Hard-liners on either side who find fault with the terms would do well to remember how we got to this point in the first place. Israel and West's pursuit of an of a total blockade of Gaza did nothing to weaken Hamas, and led directly to renewed violence. As hard as it may be for us to stomach, recognition and minimal cooperation with Hamas is the only way to bring them back into the moderate fold, with the chance of merging the militants back into Fatah.

Likewise, Hamas members disinclined to cease rocket attacks on Israel ought to reflect on what the past two weeks have brought them. Their organization is close to collapse, and hundreds of their countrymen, many civilians, are dead. While there has certainly been international outcry, there has been no actual help, nor is there likely to be in the near future. Hamas members keeping score would do well to note that while the world is watching, it is not intervening -- and their time is running out. With the concessions above made by Israel, it should be clear that the path to legitimacy, statehood, and ultimately prosperity lies not through Israel, but with it. But deviation from the line, in the form of any violence, would result in a quick reversion to the status quo.

If you were really my friend, you'd tell me the truth...

2009-01-08T14:35:00.000-08:00

There is a give-and-take when your policy interests are suddenly made the sudden focus of the international media, one which I'm suddenly coming to understand on an intimate level. Today, that education continues in two forms: a newsy editorial from Tim McGirk in Time, and a response from Kain to my earlier post on the aborted third intifada. Though they're asking different questions, they are basically talking about the same revelation: that Israel might not always be able to determine its own best interests.

Let me be clear from the outset that I'm overjoyed that they have both reached this conclusion. Kain is a thoughtful and tuned-in moderate who I'm happy to see arrive at a more nuanced understanding of Israel. I can't vouch for McGirk's character in the same way, but it's always good for the moderate approach to Israeli policy to get an airing in Time. I hope that they both make the Gaza war an occasion to learn more about Israel's political role in the Middle East, and to see beyond the self-defeating despair of so many bloggers, toward real solutions to a conflict that desperately requires them.

At the same time, I am perpetually frustrated by the fact that this is exactly what Israeli moderates (and their American counterparts working closely on the issue) have been saying for years. If I at times seem impatient with the unexpected attention being paid to Israel, this is why. We've been trying to tell the American electorate all along that there are better ways to be a friend to Israel than to give it a blank check and a license to kill -- but nobody listens until there's more blood in the street.

So, to respond to McGirk's limp editorial: yes, we certainly do need a unity government between Hamas and Fatah. But how does he think we'll bring them together? Is he naive enough to believe that such a unity is not exactly what we on the ground have been working for since the 2007 Gaza takeover? And while he is at it, can McGirk explain to me how Israel -- a functioning (not prettily, but still) representative democracy -- is supposed to generate popular support for a withdrawal to 1967 borders, when any move it makes to curb the violence in its southern region has to be done with one hand tied behind its back, to appease the international community? How does the UN's call for an immediate ceasefire actually bring Israel closer to a condition wherein it can reestablish 1967 borders? McGirk would do us all a much greater service if he used his platform to ask this question, rather than to restate the obvious.

As for Kain, I can promise to him that Israeli foreign policy realists are very aware that the West Bank settlements are going to have to be dismantled in order to form a Palestinian state. And what's refreshing about Israel, compared to the US, is that the broad swath of moderates at its center is of the realist persuasion.

Not being a settler, I can't speak for their mindset. Are they afraid? I would be. There have already been a number of stabbings, in many cases of the elderly. That being said, there is no convenient way to group settlers ideologically. The radicals who start building houses on a hill between Beit Jalah and Bethlehem, just to split them and make life harder for Palestinians, are folks who partake of the (fully debunked) mythology that Palestinians are just Jordanians who want to make trouble for Jews. In their view, the Palestinian problem is solved when the Palestinians admit that they are not Palestinians, and go back to Jordan or Egypt, or really anywhere that's not biblical Israel. These settlers are assholes, ignorant and racist, and when a Palestinian state is formed, most Israelis will be happy to say 'good riddance.'

But settlers are also Israelis of no particular ideological bent, who bought homes in settlements because they worked low-paying jobs, and couldn't afford to live in a city. These people live in places like Gilo and Har Homa, well-established communities whose crimes, while still very relevant to the future of a Palestinian state, are now 30 or 40 years in the past. Enough time, in other words, so that we must now grapple with the idea of second-generation settlers, guilty of nothing more than being born in the wrong place. These people deserve to be resettled fairly, and it should be the duty of Israel and the international community to look out for them just as carefully as we will look out for Palestinian refugees who have to be resettled outside of Israel.

So yes, Kain is perfectly right to point out the contradiction between the Israeli government's tacit approval of settlement expansion and its ostensible support for a Palestinian state. I hope he will see that maintaining such a contradiction has been in the interest of Israeli politicians for many years now, in no small part because of the United States' simplistic, dumb support of this little country. McGirk may not be saying anything new, but he should be heeded. The only way to straighten out these contradictions is to cease to make them a politically viable position for the Israeli government. And only one country has the ability to do that.

Trouble in the West Bank?

2009-01-08T01:26:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the posting delays. My family is visiting from the states, and I was traveling up north for the past few days, mostly in Haifa. If it's any consolation, as this war marches on, the inconvenience is far greater to my editors than to my blog-readers.

This is also going to be a short post, but I didn't want to let more than a day go by before mentioning this interesting bit of analysis from the Post. When this war first broke out, my number one concern for my personal security was that violence might spread to the West Bank, which essentially surrounds me. But that hasn't happened. On the first day of the war, there were a few violent protests, not only in the territory but also East Jerusalem and the Old City. But I'm told that they fizzled quickly, and after eating lunch at my favorite place in the Muslim Quarter a few days back, I'm confident in that assessment.

That news is striking in and of itself, but it becomes downright portentous when you recall that, not a week ago, top Hamas officials were calling on West Bank Palestinians to initiate a third intifada. The proclamation alone was enough to send a collective chill through Jerusalem. (I began standing a few extra feet away from fellow bus and taxi travelers, to protect against stabbing. A friend confessed to me that she had gotten herself so worked up that she actually got off a city bus four or five stops early.)

So, whither the West Bank violence? I had plans to blast this smug, Commentary-worshipping "analysis" of the Gaza War. I have spent some time in the West Bank recently, and I thought to myself that Kramer tipped his hand as being one more right-wing hack -- economic development in the West Bank has been minimal, and could be praised only in comparison to a nightmare like Gaza.

But as far as developing popular support for Israel in the West Bank goes, it might not matter. Obviously, Palestinians in the West Bank are still more than happy to express their hopes for the ugly demise of the Jewish state. But the failure of West Bank Palestinians to take to armed resistance, as they did only a few years ago, suggests that something is changing there. And it's certainly one more black eye to Hamas, to have exposed themselves to the kind of embarrassment that must accompany one's call to popular resistance being all but totally ignored by the populace.

Gaza developments

2009-01-04T08:14:00.000-08:00

As I noted previously, direct altercations with armed Hamas on a massive scale is new for Israel, and it is accompanied by fears that some soldiers may be captured. Ha'aretz is now running a story, mostly based on rumor, that two soldiers may have been captured. Accompanying the national nightmare that has been the Gilad Schalit saga, this could be disastrous for the ground incursion.

My same source says as far as he can tell it's pure rumor, emanating from Hamas themselves. But it tells us that Hamas very much understands the deep fear that Israelis have of soldiers falling into enemy hands.

More worrisome still are statements coming from the Shin Bet leadership that Hamas may be on the verge of collapse. Of course, Israelis know how to play the psychological war as well, and there's certainly an element of bullshit to the statements. Nonetheless, if there's any truth to the possibility of Hamas collapse, that seems to me to spell trouble for Israel.

The government has been clear that they do not want to reoccupy Gaza. But if Hamas falls, will they have much choice? The PA seems to believe that, in the even of a Hamas defeat, they will be taking over. But is that in Israel's interest? These are, after all, the wunderkin whose chief of security fled to Egypt on the first day of the Hamas coup in 2007.

Alternatives, though, are hard to come by. The best solution, to my mind, is for Egypt to deploy a peacekeeping force to the Strip for a transitional period of a year or so. But the Egyptian government is facing a minority challenge from the Muslim Brotherhood, a kindred organization to Hamas, which enjoys significant popular support. If Mubarak is seen as too obviously approving of Israel's Gaza campaign, he risks a popular insurgency in his own country. The political calculus runs against Egyptian involvement, from their perspective. And of course, the hawkish element in Israel would also likely protest allowing Egyptian forces into any part of sovereign Israel, including the territories.

Another option would be a NATO deployment, filling the same role as the Egyptians. Personally, I see this one as a considerable long shot. As much smarter people than me have pointed out, neither NATO nor Israel want to put themselves in a position where there is the slightest chance of either shooting at the other. Ditto for a UN force. Gaza is probably just too volatile to guarantee zero chance of engagement -- and neither side wants to add that kind of scandal to an already nasty situation.

Out of the question, if the primary criterion is common sense, is any cooperative effort between Israel and either Egypt or Fatah. Such a cooperative effort would immediately brand either Arab force as hopelessly collaborative with Israel in the eyes of Gazans, who are going to emerge from this war deeply traumatized. (This is, incidentally, the primary argument against an Israeli reoccupation, as well.)

One possible hybrid solution would be a cooperation between Egypt and Fatah. Mubarak would be able to hide behind the purely altruistic veil of Palestinian reconstruction, and deflect questions of his complicity in the Hamas takedown. And Fatah would gain some real muscle to put behind their resumption of rule in Gaza. That solves the immediate problem of control in Gaza.

What it doesn't solve is the problem of Fatah generally, which continues to lack a mandate to govern Palestinians (and, in this most recent conflict, won't be able to help but further sacrifice what little credibility remains to them). It's not clear to me that Israel or the PA really knows what to do about this. It's hard to see Israel making the same mistake twice and holding new elections any time soon. (Who will Gazans choose? Al-qaeda? Will they write in Beezlebub? Anything is possible, post-Gaza war.) But then, how does Fatah gain credibility otherwise?

A lot may depend on how efficiently reconstruction is run in Gaza. In the coming days and weeks, depending on the length of the war, we're going to start to hear different plans for how to rebuild what has been destroyed. It's in Israel's long-term, strategic interest to offer significant capital to Fatah for humanitarian aid and infrastructure rehabilitation. Likewise, the UN and NATO, led by a generous US, should offer a multi-billion dollar aid package to Gazans, to be distributed by Fatah, with the understanding that it represents Fatah's only chance to come out of this whole debacle without being seen as hopelessly beholden to Israeli interests.

More later, as the future starts to clear.

Ground op

2009-01-03T10:50:00.000-08:00

We are now inside Gaza. The story is just breaking, but a source I have in the national broadcast agency says he got word of the situation hours ago, with all national and private media instructed to sit on the story until now.

Like many Jews I'm sure, I'm crossing my fingers that the amount of death on both sides is minimal. But there is no question that we are now entering a new phase of this conflict, in which Hamas fighters are going to be able to kill or capture Israeli soldiers, possibly on a massive scale. That's a new dimension of the conflict with Hamas, and one that is going to have a complex impact on Israeli psyches.

What can we hope to gain from this operation? I maintain my earlier claim, that the only chance to achieve a positive result is through disarming Hamas, but leaving them in power. The New York Times reflects the more widely held belief that Israel doesn't know what it wants, nor does anyone else. I prefer to imagine an Israel that has some sense of purpose in this operation, and that is not operating out of a crass sense of pure political opportunism. But I've been wrong about Israel before.

I'm going to keep an eye on the headlines, but until we know exactly what the ground campaign objectives are I think I'll hold my comments.

Ceasefire wrap-up

2009-01-02T05:05:00.000-08:00

I get the sense that Larison, like Freddie, is ready to move on, at least from this particular facet of the issue. That's fine. I asked him over there, as I asked Freddie, to please keep thinking and writing about Israel after it's out of the headlines, as it would gratify me personally to see American writers I like start to pay more attention to what's going on here.

(Not to say that I don't think Israel gets enough American or international media coverage -- as many have pointed out, it probably gets far too much, given its actual impact on world events. What I would like to see more of is the confrontation of fundamental beliefs that we hold about Israel and Palestine, on either side of the issue (if one can really speak of 'sides' in that context), and a more serious inquiry into how to improve life here. The kind of confrontation that, right now, seems only to be generated by violent outbursts.)

Larison gives me the point on the lifting of the siege, but responds that any military victory for Israel in Gaza would rely on a continuation of the siege. He doesn't really elaborate on what he means there, so I can only assume that he's referring to the tight control Israel is going to have to exert over imports, to curb the possibility of weapons making their way into the Strip.

If that's the case, color me confused. I'll admit right off the bat I have only a limited understanding of how goods travel into Gaza. But as long as Israel maintains oversight, I see no reason why full food, fuel, and currency shipments can't resume as soon as the operation is over. The government would no longer have its hands tied by the moral quandary that is feeding and heating one's enemy, nor would they need to worry about smuggling, as they would be controlling all the goods and services entering the region.

If Daniel is suggesting something else, he'll have to elaborate. Whatever the case, while he's absolutely right that the siege represents a political non-starter, not to mention a humanitarian catastrophe (thanks Melissa), I don't really see any other way out of it. I asked Daniel to explain to me how he sees the siege being lifted without the kind of action I'm talking about -- maybe he knows something I don't.

One person who does seem to know quite a bit that I don't is my sort-of boss at the Post, the news editor, Amir. I just discovered his personal blog, Forecast Highs, and I've added it to the sidebar. Appropriately, his most interesting recent post deals with the weather here in Israel, which has been cold and rainy and overcast for nearly a week now. He thinks that's part of the reason for Israel's hesitation to initiate the kind of ground operation I want to see. Check out the whole thing, it's very well informed.

Capital gains

2009-01-01T12:33:00.000-08:00

Larison comes back on me, suggesting that even if Hamas already had popular support, there's always room to gain. He also points to a Reason blurb from a few days ago that suggests perhaps Hamas was on the wane before the newest Israeli offensive. Now, they're surely enjoying the full support of Gazans (and many others around the region).

I should make it clear that the reason I support the continuation of the current operation -- one of the biggest reasons, anyway -- is that I am and always have been against the Gaza siege, for all the reasons that Daniel is enumerating. Hamas caught the international community, Israel included, with the proverbial pants down last year, and the Knesset wasn't able to develop any good ideas fast enough to actually solve the problem. Their response was reactionary and counter-productive.

But I don't understand how Daniel can, in one moment, condemn the siege for the obvious mistake it is, without seeing the necessary follow-up: the continuation of the siege, without tangible positive result, is a clear indication that something beyond strategy is driving it.

That 'something else' is Israeli public opinion, which has no interest in lifting the blockade on a territory that has been shelling it consistently for over a year now. Forget about Larison's brand of rational discourse -- Israelis are pissed. That's why the siege has continued, and that's why the operation in Gaza enjoys popular support despite its echoes of Lebanon '06. There simply isn't a critical mass of Israeli voters out there willing to stomach delivering food and supplies to a population they perceive as actively making war on them.

Ironically, the same Reason article that Daniel cited points at the issue. Hamas violence, however practically mild in comparison to the Israeli response, has nonetheless radicalized the Israeli population as much as Israeli violence has to Gaza. The only way to cool down will be for one side to stop shooting.

It's very clear that Hamas has no intention of doing that -- as has been pointed out, the shooting is precisely what's reinforcing their support. And Israel, while it may be persuaded to come to a temporary ceasefire, will certainly not lift the blockade while shelling continues. Any politician who does so is committing instant political suicide. If Barack Obama were reincarnated tomorrow in the body of a wizened Israeli general, he couldn't pull it off.

The only way to solve this problem is disarm Hamas. 'Nikudah,' as they say in Hebrew. The Israeli government knows that the siege of Gaza is not working. But they require serious political capital to lift it, and the only way to gain that capital is to halt the shelling. The fact that it was Israel itself that did the disarming is a big bonus that will only speed the process.

Hamas cannot be permanently disarmed. But as I said to Freddie, Gaza is not Lebanon. Unlike Lebanon, Israel exercises significant control over Gaza through that very same siege. In Lebanon, Israel's lack of territorial control set the stakes too high: either Hizbullah would be totally annihilated, or it would regroup and rearm via Lebanese and Syrian infrastructure. It was far too easy to fail, and Israel never really had a chance.

But Hamas will not have the ability to rearm. Their only chance was cooperation, or at least tacit understanding, with Egypt. But as Egypt is more fully pulled into an ugly, public battle with an Arab neighbor, the likelihood of its interest in a continued Hamas presence in the region is fast decreasing. There will be no rearmament through the Rafah crossing.

If Israel can get into Gaza on the ground and destroy the remaining rockets, we could be looking at a solid year or two of relatively stable cease fire. That's not a permanent solution. But it will give the Israeli leadership the room it needs to back down from the siege -- the only move that might actually delegitimize Hamas. And when that happens, one hopes, the moderate Palestinian element in Gaza will reemerge, and begin the difficult work of tempering or replacing their extremist rulers.

It's an imperfect plan fraught with uncertainty. But it is far better than forcing Israel to pull out of the operation now, when nothing has been accomplished except for more increases in death and resentment.

Other ways to ceasefire

2009-01-01T05:05:00.000-08:00

Andrew Sullivan has a useful roundup of Gaza reactions that gives a lot of food for thought. He just misses Daniel Larison's sudden return to the keyboard. Though, as much as I like Larison, I think he's pretty off-base in that post, and doesn't really seem to understand what this operation looks like to Israelis. (In particular, he mistakenly believes that Israelis see the Gaza op as another Lebanon. While that perspective may eventually develop, even the Israeli left wing is behind the current campaign, and every Israeli I've spoken to sees the current operation as a massive improvement. Update and caveat: the press is beginning to whisper.)

What I want to make clear is that I'm not against a ceasefire in principle. I'm simply against a ceasefire for its own sake. I don't believe that we will be saving more civilians now by halting this operation before it has run its course than we would by allowing the IDF to achieve its strategic goals.

What's been so frustrating to me is not the international community's dedication to preserving civilian life. Rather, it's this pernicious habit of Western governments to simply sit and do nothing in Israel and the territories for years at a time, and then at the first sign of serious violence to swoop in and demand that it be stopped. What does this accomplish? I hear so many critics of the current operation asking for a ceasefire to preserve innocent life. But where were they when there was a chance to preserve the innocent life already lost? Where was the West when Hamas might still have been a containable problem? I worked for months at a NGO that daily begged the US to intervene in the conflict more forcefully on both sides. I spun my wheels to all manner of people in my home country, trying to get them to understand how much more we could be doing for Israelis and Palestinians -- to no avail. Now I sit and listen to the faux outrage and recriminations coming from that same country, and so many others who could have actually done something, when it mattered, and all I can do is shake my head.

The time for moral and diplomatic arguments has passed. Those who want to see a ceasefire put into play need to develop a tactical argument. Is there such an argument to be made? I don't think so.

The IDF's stated goals are vague. They have backed down from trying to topple Hamas completely, which is good, because they can't. (And even if they could, what good would come of such an effort? Another Israeli occupation? A lawless terror state? No thanks.)

Instead, the new goal is to put an end to rocket attacks, and to position Israel for another ceasefire agreement. I don't think anyone knows how many rockets Hamas has left, or if there are any more tunnels capable of bringing in more. Yesterday about 60 rockets landed, up from about 40 the day before. Today, 10 have landed so far. Whether we'll start to see a diminishing number remains an open question, as does whether that pattern would actually mean anything.

Put bluntly, there really isn't anything strategic for Israel to gain from a ceasefire right now. Disarming Hamas is the first step to an even greater goal (from my perspective): easing the Gaza blockade. Only then, very slowly, will moderate Palestinian leadership have room to work. If Israel is to maintain credible deterrence it cannot open the blockade to a government that is still attacking every day. Once Hamas's military capability has been eliminated, a window of opportunity opens.

Critics like Larison point to Lebanon and say that, because Hizbullah was able to seize political power there, the entire Israeli strategy of using force against guerrilla armies is useless. This is to take the Lebanon analogy too far. Hamas is already in power -- they have nowhere to go but down. Popular support for Hamas is widespread, and attacks by Israel are not going to shore up what is already well established.

Instead, the Israeli campaign is about establishing leverage for a real ceasefire. Engaging in a temporary ceasefire now will not disarm Hamas, which jeopardizes any actual ceasefire and any opening of the blockade. David Grossman, in the Times, points out that 'the war is not going anywhere;' -- as in, if Israel feels the need to reengage Hamas, they'll be right where we left them. True enough. But if Israel gives up the initiative now, allowing Hamas to regroup, a ground operation will be much more difficult, and one of the big purposes of the air strikes will have been sacrificed. And acknowledging that ultimately, the only way for Israel to ensure that Hamas has been disarmed is via ground work, there's really no sense in allowing such an operation to get more risky, especially if one grants that Israel will eventually be heading back into Gaza (which is where the smart money is).

The best solution remains to finish the operation as quickly and effectively as possible, with an eye toward renegotiating a ceasefire once such a renegotiation is in Hamas's interest.

The rejected ceasefire

2009-01-01T01:28:00.000-08:00

Now that Israel has definitely rejected the 48-hour ceasefire, I want to explain why I support the rejection. But before I can do that, I need to lay some groundwork. Freddie is once again on the moral warpath, suggesting that anyone talking about Gaza who doesn't regularly avow either absolute agreement or disagreement with the killing of children is an intellectual coward. Roque usually irks me at Culture 11 and elsewhere but he calls Freddie out correctly on this one: it's a failure to understand the difference between humanist-philosophical investigation, and political-tactical analysis. Plain and simple, Freddie does not know how to separate these two fields, and I would guess he probably would deny that they even can be separated.

That insistence on combining the moral sense with political reality, regardless of the circumstances, boils down for me in one of two ways. The first is a case like Freddie: an total preoccupation with moral theory that leaves its object (Freddie) unable to actually analyze a political conflict and reach a conclusion. Freddie himself admits to the problem in this Hume-like lament, being caught up in endless moral struggle that can never produce results.

The second path is one of the certitudes (or apparent certitudes) of morality combined with irrevocable action. In Freddie's world, if a moral certainty can be determined, it is just as irresponsible not to act on that certainty as it is to bypass the search for such a certainty in the first place. The result is dangerous at both ends: either one reaches a moral conclusion that, while sensible on paper, like manifests itself in radical action; or, to avoid radical action, one avoids all moral questions out of fear of compulsion.

What's nice about breaking down this argument is how the world currently seems to fit into the model. The countries calling for a ceasefire from Israel (appropriately) remind me of Freddie, in that their demands are nothing more than the manifestation of the shallowest moral consideration. "Civilians are dying? Then stop!" they seem to say, answering the question as a grade-schooler writing a letter to God might. Never mind that there is no plan advanced by any of these countries for what is supposed to happen during or after the ceasefire. Never mind that they have contented themselves with utterly ignoring any kind of political-tactical analysis, and therefore have betrayed their lack of seriousness in calling for a ceasefire in the first place. They, like Freddie, cannot be bothered to play in the mud with Israel.

It's a deeply irresponsible attitude, all the more so because these countries -- the EU, the Saudis, the US, Russia, the UN -- are supposed to be stewards of the region. As I mentioned in the last post, this is the latest in a long series of betrayals to both Israelis and Palestinians, that began in '48 and the most recent incarnation of which is the complete failure, not only to do something about Hamas, but even to suggest to Israel any course of action that did not consist of sitting, waiting, and getting shelled.

The second attitude, that of perceived right moral action, is much more in line with the partisans on both sides of the issue. It's ironic to me that Freddie, who prides himself (I assume) on a fair, non-reactionary, objective viewpoint, actually maintains a moral coda that is about two steps away from virulent extremism. Part of the utility (dare I say 'good'?) in maintaining a healthy skepticism of one's own moral sense -- what is derisively called 'relativism' by so many on the far left and far right -- is the inoculation to extremist action. Does Freddie believe that the Hamas terrorists launching rockets are doing so out of tactical sense? They're out there because they concluded that Israel was evil, and that to not actively fight would be the act of 'intellectual cowardice' that Freddie is so eager to charge against the vast pro-Israel blogging cabal. The same goes for the far right Israeli politicians who believe that it's appropriate to burn all of Gaza to glass. They have morally concluded that all Palestinians in Gaza (and elsewhere, and Muslims and Arabs and Persians and maybe even Russians, if they don't watch it) are complicit in the crimes of Hamas, and that it would therefore be more of that dreaded 'intellectual cowardice' to allow a single Israeli to die, when all Palestinians could simply be wiped out.

At the center of all of this ridiculous moral preening remains the thankfully moderate Israeli leadership. They've taken the real message loud and clear: nobody has a sensible moral understanding of this conflict, and nobody has a good idea what to do tactically or politically. So, once more, Israel will be self-reliant, and go its own way. Is the Israeli leadership (and I) guilty of 'intellectual cowardice' for not confirming their belief that Palestinian children should be dying? Maybe. But that brand of cowardice is also saving the lives of very many people right now, whom the sure-footed moral stewards of the Israeli far-right would just as soon see incinerated.

At the end of this awful new dimension to the conflict, the truly guilty parties will be the invokers of moral authority on both sides -- those on the ground who have decided to seek the unconditional destruction of their enemy out of their warped moral sense, and those countries whose facile calls for a cessation of violence were never designed to succeed because their governments couldn't be bothered to develop a tactical solution worth mentioning.

Responding to Freddie

2008-12-31T09:21:00.000-08:00

Freddie lists a number of what he calls "illegitimate" pro-Israel arguments, with a summary note at the bottom for wrap-up. Once again, he's the victim of a stubborn insistence to contort political reality to a rigid moral dogma that one imagines might even give Kant pause. I'll try to respond to each numbered point, and then the summary. In all cases his descriptions are longer than the quoted passages, so make sure to visit the article and read it in full yourself.

1. Frivolous Accusations of Anti-Semitism
Accusations of anti-Semitism, of course, flow from the extremist hawks like water. Whenever Israel becomes the subject of any criticism, for any reason, in any context or discussion, from any quarter, someone will allege anti-Semitism. The thinking, I guess, is that Israel is the home of the Jews, and so criticizing Israel means you're "really" criticizing Jews, and criticizing Jews must be anti-Semitism. In America accusations of anti-Semitism are a panacea for whatever ails those who consider themselves the pro-Israel hardline; it has become their impenetrable shield.

This is a fair point in many cases. Part of my job slumming it at the Post is to moderate comments left on our online articles. The amount of racist vitriol I read and delete (most of it directed at Arabs, Muslims, and Palestinians) is probably damaging my soul. But a lot of what I read there is accusations of anti-Semitism, leveled at anyone who questions Israel's actions. I don't begrudge older folks this reaction -- it's born of long years of prejudice. Jews have sustained a collective psychological trauma in the last century that has transformed bigotry from an indignity to a boogeyman.

That's no excuse for the professional pundits out there who rely on the same tactic, nor is it an excuse for Israeli and American politicians, and I'm with Freddie on this one. I would add only one thing: that there is an anti-Semitic movement out there that hides behind criticism of Israel, and I hope that Freddie takes the time to read about it. It's not always a boogeyman.

2. Appeals to Relative Morality
This is a common trope in foreign policy discussions of all types, and is often used to defend the actions of the United States, as well. In this argument, suddenly the relative merits of Israel compared to various bad actors is completely dispositive of Israel's character. So we are regaled with the fact that Israel has superior moral nature to Hamas, the Syrian regime, the Iranian theocracy, Hezbollah.... These assertions are no doubt true. They are also sublimely irrelevant to the central question: are Israel's actions in the world moral?

I'm fine with this one, and would have added it myself if it weren't on the list.

3. Conflation of Criticism of Israel with Support for Israel's Enemies
This kind of pure strawmanning happens with surprising frequency. Simple, lame assertions that moral revulsion at the widespread killing of civilians by Israel-- and, let us be clear, Israel has killed many more civilians in recent years than their enemies-- is equated with support for whatever despicable acts the other side has committed.

Outside of the new anti-Semitism issue I referenced above, I'm fine with this as well. As a moderate I'm often accused of the same nonsense. One minor quibble -- I'm not sure what timeframe Freddie is referencing by 'recent years,' but I assume he must mean that Israel has killed more civilians than its enemies have killed Israely civilians. If he is reaching as far back as the 80s, then Israel's regional enemies have killed many more civilians generally than Israel has.

4. The "Why do you only criticize Israel?" Dodge
In this bit of empty rhetoric, the fact that critics of Israel actually spend time criticizing Israel's actions demonstrates their lack of a moral compass, and is commonly used with implications of anti-Semitism: why do you criticize Israel so often? I'm not saying anything, it just makes me wonder.... This argument is ultimately connected with number 2 above. Why do we criticize Israel when there are other political agents worthy of criticism? There are several reasons.

Freddie is correct in his response insofar as Americans have a vested interest in Israel because of our military and cultural ties. And he's also correct to say that Israel ought to be held to a higher standard than terrorists and dictators on its borders.

But getting down to a micro, event-by-event level, I do take issue with this criticism. Even though it sounds small, it matters very much to the strategies of Israel and Hamas who is perceived to be the instigator in this conflict. Hamas violated the truce (or allowed it to be violated by others, depending on who you ask), not Israel. That's a critical point, because from it the narrative of the current offensive emerges. As I write there are two narratives vying for legitimacy in the press and popular discourse: 1. that Hamas struck first and therefore Israel's actions, reprehensible though they may be, are defensive in nature; or 2. that Israel is the aggressor and, in the truly cruel phrasing of one British journalist, that it is "addicted to violence."

That the true narrative emerge requires a critical viewpoint toward both Israel and Hamas. And too often, this is not happening. The British press, in particular, spends so much more time criticizing Israel, that a false narrative of pure aggression is emerging in the Western press. You may disagree with Israel's reaction, but it is something very different to revise the historical record to change the context of that disagreeable reaction and make it even more disagreeable.

Israel deserves a critical eye. But it needs to be understood that such criticism can have unintended consequences.

5. Guilt by association, or by ethnicity
Hamas is indeed a Palestinian organization; so what? Again, there is no difference between saying that innocent Palestinians deserve to die for the actions of Hamas and saying that Americans deserve to die for the actions of the American military. Palestinians, today, are dying, despite not being members of Hamas, never holding a rocket, never targeting an Israeli citizen, having nothing whatsoever to do with attacks on Israeli civilians.

This is a willful misrepresentation of the problem. It's true that Palestinians cannot and should not be held accountable for the actions of their neighbors. The issue arises from two conditions in Gaza:
1. Palestinians elected Hamas in free and fair elections, knowing their policy toward Israel; and
2. Hamas maintains a guerrilla fighting force that involves the citizenry to varying degrees, purposefully making it unclear to Israel and the international community who is a fighter, and who is a civilian.

In these senses there is guilt by association. I don't believe that they justify the killing of civilians. Palestinians voted for Hamas because Fatah was (and is) hopelessly corrupt and incompetent - the Arafat gift that keeps on giving. And while I'm sure some (or even many) alleged civilians happily cooperate with Hamas, in Gaza there is no option to not cooperate. It is a police state where dissidents are dealt with brutally.

That said, many pro-Israel advocates don't know that. They're still wrong, but they're arguing from ignorance, not (necessarily) racism -- a much different position from Freddie's inelegant allusion to German anti-Semitism.

As to the summary: I can say immediately and with feeling that anyone who declares the "truth" of the Israel/Palestine issue is completely ignorant of the true depth of the conflict to which he refers. I've had the lucky fortune to work over here with some of the best thinkers on the issue, on both sides. They have learned through years and years of attempts and failures to stop thinking they know what's true. Freddie needs to come off the moral highhorse, at least when it comes to this region of the world.

As a moderate/liberal American living in Israel and working in the political/media sector here, I recognize in Freddie's sentiment the same feeling I had when I was still in America. I am not a globetrotting snob who believes that you have to have come here to "understand" the issue, and there are many international thinkers whose opinions about Israel I value. But I do think it helps, especially to snap one out of the liberalism that can come so easily to the citizens of a country that has not been under bombardment for seven years.

Freddie is eager to assert a categorical imperative to protect civilians -- fine. But like so many in the international community, he perceives the current crisis in two dimensions. It's the Negev vs. Gaza; planes vs. rockets; four casualties in Israel vs. 400 in Gaza.

I'll reiterate -- this is the mentality of someone who has not made an effort to imagine what it is like to go to war in one's home country every ten years. Israel talks a lot about "credible deterrence" -- the requirement to remind enemy countries at the border that you have the ability and will to respond with deadly force at provocation. Critics see this as "an addiction to violence." It is, in my view, very much the opposite.

The problem with categorical imperatives (or one problem, anyway) is that they treat each situation as if it were part of a vacuum. So, one mustn't kill civilians. But what if killing some civilians now will save more later? When is the trade justified?

It's easy for Freddie to perform the moral calculus when he sees the relevance of the Gaza rockets only for the Israeli south. But they are part of a much larger balance of power which he has totally ignored. If Israel fails to maintain credible deterrence, it puts the lives of all its citizens in jeopardy. Israel, unlike America, faces existential threats that are real. There are multiple countries and terrorist organizations with the means to attack Israel that will do so if they believe they can be effective.

Israel has two ways of diminishing their effectiveness. The first is to maintain one of the best internal security systems in the world. But that only takes you so far. Israel also has to be willing to respond to provocation. Freddie is right to point out that it is almost impossible for moderate Palestinian leadership to remain credible in the face of Israeli strikes. But the time for dealing with that issue was before this crisis, not the middle. The United States and the UN had a year to solve the Hamas problem in Gaza peacefully, or via other means than the IDF. Instead, they sat on their hands and waited for -- what? No one knows. As far as we can tell, the Bush administration had no plan (surprise, surprise).

But Israel cannot sacrifice credible deterrence in the hope that someone will finally find a way to work with Hamas diplomatically -- or that Palestinians in Gaza will come out against the violence. I can't emphasize this enough: the sacrifice of credible deterrence puts more civilian lives at risk, on both sides of the conflict, than the current operation. That Freddie has failed to consider this is symptomatic of the international community's persistent myopia in all things regionally Middle Eastern, from Israel to Iraq.

Were there better ways to carry out the operation? I'd like to see the air strikes end as soon as possible. I believe they were necessary in the first two days of the operation, to catch as much of the Hamas leadership in the open as possible. But at this point, a ground operation would probably do more to minimize civilian death. (I say that with circumspection, as Gaza is extremely difficult, mostly urban territory, and I don't know how successfully ground troops will be able to discern Palestinian civilians from militants dressed as same.)

But either way, while I appreciate Freddie's ability to deconstruct a fallacious argument, I reject as shortsighted and essentially ignorant his opposition to the Israeli operation based on the categorical imperative he has established.

Happy new year! PR war edition

2008-12-29T06:45:00.001-08:00

Well it hadn't been two days before my Gaza fears came true. A lot of what I said earlier is now irrelevant to the current situation, especially with regard to air strikes. I admit that I was not hopeful that Israel would avoid air strikes, but I also definitely didn't realize the extent to which they were going to be used.

Understanding now that it was Israel's intention to take Hamas relatively by surprise, and that the Egypt meeting (and possibly even Barak's reluctance) was merely a ruse, helps explain tactics. A ground campaign without this kind of air support would have been long and grueling, giving Hamas leadership more than enough time to go underground. In the last post I had been assuming that high-priority Hamas targets had already gone into hiding, and that it therefore was not a concern to Israel. I now see that this was not the case. To that extent, I'm happy with Israel's operation. It feels more 'Israeli', less like Lebanon '06 -- fast, thorough, and effective.

But I am very concerned about civilian casualties, and so far there hasn't been any news on just how many there will be. Most reports circulating say that the 'majority' of the 300-odd dead were Hamas militiamen, which is good news. And to my knowledge Israel has yet to slip up and bomb a school or hospital. But at this level of destruction, there is simply no way that civilian casualties are below 10%. And as the death toll climbs, that percentage gets more and more difficult to swallow.

From a moral standpoint, all civilian casualties are unacceptable. But when a confrontation is unavoidable, so is civilian death. The real question becomes what manner of operation will minimize civilian suffering. In this case, there is no guarantee that a ground operation would have done so. As Jewcy points out, Hamas has used human shields in the past during ground fighting. And certainly more Israelis would have been killed in such an operation.

But the potential for civilian death in air strikes is much, much higher. Put another way, in ground fighting, one mistake can kill one or two civilians. In air strikes, one mistake can kill a hundred. There's no way to know yet whether Israel will walk away from Gaza having avoided such a mistake - but they are certainly playing with fire.

That Jewcy article is, I think, not very good, in that it's reactionary and a little bit unrealistic. The author, Edmund Standing, seems to be asserting that because Israel adopts the rhetoric of wanting to spare civilian lives, it is therefore not guilty of civilian lives lost. (I'm reminded of the Bush administration's incredibly doublespeakish operation names, as if they believed that by calling it 'Iraqi Freedom' it would thereby be unimpeachably a pro-freedom operation.)

Not that the Israeli government's stubborn insistence on maintaining anti-racist, pro-equality rhetoric isn't admirable, especially in the face of what Mr. Standing rightly points out is a nasty and brutal creed from Hamas. But ultimately, Israeli culpability for civilian losses will not be mitigated by rhetoric, but by what Israel is actually doing to minimize those losses.

It's not legitimate for Israel, or Mr. Standing, to claim that because Israel would have preferred not to kill civilians, it is therefore absolved of their deaths -- any more than Hamas supporters may claim that, because they did not fly the planes carrying the bombs, they are therefore wholly unaccountable for Gaza losses. The fact is that Israel has made a tactical choice in this conflict -- a difficult choice, but still certainly a choice -- to operate exclusively or primarily through air strikes. Air strikes are very effective at killing their targets, and so there is an argument to be made on the Israeli side that by dealing Hamas a crippling blow now, very quickly, Palestinian lives will ultimately be spared because of the lack of a drawn-out conflict. But air strikes also kill civilians -- and as the side that chose to employ that tactic instead of a ground invasion, the Israeli government bears responsibility for all deaths caused, including those of civilians. It shares that responsibility with Hamas, and Hamas perhaps moreso for initiating the new conflict (depending, I guess, on your perspective).

Mr. Standing is right to be annoyed at the British press's coverage of recent events. Israelis are -- rightfully -- asking themselves where all the calls of war crimes were when Israeli towns were being shelled daily by tens of rockets from Gaza. Israelis want to know why they are being accused of disrupting the ceasefire, when Hamas has been launching Qassams for nearly two weeks.

But the media is attracted to spectacle, and as unfair as it may be, the massive operation now taking place in Gaza has merited more coverage than however many rockets landing in the desert. The problem with British coverage has been a failure to provide context for the operation. American media has been by and large conscientious in this regard, from what I've seen. Reports are always careful to explain that the reason for the Israeli operation was the shelling of southern Israeli towns. British media, on the other hand, seems determined to consider the operation in a vacuum, as if Olmert woke up one morning and decided he hadn't killed enough people during his time in office.

All that to say that, again, while Mr. Standing is reactionary and a bit all over the place, I understand where he's coming from emotionally. But frustration with incompetent or unfair media coverage isn't any more an excuse for civilian casualties than a perverse, reckless enemy.

Merry Christmas! War edition

2008-12-25T09:01:00.000-08:00

Tzipi Livni's visit to Egypt today was widely covered, and with good reason. The BBC is correct to interpret the move as the first diplomatic step needed before a Gaza strike becomes an option. Egypt, despite occasional rhetorical flourishes, is a needed ally in the Gaza situation - without its commitment to sealing the border and staying out of the way, an Israeli strike is out of the question.

The BBC article also speculates that Egypt would not be opposed to an Israeli strike, which is some good connect-the-dots, though of course nothing is certain. Hamas's failure to negotiate with Fatah, and now its failure to renew the ceasefire, is a pain in Egypt's ass. The Palestinian issue is forever a burden to Mubarak, because the Egyptian people's collective heart is not in it, as I reported a few weeks ago.

But Hamas's brand of resistance is especially toxic for the Mubarak government because it constantly returns the Palestinians, and Israeli violence against them, to the headlines. Hamas, in the time-honored PLO tradition, knows that violence keeps them in the news. That's great for them -- but for Mubarak, it's nothing less than a daily reminder to his people how out-of-step his government is with their feeling.

In a nutshell, that's why Egypt pushed for the ceasefire in the first place. The country is not exactly a humanitarian paragon - but they know a good political play when they see one. Now that Hamas isn't playing ball on that front, I think the BBC is right in thinking that Egypt would green light a limited Israeli incursion designed to topple the Hamas government once and for all.

With that in mind, I think Hamas has really overplayed its hand here. I had thought that their strategy was to drop just enough rockets to get Israel to extend the ceasefire -- and to meanwhile continue to rearm and hope for a miracle (like an Iranian attack, or a surprise Hizbullah incursion). That strategy seemed so good that it honestly frightened me, as well as, I think, a lot of Israelis. Israel's hands were tied by international disapproval, while Hamas went about the nasty business of girding for a hard and nasty war.

But looking at the situation today, I honestly don't know that they ever had a strategy at all. 50 rockets a day for a week straight is not exactly throwing rocks at tanks. A growing consensus is emerging in Israel that we now have full justification for an offensive -- a consensus with which even my pinko brain struggles to disagree. A few rockets a day into the desert is not pretty, sure. But we're talking barrages. We are truly talking acts of war.

(Which, incidentally, is why Ehud Barak has once again proved himself to be perhaps the most inept politician of his generation. The idea that he could use the current situation purely for positioning - i.e., to separate himself from the pack by being 'the guy who opposed the Gaza incursion' - is truly tone-deaf. Even if the Gaza operation fails, (which it may, where failure is essentially undefined) I doubt that Barak's opposition (especially in his position as minister of defense) is going to be viewed favorably.)

What are the upshots here? Not many. The potential for widespread civilian casualties on the Palestinian side seems very great. It's hard to imagine at any time Livni or Netanyahu pushing for ground operations over air strikes when the ground operations would put Israeli soldiers in danger. But in an election year? Unless they come to some sort of private agreement, I expect we'll see multiple air strikes almost certain to leave large numbers of Palestinian civilians dead.

Couple that with the fact that Hamas leadership has already gone to ground, and I'm not sure that it would even be possible to bring down their government without a costly, longterm operation. Practically speaking, Israel can afford the expenditure. But in terms of international political capital, I would imagine it would be difficult to carry on an offensive longer than a few months. And who knows what would happen if the Obama administration perceived the campaign as a kind of test of its leadership.

That said, if Hamas could be brought down, it might be worth the risk. Certainly it would tremendously ease the burden of Palestinian peace negotiators to once again be able to speak for their whole country, instead of half. But even in the event of a victory, Israel would be between a rock and a hard place. A withdrawal at the end of the campaign, with Fatah left holding the keys to the kingdom, doesn't really sound desirable -- after all, they're the ones who lost grip on the territory in the first place. But on the other hand, can Israel afford to semi-permanently reoccupy Gaza? It may be the only way to keep Hamas out, but the human cost would again be tremendous.

Ultimately, I think Israel has to call Hamas's bluff and go in. If Hamas continues to receive carte blanche for its reckless baiting, it's hard to see a positive future for an independent West Bank.

How to do it cleanly is another issue. First of all, I think that Livni and Netanyahu ought to make the deal I spoke about above. They both must realize that, while air strikes might be a way to gain leverage in the current campaign, they would make governing after the fact tremendously difficult for whichever party took the election. I imagine they would both prefer not to be installed as PM right after a faulty missile blows up a Palestinian school, or something similar.

Having committed itself to ground operations where air strikes are too risky, I think the Israeli government needs to adopt the rhetoric of full-on war. Part of the problem with second Lebanon War was the arrogant way in which Olmert's government approached the issue. They were so sure that they would crush Hizbullah that they forgot to prepare the soldiers for the sacrifices they would inevitably be making. That needs to change. Hamas is real, and dangerous, and if the politicians send soldiers in without being honest with the Israeli people about the risks, then public support for the operation will wane very quickly.

As far as international opinion goes, Israel needs to shut it out. As long as the US remains in favor, it's better for both Israel and Palestinian civilians that there be one longer, thorough operation, rather than a number of short, messy attempts. US advocates for Israel need to approach the Obama administration couching this as his first test of loyalty, so to speak, after he protested against election smears questioning his Middle East credibility. They should strongly suggest that forcing Israel to pull out too soon would damage his capital amongst Americans far more easily than letting the operation play out (which is true). The US should be invited to help craft post-invasion strategy with Israel and Egypt, and I hope that one of the few gains from this mess will be an Obama administration that is hands-on with the peace process here.

Figuring out a post-war Gaza is harder. Assuming that Hamas does fall, I think the best compromise would be for Fatah to take over, with soldiers provided by Egypt. That way, Israel can get out, and Palestinian civilians can feel a little better than they would back under the thumb of the occupier.

But it's unlikely that Egypt would want a committed presence in Gaza. In that case, I guess the next best bet would be for Egypt to provide money and arms to Fatah, and for Israel to go through a phased withdrawal, to give Fatah time to settle in. Perhaps some security agreement could be struck between Israel and Fatah, the former promising to support the latter in the event of another coup, and the Palestinians allowing for a cooperative presence along the Gaza border.

Mead's new paper in Foreign Affairs

2008-12-22T03:10:00.000-08:00

All right, all right, I know this was supposed to be more on journalism. But forgive me, I need to take a moment to talk about a thought-provoking new essay from Walter Mead, who is a fellow with the mysterious cabal known as the Council on Foreign Relations.

I don't actually know a lot about Mead personally, or his history with Israel, or anything like that. I'm just here to talk about the paper itself, which, as advertised, is attempting a Copernican-shift in the way the US relates to Palestinians.

Ok, first, here's what Mead is suggesting that is not new. He joins a recent, unusually concerted wave of European politicians (from Austria and England, most notably) in calling for a freeze on settlements. Though, he cleverly leaves that to the end of the paper, so that the impossible Israeli right-wing doesn't shut down until at least the last page. A bit more interestingly, perhaps, he also seems to have gotten behind a divided Jerusalem, albeit euphemistically. The amusingly 'diplomatic' passage:

Support for Israel runs very deep among Americans, and it is likely to increase as Israel moves closer to a settlement with the Palestinians. The Obama administration needs to harness that support to help the Israeli government take steps on the sensitive questions of the status of Jerusalem and the status of the territories, steps that an increasing number of Israeli politicians acknowledge must be taken.

This is a gentle way of saying "we're going to have to divide Jerusalem, and give up settlements."

Mead joins the sensible, realistic wing of the Israel-Palestine issue in these prescriptions, for which I am thankful. It's the other things he has to say, however, that are of particular interest to me.

Mead is talking about, more than anything else, an extreme overhaul of American rhetoric regarding the peace process. He organizes that overhaul around two prongs, which he sees as benefiting both sides.

First prong: America needs to recognize not only the right of Palestinians to exercise self-determination, but the suffering they have endured since Naqba and Israeli independence, and the culpability of the rest of the world in that suffering.

When he reiterates the United States' support for an independent, viable Palestinian state with borders based on the Green Line, that is, the pre-1967 borders (with minor and mutually-agreed-on modifications), Obama must go further than his predecessors. He must overcome the skepticism created by the Bush administration's empty rhetorical support for a Palestinian state. He must declare that the United States is committed not only to an independent Palestine but also to acknowledging the wrongs the Palestinians have suffered, compensating them for those, and otherwise ensuring a dignified future for every Palestinian family.

Second prong: America needs to lead the charge in laying the majority of the blame for the Palestinian situation at the feet of the United Nations, instead of Israel.

The United Nations' failure to provide elementary security for both the Arab and the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine as the British withdrew was the immediate cause of both communities' suffering in the late 1940s -- of the initial clashes between them, of the accelerating spiral of violence, of the Arab armies' entry into the conflict, and then of the prolonged period of hostility. Modern Israel should acknowledge and account for its part in those tragic events, but the international community at large must accept the ultimate responsibility for the nakba, solemnly acknowledging the wrongs done and sincerely trying to compensate Palestinian refugees today.

As some commentators in Israel have already pointed out, changes in rhetoric alone are not going to do anything to put the conflict to bed. Mead himself acknowledges that these changers will stop "well short of a revolution." But he also points to a tough fact that eluded the Bush administration for eight years -- any peace agreement is going to have to command broad support amongst Israelis, and especially Palestinians.

If the paramount Israeli goal is security, then a peace agreement with any hope of lasting needs to do more than just sort out points of contention between the two governments. It needs to lay the foundation for success with the Palestinian people. In a territory with as weak a government as the PA, the only way to truly minimize terrorism while simultaneously restoring autonomy is through widespread cooperation of the Palestinian populace.

As I've talked about here before, Palestinians have more to say about grievances than even Jews -- which is saying something. They have sustained national psychological damage, and as much as they might frustrate us in seeming to revel in the role of victimhood, the truth is that endlessly getting kicked around has crippled the ability of Palestinians, as a nation, to act constructively toward mutual interest. That isn't just going to disappear with even the best peace agreement. I agree with Mead that a change in tone from Washington, followed by similar changes around the West, would go a long way toward healing the damage.

I don't know that Mead is offering much beyond rhetorical advice. The problems on the ground remain as they were -- and with the impending reinvasion of Gaza, they're likely to only get worse in the next weeks (or, God forbid, months). But, assuming the Obama administration decides to take interest in our little corner of the world, I hope they read this paper seriously.

future (or lack thereof) of reporting

2008-12-14T11:58:00.000-08:00

I'm now a week and change into a new job (where "job"=task for which I am not paid, but over which I am yelled at) at a local newspaper here in Jerusalem (which will remain nameless as I intend to be fairly critical).

I could go on and on about the weird childhood wish-fulfillment of the whole experience, or the deflating tedium of actual life as a reporter. But instead I'll focus on journalism as an industry, which as everyone knows is in its death-throes. I read Drudge Report just about daily, and nobody more gleefully reports on the death of mainstream media than that crazy guy. Lord knows why, exactly -- his business model is basically "consume and recycle mainstream media. repeat."

Put simply I don't think there is anyone my age today looking to get into print journalism seriously -- at least, no one sane. I'd be curious to see enrollment figures for journalism and mass communications schools in the States. I bet they're down. My first day on the job, I sat in on the editorial meeting with another new intern, and two kids slightly older than me who were trying to get jobs at the paper. They looked very tired. They looked embarrassed to be there.

I wasn't embarrassed. When you acknowledge up front that you're an amateur, a dabbler, you get a little cover. But to step up and say you just graduated journalism school? You've got a roomful of people looking at you like you just told them you graduated from community college with a degree in snake charming.

Where is journalism going? Print journalism is over for now, at least until the real Big One hits and we have to sell the internet to China. It's a given that journalism is going digital, a fact that even mainstream papers are beginning (albeit grudgingly) to accept. But that will not be enough to save the creaking print giants. Even web-exclusive publications like Slate are feeling the pinch. There's something missing to American journalism reform.

People won't pay for internet content. They're not used to it, and while the news is free elsewhere, that's where they'll go. For archives, they might pay. Except that everything published after, say, the turn of the century echoes so loudly across the web that there's almost nothing worth buying. If you absolutely must have an NYT article on the Microsoft hearings, maybe you'll pay. If you just need to know what happened? Wikipedia.

Ads sell. But ads don't pay the cost of producing a quality story. That takes contacts, and travel, and good writing, and editing, and most of all time. It takes time to write a good story! It takes more than a few hours.

Today I've written a total of five stories. Of those, four were compiled from press releases and a few phone calls. Only one of them was written on my own initiative. Guess which one hit the front page.

The commodification of stories results in a corresponding decrease in the quality of the stories. That's the truth. The newspaper competes with other papers, not to get the real story, but just to get the story at all. We wrote a story today on the ADL that had no information outside of their press release. Why? It wasn't interesting, and I bet nobody in town gives a fuck about it. But we had to -- the other guys had it! Of course, their story sucked too, boring and canned and utterly beholden to the interests it discussed.

Does anyone buy paper subscriptions this way? Checking to see what inconsequential bullshit one paper missed, and judging the other the better for it? I don't think so. But this appears to be how news is dictated. I have no trouble imagining the guys at that other paper looking over our shoulder just the same.

I don't know why people don't read the paper any more. I still like it. I like to know what's going on in the world. It's food for thought. I especially like in-depth pieces and profiles. For this reason I love news magazines and their format. I consider them worth my money. I see my money as an investment in perceptive people who are capable of getting close to the rich and famous, to people of consequence, and returning to articulately give me all the goods. I'm happy to spend $5 for this task to be accomplished.

I see art and poetry in good journalism and so it is no stretch for me to say any of that. I still remember reading a wonderful profile of General Petraeus. It was the highlight of my week. But I'm beginning to realize that this is one more case where I am in the minority.

I will follow this up with what I meant to talk about very shortly.

A little more on Bethlehem

2008-12-06T03:27:00.000-08:00

As it will appear in the Federation News:

Last month, I took a two-day trip to Bethlehem, the ancient sister city of Jerusalem and the birthplace of Christianity. I had the opportunity to tour the city and its surrounding villages, and to meet with a number of the Palestinians in the area, including one family who graciously let me stay the night at their home.
There is a lot to say about Bethlehem as a cultural phenomenon, from the unusual mix of Christian and Muslim Palestinians, to its enduring reputation as a tourist attraction for Westerners, despite the continued security risks. However, what most struck me about the city was not its cultural heritage, but its changing political landscape.
If there was a dominant political theme to Bethlehem, it was that of the binational state – the rejection of separate states for Israelis and Palestinians, in favor of one state for both nationalities, over the whole of biblical Israel. This notion has been floating around since long before I arrived in Israel three months ago, but the seriousness with which it is being considered by the Israeli left, and by a broad swath of the Palestinian polity, is very new.
Every single Palestinian I met in Bethlehem favored a binational state over an independent Palestinian state. I admit that I was not interacting with an average sample of the Palestinians in the West Bank; the people I spoke to were universally pro-peace, and primarily older. Nonetheless, I was stunned by their level of enthusiasm for a single state, and how rapidly suspicion and rejection of the two-state solution -- until recently the only goal considered realistic on either side – had grown.
A binational state would solve a whole host of problems for both peoples. Land rights, water rights, historic/holy sites visitation rights, and much more would be instantly resolved under a binational state agreement. But there would not be a Jewish majority.
For Jews around the world, and an overwhelming majority in Israel, this is an instant deal-breaker. Israel, after all, is supposed to be a Jewish country, where the Jewish language is spoken by Jewish people, practicing in peace the Jewish religion.
With this colossal problem in the way, there has been no serious discussion from the Israeli side of a binational state, with the exception of groups considerably to the political left of the Israeli public. But the situation in Palestine is different. There, the idea of a binational state has gained serious weight, to the extent that, for the people I met, it was the only option.
Of the many Palestinians I spoke to, not a single one of them understood the significance of the idea of a Jewish state, or how important it is to Jewish people. They do not learn about the historic struggle for Israel in their schools. They know Israel only in its modern incarnation: as a hostile neighbor and occupier on whom they cannot rely.
I asked the host family I stayed with to talk a little bit about their reasons for wanting a binational state. They were wonderfully nice people: a husband and wife, their daughter, and the wife's sister. They could speak for as long as I wanted (and often longer) on any of the subjects we talked about. When it came to the binational state, they continually returned to two issues:
1. The Security Fence -- For Palestinians, the security fence has become their world. It has done more damage to movement and access in the West Bank than any checkpoint. The family I spoke to had, for decades, been in the habit of traveling to Jerusalem once or twice a week, to visit the market, see the Christian holy sites, and sell small wood carvings that the father made, as a hobby. Since the construction of the barrier, they have not been allowed to visit Jerusalem under any circumstances. Religiously, culturally, and financially, this is a tremendous loss, as it is for the majority of the families living in the Bethlehem – Ramallah corridor, the most populous area of the West Bank.
2. Settlements – If you are living on the Palestinian side of the barrier, the math here is simple. Although you have been promised a country in a small corner of the world, in the meantime, you watch as bits and pieces of its land are subtracted every day from your future prospects. A friend of mine, who lives and works in Ramallah, the largest city in the West Bank, recently took me on an educational drive around the city limits. He pointed out two fully-realized settlements that had been built in the past two years, and three sites where new settlements had begun to go up. The situation in Bethlehem is alarmingly similar. My host family, perhaps rightfully, took only one message away from the development they saw around them: by the time a final status agreement is reached, and Palestinians are to receive their own state, there may not be any state left to give.

The security barrier and the ongoing settlement projects have received attention the world over as inhumane, illegal “land grabs” perpetrated on a helpless Palestinian public. These allegations may be true, and, from a moral standpoint, it should matter to the Jewish community in America that they be investigated. But as stakeholders in the future of the Jewish state, we need to be paying attention to these issues for other reasons, as well.
Today, the peace process is once again a shambles. A right-wing government, less willing to make concessions, is on its way to power in Israel. Gaza is completely off the table. And, in the West Bank, Abu Mazen continues to govern without the mandate of his people. These are all liabilities to the two-state solution; each of these situations, in its own way, is shaking the confidence of Israelis and Palestinians that a peaceful Palestinian neighbor will ever come into being.
The security fence and the settlements matter not only because of the humanitarian issues they raise, but also because of the massive damage they are doing in the West Bank to grassroots confidence in the two-state solution. When, one day, the majority of those in the West Bank look out their windows in the morning and see a 15-foot wall, or an Israeli village, they are not going to continue to believe in the possibility of a Palestinian state.
Should that day come, prospects for peace in the Middle East will dim considerably. The Palestinian public will have only two choices: to return to violence, or to turn to a binational state. As Jews, we claim that each is unacceptable. But what, then, are we doing to provide an alternative?

Questions for Lieberman

2008-11-19T01:54:00.000-08:00

I won't crow too much over my prediction that the Democrats would let Lieberman keep his chairmanship, and remain in the caucus, which now appears true. I was certainly not the only one, after all...and anyway, the Dems are smelling that sweet number 60, with recounts in Alaska and Minnesota seeming to lean their way. So a lot of factors came together to make this happen, and my appeal to Obama's style was only one small part.

Lieberman will be on TV tomorrow with Katie Couric, according to Ambinder, who is asking for questions which he'll pass along to her. First of all, Ambinder knows Katie Couric? Small world. Anyway, my questions are reproduced below:

Will you support president Obama's reelection campaign in 2012?
What decisions/actions taken by the president would bring/lose your support for his reelection?
Are there any gop candidates currently considering a run in 2012 to whom you would lend your support?
If so, who?
If not, what would they have to do to attract your attention?

Since I somehow doubt these are going to make it interview, I'll predict some answers. Joe would equivocate on his potential support for Obama, not wanting to seem like he was out-and-out lying, but seeing the writing on the wall and not wanting to appear to be sending a shot across the bow of a soon-to-be-sitting president. Which is why I would ask the follow-up about what Obama's record would need to look like to gain/lose support.

On that question, I'm sure Lieberman would hammer home his national security concerns. He might charitably suggest that the Democrat decision to let him keep his chairmanship is a sign they're moving in the right direction. He would praise Obama's insistence on taking the fight to Pakistan and back to Afghanistan. He would caution the president-elect with trying to engage Iran diplomatically. He would say something about Israel. (Who the knows what, exactly. Lieberman - hell, the whole Republican party - is all over the map when it comes to Israel. Perhaps ironically, Lieberman's Judaism might mean that he would be one of the few remaining neocons out there who would not somehow shoehorn the word 'holocaust' into this comment.)

Question three, of course, is all about Palin. She remains, for a lot of Democrats, one of Lieberman's most controversial decisions. We want to know if, now that the campaign is over, he's going to come clean and admit that she's awful. My guess is that Lieberman, unless directly asked about Palin, will avoid bringing her up. He might have something nice to say about Bobby Jindal or Tim Pawlenty. I don't know where he would be on Mitt Romney. Basically, without being prodded I'd expect Lieberman to punt on this one, saying it's simply too soon to tell.

Which is the reason for the last question. Maybe, if he could speak more generally, Lieberman would tip his hand a bit. We'll never know.

Abortion compromises

2008-11-18T04:53:00.000-08:00

A very very interesting post from Ross Douthat on possible abortion compromises. Abortion seems to be the talk of the town once more, as speculation grows over what the incoming Democratic majority could mean for the future of abortion law. He comes just in time, as all of the reading was beginning to agitate me. I felt hopeless over the prospect of a compromise. Abortion is such a tough issue I thought that there was no available compromise. It was merely a battle of ideology, which the left happens, at the moment, to be winning.

Freddie suggested that the resounding defeat of the GOP ought to send a clear message to the right on abortion: moderate or perish. But, as many readers and writers more informed than myself have pointed out, Democrats are no more moderate on abortion than Republicans. It is, in fact, that large, elusive swath of the electorate known, appropriately, as 'moderates' who hold the middle ground on the issue. Most of America would like to see more restrictions on abortion; most of America would also like to keep abortion legal under at least some, if not most, circumstances. And yet, the law of the land does not reflect this desire. Roe continues to make unconditional abortion legal, its impact tempered only by the few laws the GOP has managed to pass in the past few decades, laws which really operate at the margins of the overall policy impact.

Despite the seemingly inherent intransigence of the available positions on abortion ("abortion is murder," "abortion is not murder"), the American electorate is ripe for a compromise. Why? Who knows. Maybe we're just tired of arguing about it. An optimist (not the writer - not me) might look at these most recent numbers and see that both sides of the issue are willing to admit the possible rightness of one another, and therefore have decided to lay down their rhetoric and find something palatable.

So the big question: what would a compromise on abortion look like? Well, enter Ross, who makes the startling (to my fragile liberal ears, anyway) proposition that abortion be fully legal for any woman under the age of consent, and illegal otherwise. Is that enough? Not for me. But it's a tantalizing beginning. So, a counter-proposal: abortion is legal for anyone under the age of consent; AND abortion is legal for anyone who can prove a lack of capacity to care for a child.

What would proof like that look like? Well, it could, for starters, be tied to annual income - i.e., anyone in a certain tax bracket or lower would have the right to an abortion, should she so choose. We might also add: convictions for habitual drug use, or past child abuse; or a medically-certified mental disability, such as severe schizophrenia.

I think this kind of compromise would be acceptable to me. It would eliminate a huge portion of the population that might seek life-threatening, illegal abortions were the practice to be completely illegalized. At the same time, it would spare a huge number of unborn children not currently protected under Roe.

post-election positions

2008-11-06T08:29:00.000-08:00

Nothing to add to the conversation already taking place around election night and the acceptance speeches. I felt moved to tears. I dislike the bombast that's so prevalent among political bloggers and especially "DC people", so maybe it's the sleep deprivation from being up all night in Tel Aviv to see the returns; but even I have to admit to being moved by the events of the past few days.

Two things, though, to mention (for now) about how the new Washington is shaping up:

First, Obama has asked Rahm Emanuel to be his chief of staff. A lot of people are focusing on what kind of message this sends Republicans and the new cohort of centrist democrats, since Emanuel is a bit of a bully, or at least someone who is known to play with the gloves off.

But I was more surprised to learn that Emanuel has two young kids, and is thus reluctant to take the job. Mike Allen pointed out today that he will pretty much have to take the job anyway, since a refusal would look bad for the new administration. In light of that it's really, really stone cold for Obama to have asked Emanuel and leaked it to the press (I assume it was his side). If anyone doubts that Obama was serious about his rhetoric of sacrifice in the acceptance speech, Emanuel might have a talking point for you.

I'm also beginning to think that Lieberman's ass may be saved by the new administration. Obama has, in my opinion, run a very gracious if not always clean campaign. He has always extended courtesy to McCain and those on the right in general, and his acceptance speech was only a more direct promise to make the Democrat tent bigger. This is a product of some second level political thinking on Obama's part, a way to build and strengthen the Democrat majority while looking magnanimous -- but it will probably also save Lieberman. It would seem out of character so to speak for an Obama administration to settle scores, especially considering that Lieberman continues to caucus with the Democrats on domestic issues. As the Democrats also appear to be getting tantalizingly close to 60, it does them little good to put Lieberman out on his ass just to blow off steam. Too bad -- I was looking forward to it.

Some thoughts on the Bethlehem trip

2008-11-02T04:12:00.000-08:00

Please excuse what may seem to be the uncollected nature of this post (and, in all likelihood, some more to come.) I'm still processing the Bethlehem trip, from a political as well as a personal standpoint. But I wanted to say a little bit about my experience while it remains fresh.

I got home from Bethlehem two days ago, having spent the night with a Palestinian family, and nearly the entirety of two days discussing the conflict from a personal (and occasionally political) perspective. Almost none of what I experienced was conceptually new to me. Unlike most of the other participants, it's my job to deal with most of the issues we discussed on a daily basis.

However, the intensely personal setting was new. This was my first trip to the West Bank. Although I've spent some time in East Jerusalem (see below) -- and there is considerable cultural and financial similarity between the two -- I had not spent so much time discussing the situation face-to-face with Palestinians.

It's easy for Jews to forget the human toll that the occupation exacts on the Palestinian people. I flatter myself that I am spending more time than most accounting for and trying to minimize that toll.

But there is no question that even I tend to forget the pace of the trouble. I come into the office every morning, to work on whatever project happens to be that day's priority, with essentially the same understanding of the territories. Broadly, their status remains the same over the course of the months. But being there on the ground I was confronted with a difficult realization: every single day of continued occupation is a day of new tragedies. That is not hyperbole. We visited homes and even entire villages that, should the occupation end today, would be safe and sound -- but in a month will be nothing but rubble.

The truth is that 60 years of conflict can deaden us to the daily struggles taking place in the West Bank and Gaza. But those struggles have not relaxed apace with our interest or dedication. They continue every single moment, and as the months and years accrue the desperation only grows.

This morning I came to work and tried to shake off the overwhelming despair that largely ruined my weekend. I need to find a way to synthesize my experiences in Bethlehem into a renewed dedication to this work; but so far that has eluded me. The next posts will be elaborations from the five or so pages I wrote out on the trip; I hope that getting them into a longer form will help me bounce back.

Deerhoof

2008-10-27T07:29:00.000-07:00

A quick departure from politics:

I've just gotten my hands on the new Deerhoof album, 'Offend Maggie.' For those who don't know Deerhoof, they're very difficult to convey in writing. Although they get mistaken for art-rock, they are at heart very much a pop band, meaning they search for transcendent feeling in simple and repetitive melodies and sounds.

There's a lot of great things to say about Deerhoof. I'm fond of telling the story of the one time I caught them live, in a tiny and disgusting metal club in Baltimore a few years back. The preceding opening acts were an interpretive dance troupe, and a series of short films that were basically just hardcore porn from the 70s, with hand-drawn spiders with penises for legs crawling all over the footage, sodomizing everyone. Not what I paid for, but certainly a unique experience. But the point of the story has always been the band itself, which does an energetic and engaging live show. The lead singer, a tiny Japanese woman, plays a bass twice her size and dances with the audience. The drummer, at least that night, had only a three-piece kit: bass, snare, high-hat. But he drummed harder and louder and faster than anybody I ever saw.

The experience of first entering a Deerhoof record is like climbing into very cold water on a hot day. As you descend the shock to your system just keeps growing, to the point of misery. Deerhoof records, for those who are new to the band, are profoundly uncomfortable. The songs are disjointed and seem to not make sense on the first few listens. The singer has a very heavy accent, and sings in a falsetto that makes her sound like a small child speaking gibberish. (Indeed it was a year or so of constantly playing 'The Runners Four' before I finally started to understand what some of the songs were ostensibly about.) But slowly, you get comfortable in the water, and you realize that this was just what you needed on such a hot day. (In my extended metaphor Deerhoof's more formulaic pop and indie cousins are the insufferably hot day.) The record becomes a true blessing, and in the future you are more eager and open to jumping in.

'Offend Maggie' has so far not been a disappointment. There's a melodic surprise around every corner. The vocals are a bigger part of the record this time through, which has the curious effect of both increasing my appreciation for Satomi Matsuzaki's inimitable style, and proportionally decreasing my ability to know what any of these songs might be about, in terms of narrative. But that's no problem; Deerhoof has always been more about the strange sound of the music than anything didactic.

If you're interested in breaking into the band, I started with 2006's 'The Runners Four.' After that there's 'Friend Opportunity,' and now 'Offend Maggie.'

My ballot

2008-10-26T03:18:00.000-07:00

A week or two ago I was reading an amusing article about old-fashioned voting in the US. Although I can't find the article anymore (I think it was NYT but I'm not certain), one of the more interesting factoids dispensed was the revelation that ballots were not considered secret or personal information. A citizen who refused to reveal his vote was considered a coward.

In honor of our nosy, judgmental ancestors, I'll briefly talk about some of the choices on my absentee ballot, which I just mailed:

President: BARACK OBAMA
Perhaps little needs be said about this choice. Like what appears to be a considerable majority of the country, (and of early voters in NC, according to reports) I cast my vote for the Democrat. This is my second time voting in a national election, and my second time casting for a Democrat. However, I don't consider myself a 'party line' type. Although I'm a registered Democrat, I maintain the affiliation only so that I can vote in the primary of the party which, this cycle, I had more interest in directing (away from Hillary Clinton). I am by no means fully thrilled by Obama, and I am not a partisan in this respect.

Although I think Joe Biden is a genuine and straightforward guy, he is a hawk on drug prosecution, which is a pet issue of mine and on which I occupy the opposite viewpoint. Although Obama has a more moderate stance on drug crime, I have not heard from him anything hinting at the kind of drug law reform this country truly requires. It remains incredible to me that, despite the high-profile coverage of the ineffectiveness of the drug war, the overwhelming prison population (highest in the first world), and the more than three BILLION dollars required every year to prosecute marijuana offenses alone, there is still not a presidential candidate willing to speak out honestly on this issue. Democrats have been in the defensive crouch on domestic crime as long as they have been on national security, but with such an overwhelming Democrat majority imminent in Washington, I had some hope that a serious national dialogue might be initiated on marijuana legalization and drug penalty reform. I still have hope that perhaps after the election that conversation might get started -- but there's no denying that Obama lacked the belief or courage to talk about it when it was still a risk.

This is, in general, my reservation about Obama. I don't see him speaking in platitudes so much as I see him always seeking the middle ground. On a lot of issues in America today this is not a negative attribute, and it's refreshing to meet a candidate who seems to want to move beyond partisan heckling. But at the same time, there are moments when the President needs to take a stand for what's right, even if that means drifting away from the center. Although I agree that it was popular with the Republican party and thus not a 'risk', so to speak, nonetheless President Bush's insistance on the surge in Iraq redeemed that war to the level of 'disaster,' up from 'unmitigated, punishing, heaven-sent disaster.' I don't know that, given the same level of popular distaste for an event or policy, that Obama would be able to show that kind of mettle (or stupidity or insensitivity, depending on how you view W.)

The most illustrative example comes from the Russia-Georgia conflict. Obama's first response was a downright joy to hear amidst the neocon yammering of a resurgent Russian power. He rightly criticized the disproportionate response of the Russians, while at the same time acknowledging that it was a response, not to nothing but to clear aggression from Georgia. While this sounds moderate on paper it was actually quite a departure from the Washington CW, and it encouraged my sense that Obama has an independent mind. Unfortunately, McCain took the bully pulpit and began hammering away at the Obama response, forcing the Democrat to join in the stupid rhetoric of the new Cold War. I feel certain Obama shifted in order to minimize an election liability -- i.e. soft foreign policy. But the fact is that, when it counted, he put political calculation over responsible governance, changing his rhetoric in the type of conflict where rhetoric is all (god willing) that matters. (Not, by the way, that this somehow gives the point to McCain. His reaction was and continues to be pig-headed, foolish, and irrational. But at least he stuck with it.)

Do I think this is the time to elect a younger, somewhat untested candidate? Not really. But he is much better than his counterpart the loose cannon, both in terms of temperament and policy. I do not regret the vote.

Senator: KAY HAGAN
I'd be lying if I tried to play like I don't feel some hometown pride for Ms. Hagan. But really, this one's symbol. Incumbent Dole is a brainless yes-machine, who voted with Bush almost 100% of the time, and did little to nothing for the state. She coasted to victory on name recognition and holds a position she never earned, nor deserves. Hagan is a run of the mill Democrat, not, in my opinion, particularly exciting. But she is a competent legislator and, one hopes, not to be led by the nose, like her rival.

Governor: MIKE MUNGER
This is my first time voting Libertarian. It took a unique confluence of circumstances to bring about a third-party vote. I voted for the incumbent governor last election, a Democrat, not my favorite but a decent manager. The party has now, despite my primary vote, nominated a bureaucrat, an empty suit in the worst sense named Bev Purdue. She simply does not have the intelligence or clout to hold the position, and I was disinclined to give it to her solely on the merits of party loyalty, which holds no truck with me.

The Republican challenger seemed more intelligent, but his anti-immigration stance was too strong for my taste, and his attitude toward offshore drilling much too reckless. I was only pleased to see that he favored lowering some corporate taxes in the state -- not a policy with nationwide appeal, but sensible when you consider that NC's corporate taxes are through the roof relative to the states on our borders and around the south, a terrible drain on business interest in the state.

Mr. Munger, however, both supported the same tax cuts, and touts a considerably more sensible social agenda, including the elimination of the death penalty, reform of drug law, and a focus on statewide infrastructure. He supports drilling only to the extent that it is a part of job creation, but only coupled with investment in future non-oil-based energy solutions.

I thought for a long time about whether I was throwing my vote away. Munger has no chance of winning, even in independent-minded NC. Ultimately, I considered it a vote well-spent for two reasons. First, I think Munger is an intelligent guy, unusually moderate for a Libertarian, and a worthwhile voice in NC politics. To that ended, I felt that if he could pick up a few percentage points more than the average Libertarian, he might become a fixture, or at least the leader of the party. That's a development I would embrace.

The second reason came from Munger's own website. He points out that, if he gets more than 2% of the total vote, NC law mandates that the Libertarian party be included automatically on the ballot of the next election. Munger explains that it costs the party roughly $150,000 every year for the petition drive necessary to get on the ballot. If they can save that money in the future, it will make a big difference to their media exposure.

The rest of my votes were not of much interest. I voted against Coble, as last time. He's a know-nothing old fart who's been trying to tax the internet pretty much since I was born; he'll never get my vote.

libertarians on gay marriage

2008-10-21T06:36:00.001-07:00

Via James Poulos, some commentary on the Connecticut Supreme Court ruling in favor of full marriage rights for gays from Reason Magazine:

Under state law, civil unions are, as everyone agrees, substantively indistinguishable from what heterosexuals get. The trial court in this case found that the effect of the civil union law "has been to create an identical set of legal rights in Connecticut for same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples." The only difference is the name.

But that didn’t particularly impress the state Supreme Court, which says the law deprives homosexual couples of the equal protection of the law. Far from advancing their equality, it concluded, the legislature "has relegated them to an inferior status." And: "There is no doubt that civil unions enjoy a lesser status in our society than marriage."

Really? No doubt at all? As one dissenting justice noted, expressing his own doubt, "what is perceived or considered to be an inferior status in a given society may not be readily apparent when the subject is a brand-new institution." It may be that over time people will come to regard civil unions as a pale imitation of marriage. The alternative is they will come to regard them as the full, though distinct, equivalent.

It’s a comforting cliche that separate means unequal, but we know better. No one thinks that when a university fields sex-segregated sports teams, it brands women as inferior.

To say that gays should have access to civil unions rather than marriage could mean society regards them as unworthy of true matrimony. Or it could mean society sees same-sex unions not as worse or better than marriage but simply different, and thus properly designated by another name.

This is some fancy footwork but it comes apart fast. The author's example of segregated sports teams is telling. It's a wonderfully attractive example for those of a certain ideological persuasion inasmuch as sex-segregated sports teams have manifest sense to them. Sports at any competitive level require certain physical ability. The meaning of sports, you might say, is physical ability, and we distinguish between sports based on their different rules -- rules which determine the physical strengths and abilities most required. Men and women, while equal in legal status in the US, still are not equal on average in terms of physical strength and ability. Therefore, we segregate sports by sex for the good of both sexes.

Inarguable, no? And yet, note the footwork (footwork being the most important nonphysical skill for blogging. most important physical skill? wrist flexing.) First, although "brand" is an ugly word, the fact of the matter is that sex-segregation in sports does imply that women are inferior. That's the point! Women are, in general, less physically able than men; therefore sports are segregated. This is not a moral judgment but one based solidly on biological reality.

So the question we should be asking ourselves, within the author's framework, is whether homosexuals have less of an ability to engage in matrimony than heterosexuals. This prompts an interesting philosophical issue: what is matrimony?

There are many answers I'm sure. For myself, I posit that the good of matrimony, in the culture of the US, is monogamous commitment between two lovers. This brings with it many secondary goods: a safe and healthy sex life, financial and social strength, and, most important of the secondary goods, a healthy and reliable home in which to raise a family. However, ALL of these goods are inherently secondary -- in the US, we do not require those getting married to promise to have children, or practice safe sex, or keep a mutual bank account. All we ask is that they vow to maintain a monogamous and lasting sexual and loving relationship.

To return to the question. Are homosexuals less able to fulfill the requirements of matrimony than heterosexuals? It's hard to know, since most conservatives, including the author, don't seem to want to give them a chance to find out. But on the merits, they seem to have the same potential. There are many committed gay couples, and, one imagines, would be many more were the opportunity to marry available. But even if there were not, the point remains: there is nothing inherent in homosexuality to prevent two people from living a monogamous and committed life.

The author finishes by noting hopefully that "it could mean society sees same-sex unions not as worse or better than marriage but simply different." A lovely sentiment without the slightest basis in reality, and, one imagines, sinful for a libertarian to utter in public, let alone put in print. This is another sad case of pundititis -- believing that your own academic or professional interest in some aspect of politics is shared by the public.

Get real, dude. Nonpundits who are interested in preventing the legalization of homosexual marriage are interested for one reason only: they think gay people will taint the institution. There are lots of subreasons here, from buying into the mythology that gay men are too promiscuous to be faithful to just good old-fashioned homophobia. But there is no disinterested sentiment of "just different" from these folks. Ask yourself: if you really just thought that matrimony between gays was "different" from marriage, neither better nor worse, would you donate money to Focus on the Family? Would you elect politicians who promise to block gay marriage? Would you sign petitions asking for a constitutional fucking amendment to prohibit it? Would you march in the parade? Or would you just shrug, remember that your personal opinion cannot always dictate the law, and go back to your dinner?

The "New Right" pundits at Culture 11 and elsewhere can go on pretending that opponents of gay marriage are not ignorant, small, culture warriors. But it's an illusion. And as we are now seeing with the GOP implosion, that illusion will ultimately come with a price tag.

Impressions of Jerusalem

2008-10-19T03:25:00.000-07:00

Here's the most recent column I've written for the Federation newsletter.

Last week I had lunch with a friend on Ben Yehuda street, in the heart of West Jerusalem. He's a bit younger than me, a happy and enthusiastic guy by nature who aspires to become a pulpit Rabbi. Last summer he worked for me at Ramah. Now he's spending a year in Israel, studying at university and, like me, getting to know the country.
My young friend is here in Israel on a תוכנית, a “program,” as Israelis are used to saying. Of roughly 250,000 Americans living in Israel, a substantial portion are here on “programs” -- courses of study and experience designed and facilitated and funded by outside organizations that want to convey Israel as an idea and a reality in a certain way. “Programs” are available for people of all ages, but focus especially on young people, those anywhere from high school to grad school. You've probably heard of some of these programs: Alexander Muss, Nativ, Ramah Seminar, and so on. Even Birthright Israel is a program, albeit an abbreviated one.
Talking to my friend over lunch, he told me about all of the exciting things he's been doing in Jerusalem. He was surprised that, by my own admission, I did not get down to Ben Yehuda street more often. I find it too noisy, and oftentimes too American. (Not that I am an Israel pro, who can only deign to speak Hebrew; in fact, the opposite is true. But I seem to be more allergic to upper-crust New York entitlement than good old-fashioned Israeli gruffness.) “Where do you spend all of your time, then?” he asked. “Ben Yehuda is the center of town!”

A few weeks ago I took a tour with an organization called “Ir Amim,” the “City of Nations.” Ir Amim advocates for a number of changes in Israeli policy toward East Jerusalem, a large swath of territory, annexed after the Six Day War, that is almost entirely Palestinian. Palestinians in East Jerusalem, like many of their neighbors outside the city, refuse to vote in Israeli elections, a worthless and empty way of protesting Israeli legitimacy.
As a result of this practice, East Jerusalem is a wreck, a sick urban backwater disconnected from all but the most basic governmental services – and sometimes not even those. Ir Amim's mission is, in part, to expose the disaster that is East Jerusalem to the Israeli and international community. Their tours are free of charge and open to all comers.
A secondary goal of Ir Amim is to give some background to the many settlements that have grown and are growing out of Jerusalem. Ir Amim's tour runs through Gilo, one of the oldest settlements, to Har Homah, and other new settlement ventures currently under construction. As an advocate of the two-state solution, part of Ir Amim's goal in publicizing these settlement projects is to point out the destructive impact they have on negotiations. Settlements are the basis of an oftentimes ugly reality behind Israeli good intentions: the government's failure to curb extremist elements in its own society at best, and a shameless land-grab at worst.
Palestinian officials and civilians interested in peace with Israel consistently cite the construction of settlements as the worst offense by the Israeli government, and with good reason: the worst of the settlement projects are designed with no less a purpose in mind than to drive a wedge through the middle of the West Bank, making the establishment of a Palestinian state effectively impossible. There is a tragic irony in the portrait of a country that simultaneously places its hopes for peace in the very concept that its infrastructure daily seeks to destroy.
Beyond simply raising awareness with the public, Ir Amim devotes its resources to helping Palestinians living in East Jerusalem obtain basic services, like running water (a hot commodity in much of that part of the city). But its main activity remains outreach through the city tour, an eye-opening experience that calls in to question much of the conventional wisdom about Jerusalem in particular, and the Occupation in general.

As we finished up our lunch, I asked my friend if he had gotten a chance to see East Jerusalem. He explained to me that he was not allowed to visit that part of the city, due to security concerns held by the leadership of his program. I asked if he would have the opportunity to take a guided tour with his program, or outsourced to a group like Ir Amim. He did not believe such an outing could be arranged.
Why do such restrictions apply to the vast majority of programs for young people in Israel? There is not a significant difference in crime rates in East Jerusalem vs. West Jerusalem – and in fact, the former boasts a considerably larger security presence. Additionally, organizations like Ir Amim run bus tours on a weekly basis, which even minimize direct contact with the local populace -- if that were, for any reason, a concern for the cautious caretakers of these high school and college students.
The reality, of course, is much simpler: these programs are designed to promote a positive image of Israel to young American Jews – and the architects of the curricula don't believe such an image is possible with the addition of East Jerusalem. Like censors throughout modern history, they are fully, destructively incorrect.
Is it difficult to digest the image of a third-world shantytown hidden behind the beautiful Jewish capital? Absolutely. It is chilling, saddening, and sickening, and it will make you weak in the knees when you drive to a destitute refugee camp five minutes from the Kotel. If students taken on such a tour feel somewhat disabused of their notion of Israel after the fact, that's understandable.
But these תוכניות, in choosing to conceal from the future of American Jewry the true state of relations in the holiest city, are gambling with far greater risks than the possibility of disillusionment. They are developing an entire generation of Jews who believe that Ben Yehuda street is the center of Jerusalem, an entire generation of Jews who will contentedly sit by as the chance for two states – as the chance for peace -- blows by them.

To find out more about Ir Amim, you may visit their website at http://www.ir-amim.org.il/eng/ .

Moderate conservatives

2008-10-05T07:30:00.000-07:00

For a few years now I've felt like an independent voter looking for a reason to be independent. While I don't lean conservative on many (or perhaps even any) issues, I do feel a lot of sympathy for many conservative voters, and a lot of antipathy for a certain, (small) smug portion of liberal voters.

I thought Democratic spin on the Iraq war got pretty out of hand, as epitomized by Bill Richardson, whose shameful, pandering, "immediate 100% withdrawal" seemed to me to echo the worst of right-wing identity politics. That kind of passion-mongering plays on the same kinds of nonsense the culture-warrior rhetoric of the far right, galvanizing the polity to vote its anger, rather than its good sense.

This election cycle has seen the Republican Party sink to new levels of shame and disgrace, and it seems they have yet to sound the depths. The conduct of the party, and of John McCain and his wretched shrew of a VP have solidified in me a resolve to vote for Barack Obama that could never have been forged aloneby that man's policy or rhetorical skill (as in both cases I am, maybe against the grain of opinion, underwhelmed).

But one thing that the GOP's seemingly ceaseless descent has really helped me with has been the ability to identify those conservative holdouts around the web that are guided by common sense and honesty. These brave (really) few groups stand in stark contrast to the nausea-inducing fawning of National Review, Weekly Standard, Gerson, et al. So I thought I would introduce some of the best of them below.

Ross Douthat -- My faith was shaken in Ross earlier this cycle, when he came out strongly in support of Sarah Palin, despite what seemed to me to be obvious shortcomings on her part. However, he has since retracted that support, and although he maintains that she is a good person (which I kind of doubt), Ross is nonetheless open to critics and alternative points of view.

David Frum -- The only worthwhile writer at National Review, Frum has been a vocal critic of the Bush Administration (for which he once worked), and a frank and intelligent commentator on the state of the election and the Republican Party. He seems to have taken a short vacation, but in general he is a must-read.

Daniel Larison -- Daniel is an unabashed Paleoconservative, which is about as scary a concept as the name implies: a kind of toxic cocktail of libertarianism, Christianity, isolationism, and liking of Pat Buchanan. But despite his ideological handicap, Larison is a funny and insightful commentator, and perhaps the most sensible and restrained outlet for news about Ron Paul, if you care for such things.

James Poulos and Conor Friedersdorf of Culture11 -- I'm still reserving judgment on Culture11, a new, hip conservative blog (as hip as such a thing can be, anyway). Their "diaries" section is an irritating reminder of all the bullshit I hate about the conservative movement in this country, and I find many of the features questionable. However, I am fast becoming a fan of Poulos and Friedersdorf, two editors at the site whose own thoughts on the conservative polity are interesting, and mixed with a healthy dose of critical thought and self-awareness. I highly recommend their blog, 'The Confabulum.'

Waltz With Bashir

2008-09-28T03:53:00.000-07:00

There's a lot of chatter over the debates around the blogs -- probably, in my opinion, too much. I won't be adding to it, except to breathe a quick sigh that Obama seems to have come out on top.

Yesterday Alli and I caught a Shabbat-showing of "וולס עם בשיר" ("Waltz With Bashir", spelled out here in Hebrew to briefly note that Israelis, weirdly, spell "Waltz" like "Walss" -- a bit German, no?). There is a lot of talk in Israel that "Waltz" might make it into the "Best Foreign Film" category at the Oscars. I would personally be surprised, but who knows?

I haven't seen a lot of Israeli film, so I can't make a comment on "Waltz" within that wider context. But as a stand-alone film, I thought it had a lot to recommend it. Israelis tell me that it is one of the firt mainstream Israeli films to deal with the "Sabra and Shatila massacre" from the first Lebanon War -- when Israeli troops stood by and allowed soldiers from the Phalangist militia to avenge the assassination of Bashir Gemayel by massacring the Palestinian civilians of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

For outsiders, I imagine that a lot of the imagery of "Waltz" (which is a hybrid of animation and rotoscoping) will be quite shocking. Most non-Jews (and even, dare I suggest, most American Jews) don't know much about the first Lebanon War. Ironically, that war has perhaps the most in common with the modern American narrative than any other in Israel's recent history. It was their Vietnam, a war from which the Israeli psyche perhaps never recovered -- in no small part thanks to the horrifying revelation to the Israeli public of Sabra and Shatila.

Writer/director Ari Folman walks a fine line between fiction, autobiography, and documentary. His "camera" can seem to get lost in the reverie of his characters' dreams, nightmares, and hallucinations. Yet he leavens these poetic and often humorous looks at war -- a soldier dreaming of losing his virginity to an enormous mermaid, another soldier falling onto his ass after losing his grip on helicopter landing gear he was using to hitch a ride -- with sharp doses of the consequences of that war (the soldier floats away on his mermaid, only to watch the ship carrying his friends blown to pieces; the soldier who fell off the helicopter, waving to his friends, draws the attention of PLO militiamen, who gun him down quickly.)

Some of "Waltz" seems to have been written and drawn in homage to American movies about Vietnam, from Apocalypse Now to Full Metal Jacket to Platoon. Yet, to his credit, Folman maintains the Israeli character of the movie. His interview subjects are classic Israeli: reserved, serious, unsentimental, and reticent. Sabra and Shatila was only about 20 years ago, and for Israelis it still represents a very raw wound, especially for those soldiers and journalists who witnessed the massacre.

Yet with that Israeli character comes the unfortunate baggage of the Israeli conclusion. Folman wraps his movie with a breathtaking minute of live-action footage, mostly of the bodies of Palestinians in the camps, and the women stumbling, screaming, and crying among them. As an apex to the rising action it's a masterful idea well-executed. Yet, where one would expect another fifteen or twenty minutes in the service of some kind of resolution, Folman simply cuts the film.

This is a real disservice to the movie, and it feels like a retreat. Sabra and Shatila's infamy stemmed from the revelation that Israeli High Command knew what was happening, and chose to take no action. Though officers and soldiers on the ground repeatedly alerted command to the situation, and asked to be allowed to put a stop to it, they were denied. In a particularly incriminating scene interview, reporter Ron Ben-Yishai relates a telephone conversation he had with the Defense Minister himself, Ariel Sharon. Ben-Yishai informed Sharon of the rumors of massacre, to nothing but a gruff "thanks for bringing it to my attention."

In "Waltz," Folman builds an immense amount of emotional capital, especially with his captivating final scenes. This is the kind of capital that can be translated politicall. "Waltz" had the opportunity to ask Israelis some hard questions: why were Sharon and his commanders not indicted? And what about then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin? Although the Kahan Commission found Sharon to be directly responsible, he went on to a wildly successful political career in Israel. Folman could have used "Waltz" to ask Israelis to confront the contradiction -- but he lets the opportunity pass.

Caveats forgotten

2008-09-26T05:01:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm still new at this, so you'll have to forgive me for forgetting political blogging protocol by failing to include enough outs in the claims below to excuse me from all responsibility or liability of being wrong.

(First, by the way: it looks like Ross Douthat is picking me off. Is he doing it on purpose? Absolutely. (Private to Ross Douthat: please fight with me on the internet.))

So here's why what I said below is unlikely. First, the Couric interview, as it has slowly trickled onto the internet, (where a man in a strange land like myself can watch it) seems to suggest that Palin really is just about as colossally stupid and boring as you can imagine. This goes far beyond a question of qualifications. I read somewhere, in a place I forgot (maybe Sullivan), someone comparing the feeling of watching the interview to watching a grade-schooler try to fake her way through an oral report on a book she has not read. That is precisely the feeling I got. The stumbling and backtracking were so bad, in fact, that the transcript is actually quite difficult to read -- as if it were fragments of sentences cobbled together from the writings of five or so people all asked to answer the same question. (Which, of course -- when one considers Palin's likely interactions with her handlers -- is precisely the case.)

Anyway, it's hard to imagine even a highly gifted character actor pulling off such a convincing performance, if that is indeed what this is. In fact, I now consider myself to be about 90% certain that what I wrote below is probably not what is happening -- Sarah Palin really is one of the most uninformed, unintelligent, and uninterested politicians working today.

Not to mention, of course, the McCain campaign's new gambit to try to "reschedule" the VP debate for some future time, TBD later (or never, whichever comes first).

One thing that has surprised me is that the Obama campaign has not offered to simply switch the debates, with the VP debate to take place today. Do they want Palin to crash and burn sooner to election day? Considering that early voting for most states is already in full swing (including many swings), I have trouble understanding that reasoning. I would have thought that, suggested a day or two ago, the idea of moving the VP debate up would have been wickedly clever. You either force Palin to come in more half-baked than even McCain and Co. expected; or you force the campaign to admit that Palin is so empty-headed that she would be unable to engage an actual, working politician on the issues of the day.

But it's probably too late for that. We'll see what happens. (Last I read, Obama had proposed using the TV time without McCain, if he prefers - a suggestion terrific in its own right, although lacking the mean streak of the above.)

Palin sneak attack?

2008-09-25T05:26:00.000-07:00

Count me among the many voters and writers out there who consider the Sarah Palin selection to have been the nail in the coffin of John McCain's remaining credibility (in the interest of full, poetic disclosure). But I can't help but wonder a bit at her continued lack of press interaction.

To date, Palin has managed to answer only a single informal question from the press, as dependably-bitter Daniel Larison (my favorite Buchanan Conservative) notes. But as he, and others, have also noted, her popularity numbers are taking a nosedive, and much of the problem seems to be attributable to the growing perception that she is, if not unfit, then certainly unready for office.

Folks at TNR have long speculated that Palin is simply not ready for the press, and her interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric (the latter still in a state of slow-reveal) seem to confirm that notion. Bush Doctrine? Come on. Kids in high school social studies are learning this shit.

Nonetheless, the McCain people are not stupid. Bad campaigners? Yes. But stupid? Well, they can read a chart of numbers, at least. If Palin is hemorrhaging positives because of the campaign's consistent refusal to let her hold a press conference, then they are not continuing that refusal without a very good reason.

What do I mean? Well, one of two things. One, Palin is so badly prepared that even the gentlest, shortest press avail would hang her out to dry for good. But does anyone believe this? With the McCain camp putting the screws to the press corps, the campaign could hold a ten-minute bull session, with McCain right there next to his new soul-mate, and Palin would probably see a positive bounce. It would at least start to put the kibosh on the whole "delicate flower Palin hidden from press" narrative that is dangerously swelling.

Here's number two, a bit of a conspiracy theory, so be patient. The McCain campaign is making elaborate, dangerous plans for the VP debate. How? They are, rightfully, worried about Palin's ability to stand up to Joe Biden. There's no doubt that, as you read this, Biden is being coached on how to be "gentle but firm." He can't come off as blustering or a bully, or he'll sink himself the way Lazio did against HR Clinton in the New York debate. Biden's policy expertise is a given, and no one who is tuned into the election expects him to lose an argument on substance. His handlers are for sure focusing on his tone, word choice, and body language.

So how do Palin's people up-end this? Three possible ways:

1. Hope for a Biden gaffe (an even chance, there, as Biden's new message-discipline has been faltering in recent days.) But, while a gaffe helps, it won't win a debate for the other guys, especially if it's minor.

2. Try to capitalize on accusations of sexism, cronyism, etc...make Biden look like a big mean man picking on just-like-you-and-me Sarah, one more old guy with white hair looking down his nose at common sense and common sensibilities.

3. Win an argument. This one is in bold for two reasons: A, no one is expecting it, so the campaign gets to really cash in on the headlines; and B, it pokes a big happy hole in the entire "Sarah Palin is a policy ignoramus" narrative that Democrats are trying to (and succeeding at) building.

How does Palin win an argument against Biden? The odds of her actually outsmarting him on a significant question seem slim. But there is one surefire way to fix that. Wait for it...wait for it...

LOWER EXPECTATIONS.

Campaigns play the expectations game all the time. During the primaries, before each result, it was always a race to the bottom for both parties, trying to see who could underestimate themselves by the widest margin. The idea with expectations is to seize control of the media narrative (since, post-vote, you can't seize control of the numbers themselves). It doesn't matter if your guy only picked up 30% of the vote. If the media claim he expected to pick up 10%, suddenly your campaign has the surprise upward momentum. You get the good headlines, the rallied base, and the big money for the next race, whether you were secretly hoping for 60% or not.

Keeping Palin out of the media, as much as it is hurting her positives right now, may well be the equivalent of a long, long reloading period, the release of which will come in the VP debate, when Palin is competent. Good? Probably not. Great? No way. But if the media keep running away with their characterization of Palin as a know-nothing, (fueled, of course, by the Dems,) a competent performance at the debate is going to spin positive for the Republicans. This is important to understand. As Howard Wolfson noted today, debates do not remain in the public consciousness at the same level of complexity with which the play out. The VP debate will end with one single narrative. And if Palin can hold her own, it will be enough of a surprise to override anything Biden has to say.

If Palin can simply hold her own against Biden -- and if she can sneak in some obnoxious, pithy, nose-wrinkling one lines in the process -- the Obama camp might be caught by surprise by a post-debate narrative that fuels McCain and co., rather than vice versa.

Going bottom -> up

2008-09-25T05:05:00.000-07:00

A fitting way to start this one-man conversation: did anyone catch the Ralph Nader interview at the AV Club? It's almost unbearably pessimistic, even for me. Although if I were in Nader's place, I suppose I might have the same attitude. Is there another politician in America with as little credibility as Nader these days? Even walking-joke Bob Barr has managed to weasel his way onto a couple of tickets, crazy vice presidential candidate and all.

While Ron Paul traipses around the country, holding news conferences to say basically nothing, and then further conferences to retract the nothings said previously, Nader is reduced to giving an interview to the AV Club. (Don't get me wrong, I love the AV Club, they're a terrific and respected outlet for pop culture and entertainment. But bastion of sober political analysis they are not...) Nader uses the time to rail against just about everybody: the candidates, the media, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog...you get the idea. It's hard to believe Nader, who back in the 70's and early 80's was doing so much to inspire those on the left, could have gotten this crotchety.

I will give the AV Club credit for one of their last questions, where they ask Nader quite frankly what he hopes to gain from another failed presidential bid. The response:

That we mobilized a lot of people, young and older, and got them running for local and state election. Or energized citizen groups whose causes and various localities we championed as we go through the country. That we kept the progressive agenda alive. That we set standards for presidential campaigning, like not taking commercial money and focusing on subject matter of great importance to the public. And building for the future. In '08 or '09, maybe we can get Congressional citizen lobbies in each Congressional district to get some of these issues through, like single-payer [health care] and a living wage.

Frankly, I haven't the faintest notion how Nader's embarrassing presidential candidacy aids any of these admirable initiatives -- or how it aids the Green Party to keep running him. (Aside: it would be interesting to see just how Nader keeps getting out in front of the Green Party, which must presumably have some other viables in its ranks.) It seems to me that responsible progressives all over the country must be wondering the same thing. Nader seems to have run his course, and I hope that in November, come what may, we see a more unified call for him to step aside.