Kristof on Hebron

Nick Kristof’s column for the Sunday Times is one of the best reflections I’ve read on the horrible moral deadening that is the result of Israel’s maintenance of its settlements. While Kristof could have easily just explained how horrible the Hebron settlers can be, how the lives of Palestinians living near settlements have been horribly affect, and of the constant fear that many Israelis live in due to rocket attacks, he decided to emphasize the multiplicity of voices within Israel, of Zionists who don’t believe that their creed must result in the occupation and bantustanization of an entire people. For pointing out that the debate within Israel is often more active than the debate about Israel, Kristof is opening up space for Jews and other Americans to discuss the plight of the Palestinians in good faith. And he deserves mad props for doing so.

Israel Losing Its Liberalism

Whenever one discusses the Holy Land, a point that is often brought up by Israel partisans is how liberal a state Israel is. And, for the region and despite its identity as a 19th century throwback relgio-ethno state, Israel is remarkably open, pluralistic and free. But because of the deadening moral ordeal of the occupation, Israel is closing in. Earlier this week, the government refused to let Norman Finkelstein, the leftist critic of Israel and son of holocaust survivors, into the country, citing his hostile political views. They reportedly banned him from the country for ten years. And now, the US has withdrawn Fulbright scholarship money for students in the Gaza strip, because the Israeli government refuses to let them out. It’s hard to see how denying Gazan students from studying in the United States will make them more likely to view Israel or the US more favorably. What’s increidbly distressing is that these are the very people who aren’t Hamas supporters, who could rebuild Palestinian civil society. But that’s going to be hard to do if Israel keeps them penned up in the open-air prison that is Gaza. This quote from a Palestinian student is just heartbreaking

“If we are talking about peace and mutual understanding, it means investing in people who will later contribute to Palestinian society,” he said. “I am against Hamas. Their acts and policies are wrong. Israel talks about a Palestinian state. But who will build that state if we can get no training?”

Tragic.

What Does AIPAC, Joe Lieberman and Abe Foxman Do About Hagee Now

Now that John McCain has been forced to admit that Hagee is an anti-Semite and reject his endorsement, there should be some reckoning for those Jews who have trumpeted him as a friend of Israel and the Jewish people.

At an Christians United For Israel event where Hagee was speaking, Joe Lieberman described him as “An Ish Elohim. A man of God..Like Moses.” Abe Foxman has said that Hagee deserves to be heard and recognized by pro Israel types “because of his support of Israel. And AIPAC has repeatedly had Hagee speak at events and be something of an officially sanctioned advocate for Israel. So why were these two prominent Jews, and the most prominent Jewish political organization, supporting a conspiratorial, pseudo-Holocaust denying anti-Semite? That’s because short-term and unquestioning support for a hardline stance on Israel  has replaced any substantive committment to Jewish values or more enlightened support for Israel as a mark of true Jewishness in the mind of Lieberman, Foxman and AIPAC. But because of McCain’s denouncing, the jig, fortunately, is up (or at least it should be).

And while AIPAC, Foxman and Lieberman may denounce Hagee now (despite his anti-Semitic ravings having been widely known for years), their dalliance with him just shows how morally and intellectually bankrupt the “pro-Israel” project is.

This is probably as good a time as any to implore everyone (especially Jews) to sign up for J Street’s email list. They did a great job of trumpeting the Hagee-Holocaust story and definitely helped raise its profile among Jews.

What Would Kojeve Say About The Right To Return?

One of the oddest and most intractable issues in  the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Right to Return. Since 1948, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled/were expelled by Israeli forces/left at the urging of their leaders, there has been this massive, intractable refugee problem in Israel and the surrounding Arab countries. Now, it’s not uncommon for there to be large refugee and population flows in a postcolonial war: just look at most of Africa or India and Pakistan; what’s weird about Palestinian refugees is that they’ve remained refugees for so long. That’s because Arab states - like all states - have generally not wanted to take them in. The country that took in the most - Jordan - had a huge Palestinian terrorist problem in the 1970s, and Lebanon also has had to deal with Palestinian refugees turning into another armed group in their seemingly never ending civil war. One also has to consider that Arab states have something to gain from the festering of the refugee crisis - it makes Israel look a whole lot worse then them for refusing to take in these refugees.

Although it’s true that the refugee problem is a common one for states that emerge from the wreckage of imperial empires, the durability of the Palestinian crisis is unique. And it will continue. Even though one can imagine a world in which Israel allows for and recognizes a sovereign Palestinian state, one can not imagine a world where they let three to four generations of Palestinian refugees into Israel’s pre-1967 borders. And so this seems like a great injustice/political problem - what are we to say to those Palestinians who still have the deeds to their homes in Haifa? - will continue on perpetually. In other cases, these types of post-colonial expulsions and what not have been resolved by two things: the creation of a state for those expelled and some recognition of what happened.

This all brings me around to Daoud Kuttab’s Washington Post Op-Ed claiming that the priority for Palestinians is a state, not return to Israel. Kuttab argues that Palestinians want Israel to realize that while they (and their American Zionist supporters) celebrate 60 years of statehood, Palestinians recognize 60 years of Nakba, Arabic for “The Catastrophe.”

Palestinian refugees who have lived away from their homes for 60 years have established themselves elsewhere. Few have a sincere desire to live in today’s Israel. Respected Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki found in 2003 that only 10 percent of Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza Strip were willing to move to the areas that today constitute Israel.

What Palestinians want is for Israel to admit its historic and moral role in creating the refugee problem and its moral responsibility to them. Such an admission by a courageous Israeli leader would satisfy, and neutralize, many Palestinians who hold their keys and demand the literal right of return. As part of a bilateral agreement, surely Israel would allow divided Palestinian families to reunite with relatives who stayed in what became Israel after 1948.

This is quite similar to  what many displaced peoples expect from those that have displaced them. In Turkey, another post-Ottoman state like Israel, what minorities who suffered massive repression and even genocide in its creation (Kurds and Aremenians) want is not for Turkey to give them money or let them resettle, but instead recognition that what the Turks did to them was wrong. Thus all the Armenian activism surrounding the recognition of the genocide as well as the Kurds’ struggle to be able to speak their own language. Also, the massive expulsion of Jews from their generations-old communities in the Arab and Muslim World (Baghdad, Cairo, Yemen etc) is not really talked about more, and is thought to have been “dealt with” by the creation of a Jewish state.

The struggle by the Palestinians, Kurds and Armenians for “recognition,” as opposed to specific restitution, should not surprise anyone who has read Kojeve, and especially Kojeve-as-read-by-Fukuyama. Kojeve posits that the driving force behind History is man’s desire for recognition. The reason why liberal democratic capitalism will ultimately win out is that it, compared to monarchy or socialism or any other political-economic arrangement, best allows man to be recognized. I think what we’re seeing among the Palestinians is a vindication of Kojeve’s thesis.

Not only do they not have a state, they are also regularly told that they aren’t a “real” people and that their victimization is mostly their fault. It doesn’t matter whether or not these claims are “true” (the Palestinians are just as imagined as most imagined communities), it matters because this desire for recognition is a powerful one, and unless it can be channeled into something productive and cooperation (like a state) many more Palestinians and Israelis will die.

When People Say Israel, They Get Stupid

Read Matt Yglesias and Dylan Matthews on Obama’s shameful jettisoning of Robert Malley. The story is that Malley, who was an informal Obama foreign policy adviser, works with the International Crisis Group. As part of his ICG work - the ICG perhaps being the most respected conflict resolution NGO - met with leaders of Hamas so as to better know what was going in Gaza and help, yes, resolve the conflict. Sure, Hamas is a horribly sundry group, all of whom would be happy to see me dead, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re the democratically elected representatives and government of the Gaza Strip. And so, if you want some sort of resolution to the conflict there, one is going to have to talk to the leadership of a major portion of the Palestinian population.

Unfortunately, Obama has totally sworn off speaking with Hamas, but that’s something I can understand. But this sacrificial offering to the most reactionary forces in the Israel-Palestine debate for something that isn’t a big deal is really worrying. Although I’m excited with the prospect of Obama beating back the Jewish Establishment, I’m also worried that because of the widespread perception that Obama has a Jewish/Israel problem, he will now be tempted to make gestures to prove that he’s acceptable to pro-Israel types. First it was a priori refusing to talk to Hamas, now it’s jettisoning Malley. I hope he doesn’t go much farther and start talking about Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel and crap like that. I think that he’s OK if he makes the basic, sensible committment - that he views Israel as a legitimate, Jewish state that is the best American ally in the Middle East. And because he cares so much about Israel’s security, he will leverage US influence to try to force both sides to come to a workable solution that ends in two secure, legitimate, internally recognized states. If he can say this, over and over, I don’t see why he’d have to throw much more red meat at the AIPAC crowd.

The End of the Jewish Establishment? I Sure Hope So

For far too long, the major Jewish organizations have been controlled by people who don’t have the politics, interests, history or temperament of the American Jews they claim to represent. Although everyone always knew that the ADL, AJC and AIPAC were almost Jurassic in their approach to American Jewish politics and Israel and only represented a narrow sliver of American Jewry, it all came to the surface when Abe Foxman angrily yelled at a student criticizing the ADL’s stand against the Armenian Genocide resolution that he doesn’t “represent you nor the Jewish community! I represent the donors.” Sure, we all knew this, but at least it was good to know that Foxman’s suppression of free debate about Israel (see Tony Judt and the Polish Consulate) and smearing of respected academics (Mearsheimer and Walt) wasn’t being done in our name.

And today, we are on the verge of having the presumptive Democratic nominee - who’s likely to win the election - who has little to no support from the Jewish Establishment. It’s not surprising that Obama hasn’t been able to win the support of prominent Jewish fund raisers and players in Democratic circles. After all, the Clintons have been the number one Democrats since 1992, and have had the strong support of the Jewish community all that time. It also didn’t hurt that the Clintons enthusiastically supported a series of absurd AIPAC-promoted initiatives that did nothing to improve Israel’s security and only inflamed the situation more - like Clinton’s support for an “undivided Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital. Obama, on the other hand, hasn’t been kissing the ring of Haim Saban since the early 1990s, and also because of his middle name, association with Jeremiah Wright and some things said by advisers, is now perceived to have a “Jewish problem.” Of course, Obama hasn’t actually gone very far off the reservation about Israel. He still went to AIPAC and assured them that Israel is our most important ally and so on and so forth.

But today, as it now appears impossible for Clinton to get the nomination, I can’t help but smile that the candidate who the AJC criticized for insisting that Israel take risky steps for peace, the candidate that Haim Saban said was only 1/10th as qualified as Clinton, the one who makes AIPAC “uncomfortable” and the one that the Jewish Establishment has rallied against is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. Of course, I expect plenty of these types to come out for McCain and insist that four more years of reckless hawkishness is exactly what American Jews and Israel needs. But considering that younger American Jews don’t vote in the narrowly sectarian manner that AIPAC and the AJC would want us to, and that the overwhelming majority of Jews are Democrats, hopefully this election could signal the end of an leadership class who have served their constituents so poorly.

Phil Weiss sums it up the best:

Will Obama be as “good for the Jews” as Hillary? No. But I bet younger Jews aren’t asking that selfish question. They don’t feel themselves to be outsiders, and I imagine that many of them see our tragic Israel/Iraq policy, that deathly double-play combination of Pollack-to-Kristol-to-Perle, as the Jewish establishment at work. I often think of what Michael Walzer said at the Center for Jewish History last year. For 3000 years, “we governed only ourselves, as best we could… Sometimes [we were] semi-autonomous… responsible only for ourselves.” Not so good, he added ruefully, at governing others. I’m looking forward to more power-sharing, in a rainbow establishment…

The Best Two Paragraphs On the 60th Anniversary of the State of Israel

They come from historian Marko Attila Hoare:

So far as Israel is concerned, its record of democracy and human rights concerning its own citizens compares very favourably with most other Middle Eastern countries, but very badly with just about any West European country, because its stage of national development more closely resembles Turkey or Greece than France or the Netherlands. The two deformations resulting from the nature of Israel’s birth are, firstly, a failure to embrace the concept of a multi-ethnic citizenry and accord equal rights to all its citizens regardless of ethnicity, resulting in suffering and injustice for Israeli Arabs; and, secondly, a continued policy of colonisation in the West Bank, resulting in massive suffering for the occupied Palestinians. These deformations are, of course, linked to the behaviour of the Arab states and the refusal of most of them to recognise Israel, as well as to the Palestinians’ own behaviour - but this is not ultimately a question of apportioning blame. Like every nation-state, Israel needs to develop a post-nationalist national ideology if it is to complete its national and democratic development. This means becoming a genuinely Israeli nation-state, i.e. a state of the Israeli nation; a state of the citizens of Israel - rather than simply a Jewish state in which non-Jews are second-class citizens. Jews would still form a comfortable majority in Israel, thereby guaranteeing Jewish national self-determination. But a Jewish ethnic majority can comfortably exist with a concept of citizenship blind to ethnicity - as all concepts of citizenship should be, from the US and France to Israel and the Arab states. And as the American and French models show, a concept of citizenship blind to ethnicity rests upon identification with the state’s legal borders - hence no colonisation projects directed against neighbouring peoples.

As a Croat, I am very pleased that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia is forcing Croats to face up to the crimes carried out in the course of their War of Independence. All Croatian children should celebrate this War of Independence, but they should also learn about its moral ambiguities - the crimes against Serb civilians and the parallel attempt, which thankfully was defeated, to expand into Bosnia. They should learn about Croatian resistance to the Nazis in the form of the Partisan movement, of which they should rightfully feel proud, but also about the Croatian Ustasha genocide of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies - and, of course, about Partisan atrocities. Above all, they should be taught that theirs is a multiethnic nation that encompasses Serbs, Bosniaks and others, who do not cease thereby to be Serbs or Bosniaks. One should be able to be an ethnic Serb and at the same time belong to the Croatian nation as fully as an ethnic Croat, without abandoning one’s Serb identity, just as one should be able to be an ethnic Arab or Palestinian and belong to the Israeli nation as fully as an ethnic Jew, without abandoning one’s ethnic Arab or Palestinian identiy.

When this happens, a national anniversary becomes something that everyone, regardless of ethnic background, can celebrate without reservation.

One should read the entire thing, of course.

Elitism

Does it make me an elitist to say that perhaps the lack of economic opportunity, not to mention just how much in general it sucks to live in an enclosed, emasculated, humiliated, circumscribed prison-pseudo-state like the Gaza Strip, could motivate people to become militant?

The Insanity of Settlement Expansion

While many Israelis and Americans who consider themselves to be pro-Israel point to Palestinian intransigence and violence as the main barrier to peace or a viable two-state solution, it’s not true that either of those things are “structural” problems.  Instead they’re a response, or too say it more mildly, come out of a certain milieu that is ever-changing.  On the other hand, the main Israeli barrier to peace is all two structural - the massive amounts of settlements, that are then expanding. Until the settlements are dealt with, and hopefully by disbanding them, there will be no peace, no two-state solution and Israeli will soon be facing the horrific option of either apartheid or ethnic cleansing to maintain the Jewish state.  But despite the fact that just about everyone, with the exceptions of pseudo-eliminationists like Avigdor Lieberman or the ultra-orthodox Jews who maintain many of the illegal settlements and whose parties provide political cover for the settlers,  acknowledges the basic dilemma Israel is in, settlements continue to expand and Israel’s allies, namely the US, continue to be do very little about, despite their stated opposition to the policy.

The always insightful Daniel Levy has a guardian piece looking at settlement policy makes these points and two others that are very important.  One is that the US, which is immune from political pressure exerted by parties like Shas and the United Torah Judaism party, ought to be providing that essential counterbalance to settlement construction.  In Israel, there is very rarely pressure to curtail settlement building or to actively push for dismantlement (Sharon’s Gaza disengagement was probably a unique moment in Israeli politics) so someone ought to be providing a constant counter-balance to those who actively support settlement building.  Perhaps if Bush cared enough about Israel to, say, have a full-time envoy there for his entire presidency, we’d be on our way to a better policy vis a vis settlements, but alas we are just barely getting there now.

The second point Levy makes that needs to be amplified everywhere is the direct connection between settlement building and two very deleterious trends.  One, everytime a settlement is built or expanded in occupied territory, Palestinian moderates who want peaceful negotiations with Israel leading to a two-state solution lose credibility with the Palestinian people.  What’s the point of a two-state solution if one of the states is actively getting shrunk and diminished?”

. This is a point that is paid to little attention to. The announcement of more building in a given settlement has a devastating impact on the Palestinian belief that a real two-state solution will happen. It dramatically undermines those advocating such a solution or involved in negotiations to that end, and it also of course sends a signal to the Israeli public. The two-state solution is likely to be labelled RIP in people’s heads long before it becomes technically unfeasible on the ground. That is the challenge.

Settlements are, in short, a big middle finger to any current peace process or to even the possibility of a two-state solution. A related point Levy makes is not only do settlements erode the potential of a viable two-sate solution, they also actively encourage Palestinian violence against Israelis (not to mention the intrinsic or structural violence of building the settlements themselves):

An alternative course of action was recently suggested by Israeli housing minister Ze’ev Boim. In explaining why he was relaunching new settlement construction in Givat Ze’ev he noted that the work was suspended due to the outbreak of violence in the second intifida, but now that violence had ebbed, building could resume. Ipso facto, if there is enough Palestinian violence, work will be abandoned. The point was not lost on former Palestinian minister Kadura Fares in this powerful recent Haaretz op-ed which ended: “Mr Boim, we got the message. Will anyone in Israel yet accuse you of incitement to rebellion and resistance?”

This captures why the current mindset around settlement building so urgently needs to be rethought. Because as long as the equation is that when there isn’t violence, they build new settlements, then Palestinian violence is not only inevitable, it also becomes useful because they can see a real, positive effect on Israeli policy due to their actions. In short, the settlements are good for no one. It’s unfortunate that Israeli politics hasn’t recognized this reality.

Home Destruction Doesn’t Work

One area where people primarily concerned with Israeli human rights abuses in the Territories and those skeptical Zionists like me can hopefully unite is in condemning certain Israeli military policies that are arguably violations of human rights, and more importantly for the Zionist crowd, don’t actually reduce anti-Israeli terrorism.  A great example of this is the now-abandoned policy of home destruction.  For a while, it was Israeli policy to destroy the homes of suicide bombers.  It did not matter if the families themselves encouraged or supported their child mudering Israelis, it was thought that collective punishment would encourage Palestinians to do some self-policing.  There are, of course, moral and human rights qualms with collective punishment.  The most obvious question is whether or not it’s right to punish people for an action they did commit.  The other problem with collective punishment in the context of Israel-Palestine is that it is often, as Haim Weitzman writes about his experiences serving in the IDF during the first intifada, not really a policy designed to reduce terrorism, but more to “to get back at the Palestinians for daring to oppose us, and to give the high army command something to report to the political leadership.”

But the army stopped demolishing the homes of suicide bombers in 2005.  Why?  Because it simply did nothing to actually reduce terrorism against Israel.  If human rights groups could make their critique of Israeli actions in the Territories more along those lines, they would probably get wider support because many Zionists and Israelis instinctively come to Israel’s defense because of the horrible violence against civilians that Israelis have to deal with, and they often shudder at any attempt of “equivocation.”  But with house demolitions, we see a policy that is clearly objectionable on both human rights and military grounds, and it would be nice if we could have a gotten a kumbayah moment where everyone except extremist settlers and arab haters could have renounced this immoral, ineffective policy.

It’s A Cycle

Gershom Gorenberg, one of my favorite jounralists on all issues Israeli, has a new blog that should become essential reading.  He writes about how a new settlement for Ultra Orthodox Israelis has been approved in the West Bank.  This is despite talk of a “total freeze” on settlement.

This move is disturbing for many reasons.  The first is that it shows how Israelis aren’t exactly acting in good faith for their part of the eventual land for peace bargain that will have to be struck.  The second is that it’s indicative of pattern whereby the short-term political benefits for Israeli leaders of approving settlement will always appear to outweigh the far-off, seemingly nebulous necessity of stopping settlements and then, some day, disbanding them.  The cycle is particulary bad because the settlements will be distmantled one day, unless Israel wants to either establish total apartheid for the Palestinian population or embark on a campaign of ethnic cleansing.  And while it’s easy to say, “oh, we can get some ultra-orthodox support if we allow this one extra settlement,” this is just one more group of revanchist, religious fanatics that will be particularly difficult to remove whenever a land-for-statehood agreement comes about.

But the short term implications of allowing settlement are even more disturbing.  Gorenberg points out that one of the justifications for allowing this settlement to go through is the “relative quiet” in the West Bank.  Just look at the message Israel is sending to the Palestinians:  The only way to prevent illegal settlements is to attack the established ones in the West Bank.  Who wins here?  Surely the Palestinians don’t in either the short or the long term.  The current settlers, who despite their role in forestalling peace were encouraged to settle by the government from as far back as the early 1970s,  are now being put at risk by this restless construction of the new settlements.  Israelis who live outside of the settlements are surely being put at risk for further violence.  Who wins?  Ultra-orthodox extremists who can pursue their dreams of Greater Israel and Palestinian terrorists who will get more support for their murderous cause.

The Cold and the Dark

Considering my political priors - fiercely anti-occupation, anti-Likud, anti-Lebanon war - I’m surprisingly sanguine about Israeli security policies like assassination of Hamas leaders and the wall. As far as I see it, any policy that leads to a net-reduction in suicide bombings is both wise and justifiable, it’s certainly unreasonable to expect any society to put up with random killings of teenagers in pizza parlors etc etc.

It’s this commitment and basic love of Israel that makes me so horrified at the freezing and locking off of Gaza that is only recently being let up. The Times reports that Ehud Barak is “lifting some of the restrictions imposed on Gaza and that on Tuesday morning he would allow delivery of a week’s supply of industrial diesel for the local power station, as well as 50 trucks of food and medical supplies. ” The logic of collectively punishing Gaza escapes me. This is the territory that picked Hamas in their elections, knowing full well that economic and political isolation would result. Moreover, Hamas feeds of the suffering and resentment of the Palestinian people, meaning that the only beneficiary from the policy of collective punishment is the very people we’re trying to punish — assuming, as I do, that the center-point of Israeli defense policy isn’t ensuring the misery of the Palestinians.

The larger problem is that whenever Israel crosses the proverbial line, they face a torrent of criticism from Arab governments and NGOs. But those same groups throw up waves of opprobrium every time Israel lifts a finger to deal with its terrorist problem, so you get a situation where the Israeli government doesn’t take international criticism very seriously and sometimes has knee-jerk reaction against it. This is where the US ought to step in. The US has plenty of credibility to criticize Israeli behavior and is generally seen by the Israelis as a fair broker. We’ve earned our stripes by constantly being the lone voice of support for Israel and the UN and they know that they don’t have any other steady, powerful ally. So we should be the ones nudging them away from these destructive, disproportionate and counter-productive actions. But usually, when it comes to policies we on-face oppose, like the expansion of settlements, we do nothing concrete or we simply support bad policy, like the invasion of Lebanon.

I don’t know which presidential candidate could best play this nuanced, productive role in the Middle East. Certainly not Giuliani, and probably not Romney. McCain mostly just hates terrorists and it’s hard to imagine him being to the left of Senator Lieberman. Clinton has largely signed on with the AIPAC say jump, she says “how high” paradigm of US middle east policy. I guess, as always, on a question of foreign policy, I just feel that Obama could deal with Israel best, but this is a biased conjecture. As usual, after spending more than five minutes thinking or writing about Israel, I feel bewildered, conflicted and depressed.

What Should Phoebe Do?

While it is indeed shocking that a New York born Jew who is currently a graduate student at NYU has more Democratic-than-not political views, I think we should still help Phoebe Maltz realize that she is probably a Democrat, and if she isn’t, that she should be. The core problem for her, it seems, is that she recognizes that the social backwardness of the GOP makes a vote for them untenable, but she has some trouble identifying herself as one of “the left.” I guess I don’t really see why this is all that important a concern.

There are all sorts of people in America who may generally vote for Democrats or for Republicans, but aren’t well represented by either side. My dad, for instance, has exclusively voted for Democrats his entire life (except when voting for Schwarzenegger), but he constantly rails against how liberals hate businesses, want to raise taxes and strangle the economy. He is not, certainly, “of the left”, but he votes Democratic because on a few key issues — namely ones like abortion and the War in Iraq, he agrees with Democrats. And in America, unlike Israel, there are two political parties, so a lot of people get shoehorned into one of them, without really being fully on board with their hole program. Just look at how libertarians held their nose and voted for Republicans all these years, and how some of them may have to vote for Democrats.

The second large issue she has with realizing that she is, in fact, a liberal is the perceived animosity or issues between liberalism and Jews. While she’s correct that, if you look at it a certain way, some populist anti-corporate and anti-foreign rhetoric could be interpreted as having a familiar resemblance to anti-Semitism, she is just wrong to say that there is some deep connection between American left-liberalism and animosity towards Jews.

I’m sure she knows the old Milton Himmelfarb line, “Jews earn like Episcopalians, but vote like Puerto Ricans”, and while the language he used may not be particularly fashionable today, it is still true. 58% of Jews identify as Democrats, while only 15% say they are Republicans. The AJC released an survey which, among other things, concludes that generally Jews hold moderate-to-liberal policy views on just about everything — including the war in Iraq and war on terrorism. For instance, 59% of American Jews disapprove of how the government is handling the war on terror and 67% think we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq. So Maltz’s opinion that being fully Jewish and being fully American-liberal is somehow opposed is pretty isolated within the Jewish community.

One of her finals points is that among “the left” (which she never really defines, largely because it may be impossible to do so), “it’s far more startling to hear someone on the left grudgingly accept rather than enthusiastically embrace the officially leftist stance on an issue than it is to witness someone on the right doing the same.” I think she is taking a snapshot of the last four or so years, and drawing a conclusion about left wingers in America that hasn’t always been true. There is a long and proud tradition of left contrarianism, even within the Democratic party. Not only have leftists always attacked mainstream Democrats for not being left enough, but from about 1980 to 1992, there were entire magazines and an intellectual movement devoted to bring the Democratic party and the American left closer to the center. Michael Kinsley of The New Republic and Charles Peters of the Washington Monthly delighted in attacking their fellow left wingers and Democrats, as well as core constituencies like unions. Bill Clinton issued the New Orleans Declaration in 1990, which was mostly an attack on the left wing elements of the Democratic Party for being too far to the left. It’s just that as the Bush administration and the GOP is currently going up in flames, it’s easy for the American left to unite against a force that they all agree is malevolent. The only reason that there has been any flourishing of contrarian opinion among Republicans is because they are quickly trying to disassociate themselves from the Bush administration. Another reason why being contrarian could be more accepted on the right than on the left is that, in standard historical terms, the left is a movement, while the right is a reaction. In America, for reasons I’ll explain very soon, I think the opposite is true, but it’s still something to consider.

I take issue with how Maltz implicitly defines “left.” I assume that because she is an academic, and one that studies Europe, she takes “left” to mean the genuine European left that has existed since 1848.The American left, in so much as there is one, is not the European left, which is a more proper left. Socialism or Social Democracy, except for a brief period in the 1910s, has never had a remotely comparable following in America as it has in Europe, and so it’s incorrect to say that the European left and what she calls the American left are equivalent.

Another oddity in Maltz’s discussion of what it means to be “left” is that she, like those who write for Dissent or Democratiya, implies that thinking that democracy isn’t always superior to theocracy or that horrible human rights abuses in Muslim countries aren’t all that bad compared to the evil that is America is a genuine left wing sentiment. And many academic and British leftists, I agree, are horribly soft on terrorists and theocrats and really hate America more than anything else; but that does not mean that any sort of real-existing-left in America holds those views to be mainstream or even acceptable.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that politics and political identification are about choices. And in this upcoming election, there will be a choice between a Democrat and a Republican. And Maltz can easily choose to vote for a Democrat, without identifying with a left, which I think doesn’t really exist, she doesn’t want to be aligned with. And that’s just fine.

On a final note…Holy crap, I just wrote nearly 1000 words trying to tell a woman I don’t even know how she should identify politically. Blogger narcissism knows no bounds…

When Israeli Newspapers Hate Israel

First it was Commentary accusing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of being anti-Israel, now they’ve moved on to Israel’s leading newspaper, Haaertz.  Their sin is that they ran an Op-Ed by Tom Segev, who commemorated the 60th anniversary of the UN vote to partition British Palestine and create Israel by pointing out that Israel tarnishes its moral standing by a continued occupation.  This opinion, if I may note, is rather uncontroversial among diaspora Jews and Israeils.  Haaertz also committed the grave sin of criticizing a right wing Israeli think tank.  In Commentary world, this makes Haaertz likes the New York Times, but worse.

Anti-Semitism in America

I agree with Isaac Chotiner that David Samuels melodramatic, alarmist essay “The Silence of the Lambs” is poor stuff. Specifically, when he begins to talk about the supposed resurgence of anti-Semitism in America, his examples are almost self refuting:

Yes, Jewish life in America remains a flowering paradise compared with the realities of being a Jew in contemporary Britain or France. But it is impossible to ignore the fact that America has changed, too. At bookstores in major airports, I am no longer surprised to be greeted by a pictures of a smiling former U.S. president comparing Israel to the loathsome apartheid government of South Africa, or a Harvard professor explaining how a small but powerful coterie of Jews is responsible for the misfortunes that have befallen America in the Middle East.

Every American Jew has been quietly putting together their own pocket-sized file of stories they would rather not tell the children.

There is the story of the gunman who walked into a Jewish community center in Seattle last year and murdered one community worker and wounded five others. The silence of the mainstream American Jewish leadership in this country was met by widespread silence in the press.

Lobbyists for AIPAC are being put on trial for the crime of gossiping with U.S. government officials over lunch, an offense of which every single foreign lobbyist in Washington – and every working journalist – is guilty. Again, the American Jewish community is silent, for fear of making things worse.

Last week I logged onto the New York Times website and read excerpts from a speech by Senator Joe Lieberman condemning the extremist fringe of the Democratic Party. The comments section – moderated by the Times – began with an attack on Lieberman as the “Senator from Tel Aviv” and went downhill from there, in language that ten years ago would have been confined to white supremacist compounds in Idaho and Washington State.

Let’s go through these claims one by one. There’s the common smear that Jimmy Carter is an anti-Semite. While I disagree with his characterization of Israel, it is within the bounds of acceptable discourse to say that there are similarities between systems where there are functionally two sets of laws based on location. Moreover, I can’t imagine why an anti-Semite would broker a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel that been an unqualified success for Israel’s security. There’s also an allusion to Walt-Mearsheimer. I guess if one wants to make the absurd argument that the best place for the safety, freedom, respect and tolerance for Jews in history (the contemporary United States) is having a resurgence in anti-Semitism, it’s necessary to misrepresent The Israel Lobby. WM never claim that Jews, writ large, are responsible for our Israel policy, or are constitutive of the “Israel Lobby.” From their original London Review of Books paper, “This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby […] Jewish Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies […] The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals.” While the shooting in Seattle was a tragedy, I was largely informed of it by the Jewish press, and it’s hardly indicative of a greater trend. But smears of Jimmy Carter and blatant misrepersentations of Walt-Mearsheimer are standard practice for this type of essay. What’s starkly original is the defense of Lawrence Franklin.

Franklin is the DoD employee who passed along classified government documents about Iran to two AIPAC employees and an Israeli government official. Franklin plead guilty to the espionage charges. This is more than just “gossiping,” it’s the unauthorized sharing of classified information with agents of a foreign country. It’s a pretty cut and dry case, and Samuels is crying wolf by trying to turn this matter into a latter day Dreyfus Affair. Moreover, defending blatantly illegal activity by calling its prosecution anti-Semitic is playing into the hands of the more conspiratorial, anti-Israel fringe. If the American Jewish community were to rise to the defense of the two AIPAC staffers committing espionage, it would be shameful. Samuels is demanding the worse type of dual loyalty, whereby American Jews have an obligation to defend every action of the Israeli government. And yet, Samuels and his ilk are so quick to criticize others for saying that some hawkish Israel boosters clearly exhibit dual loyalties

The final proof that Samuels case for the rise of anti-Semitism in America is quite weak is when he looks to an anonymous comment thread about Joe Lieberman. There’s the snide implication that the Times encouraged or at least condoned this apparently awful language, despite the fact that the worse thing Samuels could find was calling Lieberman the “senator from Tel Aviv”

If Samuels is so concerned about anti-Semitism in the United States, I wonder what he thinks about Rudy Giuliani. Of course, Giuiliani would probably appeal to Samuels because of his denigration of Palestinian statehood and hawkish militarism in the Middle Eat and Israel. On the other hand, Giuliani gladly accepted the endorsement of a real anti-Semite, Pat Robertson. But in Samuels’ world, if you disagree with him about Israel or AIPAC, that’s a surefire sign that America is devolving into Jew hatred.

Maybe the Webb-Clinton Iran Bill Isn’t So Hot After All

Yesterday, I decided that Clinton co-sponsoring legislation that would withhold congressional funding for an attack on Iran absent explicit authorization is a good thing. I’m not so sure anymore. Unlike the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which labels the Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization, it’s highly unclear if the Clinton-Webb bill will pass. If the Democratic congrss doesn’t have the spine to stand up the Bush administration and various Iran hawks, Clinton would have just waisted a ton of capital with Haim Saban and AIPAC types — without a meaningful change of policy — meaning that she’ll be more likely to double up on various other misguided likudnik/Israeli hawk policy positions, like insisting on a unified Jerusalem being the capital of Israel.

If, on the other hand, this bill manages to pass and somehow withstand a Bush veto threat, I will go back to my old position and think that Hillary did something very worthwhile.

The Gazan Tragedy

Israel and the US pressures the Palestinians to have elections. To no one’s surprise, they don’t manage to elect the criminally incompetent and corrupt Fatah and instead elect Hamas. Hamas and Abbas’ PA split up, then the US, Israel and the EU try to isolate Hamas. Hamas takes over Gaza from Fatah and Gaza is sealed off from trade. As usual, it’s the Palestinian people who are getting the raw end of the deal.   And since Gaza is controlled by Hamas, there is no one to advocate for the impoverished Gazans.  Abbas is oscillating between simply ignoring Gaza and a Leninist strategy of “heightening the contradiction” –  hoping things will get so bad that Gazans will throw off Hamas.  Seeing as Hamas actually has established a monopoly on violence in Gaza as well as the loyalty - and fear - of much of the population, the likelihood of Hamas losing power in the short term is quite low.  And the Gazans will continue to suffer.

While I won’t be shedding any tears for the arms dealers that Hamas is cracking down on, the entire situation of Gaza — cut off from not only it’s purported “people” in the West Bank, but also from their jobs in Israel and fellow Arabs in Egypt — is very distressing. Gaza’s development statistics are some of the lowest in the world, which is only compounded by shockingly high birth rates. The question becomes, does the isolation of Gaza increase Israel’s long term security, and if so, at what price?

Missing M&W’s Point

Richard Cohen has a at-the-same-time perceptive and very strange column concerning Walt and Mearsheimer ’s The Israel Lobby. In the first part, he acknowledges how our current policy towards Israel, which amounts to saying “how high?” when Israel/AIPAC say jump, has lead to negative outcomes for both the US and Israel:

For the United States to remain Israel’s wingman can hardly be characterized as being in our self-interest.

The argument can be made also that America’s policy of supporting almost anything the Israeli government does — from permitting West Bank settlements to launching disastrous wars such as last summer’s in Lebanon — is no good for Israel, either. Certainly, the so-called Israel lobby, mostly funded and controlled by conservative elements in the American Jewish community, has done Israel no favor by not criticizing West Bank settlements or the harsh treatment of Palestinians. Friends don’t allow friends to build settlements.All these points are made by Mearsheimer and Walt — and bully for them. Where Israel is wrong, they say so.

Besides omitting our current policy of obscenely high levels of military aid to Israel, which even their most ardent and articulate defenders can’t justify, Cohen does a good job of explaining why The Israel Lobby is a necessary corrective to our current debate over how much support to lend to various Israeli policies that aren’t in the national interest. He then wends off into explaining all the various reasons we shouldn’t entirely abandon Israel to the wilds: it’s a democracy in a sea of tyrannies, it is expression of our values etc. This is all true, but I don’t think many recommend we side with Syria and Hamas at the expense of Israel.

But now is not the time for this type of “balanced” discussion of our current Israel policy, where every criticism of our relationship has to be counterbalanced with “but Israel should exist!” If two political scientists wrote a book criticizing military aid and political support we gave to bad Japanese or Indian policies, and Richard Cohen said “x, y and z policies and actions of Japan/India are bad for both the US and the Japanese/Indian national interest, but Japan/India are democracies and should exist!” he’d be laughed out of the proverbial.

We need a stark, realist assessment of our relationship with Israel to counterbalance our current “policy”, which hasn’t exactly been in anyone’s interest besides rich, hawkish American Jews and misguided, militarist Israelis. It’s not Walt and Mearsheimer ’s job to explain why Israel is the shit, it’s their job to explain if our current policy towards Israel is a good one or not.

The Upcoming Israel Lobby Debate

When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt released their infamous Israel Lobby paper, it was one of the strangest public debates in memory.  Mearsheimer and Walt were tarred by Israel supporters as being anti-semites and for writing a 21st century version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while Noam Chomsky and Joseph Massad, for example, — who one might think would be simpatico with MW — called out our their paper for being unoriginal and uninteresting.  Dan Drezner said it was just poor political science (attributing Iraq to the power of AIPAC was a bit of stretch).  While I was more in the Drezner camp,  the mainstream line on it seemed to be closer to what Abe Foxman and Eliot Cohen were saying about the paper — that it was a mendacious anti-Semitic lie.

Well, just in case anyone enjoys hearing Likudnik hawks ranting about antisemitism every time anyone tries to say one iota of a negative thing about American policy towards Israel, Walt and Mearsheimer’s book on the topic is coming out soon. Already, people are tagging it as anti-Semitic while I’m sure the American Likudniks (Eliot Cohen, much of the Bush White House etc) are chomping at the bit, ready to unleash their rage at M & W.  What’s going to make round 2 a bit more interesting is how the ADL, in the eyes of many Jews and those who follow their work, has been near discredited for their initial denial of the Armenian Genocide, firing a regional director who spoke out against the policy and now admitting that what the Turks did in 1915 was “tantamount to genocide” all the while forthrightly admitting that their pained contortions on the little matter of genocide were in service of promoting and protecting Israel’s interest in not seeing the Congressional resolution passed.  It’s almost like the ADL — which claims to be a civil rights group –  is lobbying, on behalf of Israel.  Shhhh! Don’t tell anyone!

Batya Battiness

As a frequent reader of the Daily Shvitz(support the tribe, read it!), I occasionally get annoyed with some of Michael Weiss’ Hitchensesque Iraq wankery, but he’s a smart honest dude and writes a lot of good stuff, so I don’t mind much.  This week’s guest blogger, on the other hand, is a complete and total nut job.  Her handle is Batya, and she describes herself as a “American-born, Israeli grandmother who attempts to teach English to Israeli teenage boys.  I live in Shiloh, that’s the genuine BibleLand, where it all happened way back when.”

That’s enough to raise red flags, but her posts are absolutely asinine.  She refers to what most people call the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” a true sign of Likudnik nuttiness, and casts aspersions on Arabs building  large homes near where she lives, ominously warning that they must be receiving “funding” and complaining that “no jew lives in such luxury.”  Oooh scary, I guess Batya likes her Arabs poor and oppressed, instead of having expatriates daring to invest in their homeland.

Batya’s most ridiculous post in her week long reign of right wing nonsense was her kvetching about the “discrimination” of the Israeli Army evicting 500 settlers from Hebron.  Never mind that the settlers were there illegally, and that the Israeli Supereme Court had ruled that their eviction was legit.  Or that there are only 500 of them surrounded by 170,000 Palestinians, thus putting heavy strains on the IDF to protect these inflammatory religious zealots.  I’m no fan of Palestinian terrorists, but the fact that these settlers and myself are ostensibly part of the same religous community drives me crazy.