As Mideast Hopes Dim, Some Urge Scaling Back of Lofty Goals. By Nicholas Casey. The Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2014.
John Kerry ruined what John Kerry built. By Ben-Dror Yemini. i24News, April 7, 2014.
Israel Has Few Options With Palestinians. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, April 9, 2014.
Why Netanyahu Won’t “Go Big.” By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, April 10, 2014.
Naftali Bennett calls on Netanyahu to annex 60% of West Bank. By Gil Hoffman. Jerusalem Post, April 10, 2014.
Casey:
But
with Secretary of State John Kerry’s declaration last week that the peace
process needed a “reality check,” hopes of a grand bargain put forward when he
kicked off his diplomacy nine months ago are being scaled back.
The
difficulties in agreeing on a prisoner swap bode ill for tackling more complex
issues that need to be resolved to reach a lasting peace. That has opened a
discussion about constraining aspirations and urging U.S. mediators to accept
the status quo while the two sides focus on ways to avoid any escalation in
violence.
Former
politicians and analysts propose that the most contentious issues that need to
be resolved for a comprehensive peace, such as borders and security, would be
left for after future elections. The two sides would continue official peace
talks, allowing their U.S. ally to avoid failure on a long-standing
foreign-policy goal.
“The
gap between the most moderate position in Israel and the most moderate position
in the Palestinian leadership is too far right now,” said Shlomo Avineri, a
former director general of Israel’s foreign ministry. “It’s time for the U.S.
to think of a contingency plan—treating this as a conflict-management
situation.” His suggestion: treat the two governments like Kosovo or Cyprus,
where adversaries never fully recognized each other, but modest agreements
stopped the threat of another war.
A Final
Status Agreement between Israelis and Palestinians—the wide-ranging deal that
would settle everything from the location of borders and capitals to the right
of return for Palestinians who lost their homes during Israel's creation in
1948—has remained elusive since the 1993 Oslo accords.
Achieving
a deal now would require both Israeli and Palestinian leaders to be able to
sell the agreement to hard-liners who threaten to bring down their respective
governments if they go too far. Yet both sides must continue to negotiate with
one another—Israel to avoid international isolation for its occupation of the
West Bank, Palestinians so they can continue to receive international aid. The
result is that both sides keep talking, but neither has incentive to reach a
deal.
Yehuda
Ben Meir, a former Israeli deputy foreign minister, said the U.S. has two
options at this point.
“Either
manage the conflict until the next elections, or walk away, and that would mean
conflict, and wouldn’t be a viable option for them,” he said.
The
most the two sides could agree upon in the near term might be what he called
unilateral coordinated actions such as allowing Palestinians to control more
land in parts of the West Bank now under Israeli control.
The grievance industry takes on momentum. By Bill O’Reilly. Video. Talking Points Memo. The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, April 7, 2014. YouTube. Mediaite. Transcript.
Dartmouth grievance list designed to ensure MLK Jr.’s dream never comes true. By William A. Jacobson. Legal Insurrection, April 8, 2014.
Lifting the Liberal Veil on US Support for Israel. By Paul Croce. History News Network, April 7, 2014.
Croce:
Support
for Israeli political and military actions have been doing the work of American
conservative ideologies, but in liberal disguise.
The
American Studies Association is an academic David dwarfed by the political
Goliaths currently managing Israeli-Palestinian relations. But the association’s academic boycott of
Israel, for “policies that violate [the] human rights” of Palestinians, has
produced a tremendous reaction because it reveals the long-hidden role of
American political divisions in US policies in the region.
And
yet, among all the debating points against and for the boycott, there has been
minimal attention to the role of American political ideologies. Instead, the arguments against the ASA’s
action have been based on the proper role of an academic organization in relation
to political events, while supporters of the boycott focus on Israeli
restrictions on Palestinian civil rights often with use of military force.
This
dynamic is a reminder of the situation in American universities in the
mid-1960s. While Civil Rights and the
Vietnam War agitated the country, many students with some faculty support asked
for a broadening of education to include discussion of race relations and war
and peace; most administrators rejected these calls arguing that they fell
outside the proper bounds of academic inquiry, labeling them outside issues, or
even subversive.
The ASA
has long served the academic community and US civil society by telling truth to
power. I first learned American Studies
from William McLoughlin, a productive and inspiring scholar in religious and
Native American history at Brown University, and a constant agitator for social
justice; he had a poster in his office with a quotation from Ralph Waldo
Emerson, “Action to the scholar is secondary, but essential.”
With
its resolution for boycott, the ASA joins a growing minority of scholars and
advocates seeking to shift the rhetorical agenda by encouraging debate about
Israeli policies and “the unparalleled military and financial ties between the
U.S. and Israel.”
The ASA
president Curtis Marez has been ridiculed for sounding frivolous when he
defended the boycott by saying, “We have to start somewhere,” as if it were an
action of feckless meandering. However,
given the prevalent American attitudes about Israel and its environs, this may
actually be the organization’s trump card for its willingness to challenge the
longstanding inertia about a seemingly impossible situation.
The
current mainstream US narrative is that the situation is a mess, and the Arabs
in general and the Palestinians in particular are untrustworthy. Add to this, for a significant minority of
Americans, Islam is an illegitimate religion, and many even believe that it
will fall sway in an epochal battle that will bring the victory, not ultimately
of Jews, but of Christians. In fact, a
higher percentage of American white evangelicals than of American Jews support
Israeli claims to Palestinian land.
To most
Americans, Israel represents our team in the region, with its harsh measures
fulfilling American interests. This
narrative is often presented as both a moral defense of Jews, and as a
practical necessity for sustaining American power in this sector of the
globe. With its lack of attention to the
Palestinians, this path also suggests a bleak future for Israeli Jews in tense
relations with the other Semites in their midst, and with many Palestinians
even contained behind walls. Graffiti on
one wall reads “Ich bin ein Berliner,” recalling John Kennedy’s defiance of the
Berlin Wall in 1963.
Fear
and anger have haunted each side for decades, with tragic cycles of terror and
military reprisals. The boycott is a
welcome turn to nonviolence that should be applauded by all sides—except, of
course, for those who find Arab terror useful for maintaining fear and
justifying robust military policies.
It
would be a tragedy if criticism of the ASA about the proper role for an
academic organization would distract from the way that Israeli policies toward
Palestinians have become a chapter in the contemporary American culture war
between neo-conservative support of aggressive military strength by contrast
with progressive hopes to scale back military action and spending in favor of
diplomatic solutions.
Within this American
polarization, ironically, the boycott has prompted some academic progressives
to affiliate with Israel’s military measures for dealing with a population
within its dominion. The ASA action
reminds us that Israeli political and military actions have been doing the work
of conservative ideologies, but in liberal disguise.
Can Putin’s Ukrainian Strategy Be Countered? By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, April 6, 2014.
