The Outrage Gap. By Gil Troy.

Netanyahu on “Final Resolution”: Not “A Single Arab on Our Lands.” By Gil Troy. The Daily Beast, July 30, 2013.

Troy:

Of course, Benjamin Netanyahu did not say that—or any such thing. Netanyahu, as the leader of the Jabotinskyite Likud movement understands that Israel must remain a Jewish and democratic state that respects all its citizens, including Arabs, many of whom serve honorably in the courts, the Knesset, and elsewhere. But imagine the outrage if Netanyahu had said such a thing—we have seen how when third-string Knesset backbenchers make even less offensive remarks it generates New York Times headlines and much Jewish handwringing about supposed Israeli “racism,” when, of course, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a national one not a racial one at all.

 

By contrast, when Mahmoud Abbas, briefing “mostly Egyptian journalists,” according to the report reprinted in the Jerusalem Post, imagined an Israeli-free (but let's face it, basically Jew-free) Palestinian state, few mainstream media outlets decided this was news. This Outrage Gap, this magical ray that renders Palestinian bigotry and hate-mongering invisible, has perverted the so-called “peace process” for decades, and has already caused imbalance in this latest round of negotiations—which, despite my frustrations and fears, I desperately hope will succeed.

 

To be fair, this is Abbas’s full sentence: “In a final resolution, we would not see the presence of a single Israeli—civilian or soldier—on our lands.” This is, of course, one of the fundamental assumptions guiding peace talks for decades, that the Jews will leave what the Palestinians have convinced the world is their territory exclusively, while Arabs will stay in Israel. That assumption follows the guidelines of the original British Mandate after World War I, which created a Jew-free Transjordan, east of the Jordan River, and envisioned carving out some territory west of the Jordan for a Jewish state.

 

Let me be clear. My vision of Israel’s future includes all of Israel’s current citizens and their future descendants, Jewish, Christian and Muslim. Moreover, I understand that a future Palestinian state will require displacing more Israelis from some territory, as was done with Yamit after the Egyptian Peace Treaty and was done in Gaza—and we forget—part of the West Bank, with the Disengagement. I also believe that the most viable arrangement with the Palestinians will respect current demographic realities as much as possible, trying to draw viable boundaries that minimize the amount of inconvenience to people living on both sides of the Green Line—that improvised boundary from 1949.

 

But the free pass given Abbas on these remarks, like the free pass given to his odious dissertation trying to Nazify Zionism and minimize the Holocaust, tells a deeper, darker tale. There are vast armies of Palestinian enablers in the West who exaggerate every Israeli imperfection and soft-pedal serious Palestinian evils. This asymmetry results in always blaming Israel—even when the Palestinians turn from negotiating back to terror in 2000—and always putting the onus on Israel to make the first move—as evidenced by Israel’s major concession this week in freeing murderers with blood on their hands. This outrage gap holds democratic Israel, with all its imperfections, to an impossibly high standard, while rarely holding Palestinians up to even the most minimum standards when it comes to judging their undemocratic procedures, their appalling human rights record, their hostile attitudes toward gays, women, Jews, or any non-Palestinian, non-males.

 

Clearly, this imbalance hurts Israel, undermining Israel’s standing, alienating bystanders, putting extra-pressure on Israel even from natural allies in the United States and Europe. But this imbalance hurts Palestinians too, in at least two central ways.

First, I think reflects what I call liberal condescension. I hold Palestinian politics and society up to high standards out of respect; giving Palestinians a free pass, be it when they terrorize or demonize, shows contempt for them, assuming that somehow they cannot live up to basic standards of decency.

 

Second, all this enabling feeds Palestinian extremism and Israeli extremism as well. Indulging Palestinian bigotry, oppression, fanaticism, and violence helps make the Middle East more incendiary, undermines Israeli moderates, and fuels the fanatics.

 

Just as many critics of Israel insist they are true friends trying to save Israel’s soul, true friends of the Palestinians in the West would start by publicizing Abbas’s remarks—and then repudiating them as contrary to the kind of country he should be trying to build and the kind of tone he should be trying to set in negotiations.

A Cultural Redesign of the Peace Process. By Richard Landes.

Redesigning the Peace Process. By Richard Landes. Tablet, September 25, 2012. Also at The Augean Stables.

Romney Is Right on Culture and the Wealth of Nations. By Richard Landes. Wall Street Journal, August 5, 2012.


Landes (Peace Process):

Since the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, there hasn’t been a moment when the punditocracy hasn’t insisted that Israel needs to make a deal with the Palestinians—and soon. Otherwise, they claim, Israeli democracy, saddled with millions of Palestinians living under Israeli control without citizenship, will have to choose between the twin catastrophes of democratic suicide and apartheid. And since the solution that everyone knows is the eventual one–land for peace–is so clear, let’s just get on with it.

 

It hasn’t panned out. We’re now approaching two decades of failure of the two-state solution. Every strategy for pulling it off—Oslo, Taba, Geneva, Road Map, Dayton, Obama/Clinton—has, despite sometimes enormous efforts, failed or died stillborn. And yet, with each failure, a new round of hope emerges, with commentators and politicians arguing that this time, if we just tinker with some of the details, we’ll get peace right. (Or, as an increasing number have now come to believe, it’s time we abandon the two-state solution entirely.)

The predominant explanation for this impasse in the West has focused on Israel’s role: settlements that provoke, checkpoints that humiliate, blockades that strangle, and walls that imprison. Palestinian “no’s” typically get a pass: Of course Arafat said “no” at Camp David; he only got Bantustans while Israelis kept building illegal settlements. Suicide bombers are excused as registering a legitimate protest at being denied the right to be a free people in their own land. In Condoleezza Rice’s words: “[The Palestinians] are perfectly ready to live side by side with Israel because they just want to live in peace . . . the great majority of people, they just want a better life.” The corollary to such thinking, of course, holds that if only the Israelis didn’t constantly keep the Palestinians down the world would be a better place. So, the sooner we end the occupation, the better, even if it means urging the United States to pressure Israel into the necessary concessions. It’s for Israel’s own good.

 

This line of thinking is driven entirely by politics. Oslo thinkers from Bill Clinton to Thomas Friedman believe that what was needed was a political settlement and the rest would take care of itself. In 2007, Rice reflected this outlook in a statement of faith that projected a peculiarly modern outlook: “I just don’t believe mothers want their children to grow up to be suicide bombers. I think the mothers want their children to grow up to go to university. And if you can create the right conditions, that’s what people are going to do.”

 

Overestimating the power of politics and dramatically underestimating the importance of culture has actually hindered the possibility for a political solution. For Jews, especially progressive Jews, the early second decade of the 21st century poses a particularly interesting and painful meditation just in time for Yom Kippur: In our quest for “fairness,” for splitting the blame evenly, for misidentifying problems as political and therefore easily solvable—so easily solvable they could be dispatched with a simple email, as one exasperated BBC anchor put it recently—are we actually working against both parties in the conflict?

 

I believe the answer is yes. And those who wish to pursue a peaceful resolution need to take a hard look at the cultural difference between Israelis and Arabs—and craft policy that confronts it.

 

***

 

Any approach that pays heed to cultural issues yields a very different view as to why the conflict persists. The zero-sum logic of Arab attitudes toward Israel does not represent merely the choices made by politicians, but Islamic religiosity and deep-seated cultural mores. From the Arab perspective, the very existence of Israel represents a stain on Arab honor and a blasphemy to Islam’s dominion in Dar al Islam. Some, like the Palestinian Authority, may have made a tactical shift in which they will, despite the shame of it, talk with Israelis and even make public agreements. But they have treated such engagement as a Trojan horse, a feint to position for further war. Within this cultural context, the peace process has actually served as a war process.

 

Well-meaning Oslo proponents, afraid that criticism of, and demands on, the Palestinians would delay the peace process, denounced anyone who made these kinds of observations as enemies of peace. So, when Arafat said “no” at Camp David in the summer of 2000, and a wave of suicide bombers came pouring out of the belly of the horse, these same Oslo supporters, including many an alter-Juif, rather than admitting they had called it wrong, preferred to blame Israel.

 

But bitterest of ironies, in so doing, they fed the very culture they denied. Palestinian hatred has festered under the guidance of Oslo-empowered elites, unopposed by the very actors one would expect to have the courage to call out such vitriol: journalists, human-rights organizations, and progressives. Instead, these groups have gone out of their way not to inform their readers of this culture of hate.

 

By constantly reinforcing a Palestinian sense of grievance against Israel, activists like the late Rachel Corrie, journalists like BBC’s Jeremy Bowen and CNN’s Ben Wedeman, and Israel-obsessed organizations like Human Rights Watch have unwittingly contributed to the very war that rages. And as a result of this consensus, Israel appears to most in the West as a terrible oppressor when the sad but redeeming truth is that the Israelis are the best enemies one could hope for, and they face the worst.

 

Nothing illustrates the cultural gap between Israel and Palestine better—and offers a more immediate and constructive way out—than the problem of Palestinian refugees. They are the symbol of Arab political priorities. When faced with the catastrophic humiliation of 1948, when the combined Arab nations, fully confident of a glorious victory, failed to destroy the upstart Jewish nation in the heart of the Muslim world, the Arab leadership unanimously chose to herd Arab refugees into prison camps so that they could serve as a symbol of Israeli crimes and a breeding ground or the counter-attack.

 

For over 60 years, Arab leaders have blocked any efforts to remove these people from these wretched camps because to do so would be a tacit acceptance of Israel’s permanence and would acknowledge the humiliating defeat. (By contrast, Israel rapidly moved the even larger number of Jews chased from the Arab world in 1948 out of their refugee camps.) The Arabs thus went from a zero-sum loss (the establishment of Israel) to a negative-sum solution: sacrifice your own people on the altar of your lost honor. No negotiations, no recognition, no peace.

 

Not only do Palestinian negotiators insist on the return of 5 million refugees to Israel (it was one of two key  deal-breakers at Camp David), but the Palestinian ambassador to Lebanon recently explained that Palestinian refugees not residing in the future Palestine would not be citizens in that state. In other words, Palestinian refugees still captive in camps in Lebanon and Syria and Jordan only have a right to citizenship in Israel.

 

So, here’s my proposal to those who somehow feel we must revive the peace process now, before it’s too late. Call for the Palestinians to show their good intentions, not toward the Israelis, but toward their own people. Get those “refugees” out of the prison camps into which they have been so shamefully consigned for most of a century.

 

Begin at home, with the over 100,000 refugees in Territory A, under complete PA control. Bring in Habitat for Humanity and Jimmy Carter to help them build decent, affordable, new homes. Let us all participate in turning the powers of Palestinian ingenuity away from manufacturing hatred, fomenting violence, and building villas for the rich and powerful, while the refugees live in squalor as a showcase of Israeli cruelty, and start to do good for a people victimized by their own leadership.

 

To take this position, so aligned with progressive values, however, we would have to confront two obstacles. First, overcoming our immense reluctance to criticize and make demands on the Palestinians. That would also mean we’d also have to renounce the impulse to attack as racists or Islamophobes those making the demands. We also have to consider, especially true for journalists in the field, the possibility that we’re intimidated, afraid to criticize people with so prickly a collective ego. Second, it would mean overcoming the widespread hunger for stories of “Jews behaving badly.” After all, if it weren’t for the appetite for moral Schadenfreude, the whole idea of pinning the miserable fate of the Palestinian refugees on Israel rather than on their Arab jailors would never have taken hold in the first place.

 

***

 

Such introspection and self-criticism can be a little like chewing glass, but I can think of no more important communal task this Yom Kippur.

 

How often have I gone overboard, how often have I accepted a lethal narrative in order to save face with my friends who expect me to rise above being an “Israel-firster”? How often have I admitted to crimes on behalf of my people without checking to see if they were accurate? How often have I failed to speak out against the depravity of the Palestinian leadership, out of fear of being called an Islamophobe? In the answers to those questions lies the path to a real peace in this troubled, blessed land.

 

Do we outsiders who say we want peace want it badly enough to confront our own comfort zones? Let’s hope. Those Palestinians and Israelis who are ready to live in a win-win world depend on it.

How Sweet, Smart Kids Under Occupation Come To Worship Militants. By Haroon Shah.

How Sweet, Smart Kids Under Occupation Come To Worship Militants. By Haroon Shah. Tablet, July 30, 2013.

In the heart of Kashmir, where happiness was a warm AK-47, the weapon was my voice, and my dream.

Britain Is Now a Socialist Utopia. By Toby Young.

Britain is now a socialist utopia. By Toby Young. The Spectator, August 3, 2013.

SWAT for Settlers. By Debra Kamin.

SWAT for Settlers. By Debra Kamin. Foreign Policy, July 31, 2013.

Meet the Brooklyn-born weapons instructor who’s training West Bank Jews to pack heat and use it.

Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness. By Emily Esfahani Smith.

Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness. Emily Esfahani Smith. The Atlantic, August 1, 2013.

A functional genomic perspective on human well-being. By Barbara L. Frederickson et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, published online, July 29, 2013.

Michelle Malkin: Al Sharpton Is a “Shakedown Artist” Who “Has Blood on His Hands.”

Michelle Malkin: Al Sharpton Is a “Shakedown Artist” Who “Has Blood on His Hands.” Video. Real Clear Politics, August 1, 2013. YouTube.

SEAN HANNITY: Do you think Al Sharpton has ever created a job with all this activism? Has he prevented a life from being taken with all this activism? Has he united anybody, has he solved any problems among any groups that you know of, Michelle?

 

MICHELLE MALKIN: Al Sharpton has blood on his hands. He’s ruined lives, he’s been one of the worst purveyors of racial divisiveness and hate in my lifetime. And it’s – how can you expect an ounce of honor from a man who doesn’t have it? Certainly he’s not going to go out of his way to try to defend yours or be a standup guy. I love you like a brother, Sean. And I was very dismayed when you made that decision, and I know you made it out of good faith, to attend the National Action Network, and this guy is a shakedown artist who hates cops, who hates whites, who hates Jews, who has stoked his rent-a-mob to murder Yankel Rosenbaum, to destroy the life of Steven Pagonis when he lied about Tawana Brawley, and who has done nothing but foment the very kind of anger that he is now accusing you, a once “friend” of, and I think the lesson here is something that I have tried tirelessly to remind all conservatives. If you get in the snake pit, you will be bit. Conservatives have been far too nice to these people in a good faith effort to try and have honest race relations. You can’t with somebody who is a demagogue. And who is evil.

 

HANNITY: Maybe you’re right. Maybe I made a mistake. I gotta tell you. In, especially the first debate – we aired it here on Fox. I confronted him with all his comments about, for a Jewish man to pin his yarmulke on backwards and the white interloper comment that he made at Freddie’s at 125th street, that resulted in deaths. I’m gonna say to him, if this is a battle he wants to fight every day, I’m going to remind everybody, not of one isolated incident, but of a history of vitriol out of his mouth.

 

***

 

HANNITY: If it wasn’t so sad and incendiary, it would almost be like a Saturday Night Live skit, its so over-the-top.

 

MALKIN: It’s chilling, is what it is. Because in an era where we’re supposed to take Martin Luther King Jr.’s words to heart, judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, all this man has done is enrich himself by fomenting more racial division. And it should be known that in addition to that long string in history, of racial hate and demagoguery, that the National Action network itself is nothing more than a shake-down vehicle to buy legitimacy. And you have the fact that everyone from President George W Bush to Newt Gingrich to Al Gore. Every Democratic presidential candidate in the 2008 election and preceding it has kissed the ring of this race charlatan. And now he has reinvented himself, he thinks he can lose weight, put pancake makeup on, and all of a sudden he’s respectable. You do that Sean, and remind people every day of where that man came from. Warn people not to make the mistake of being an enabler of Al Sharpton, but be a disabler of his demagoguery.

Sam Houston: American Hero. By Jeffrey Stuart Kerr.

Sam Houston: American Hero. By Jeffrey Stuart Kerr. The Huffington Post, August 1, 2013.

The Raven: A Biography of Sam Houston. By Marquis James. Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1929.

Sam Houston and Secession. By Edward R. Maher, Jr. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 4 (April 1952).

Sam Houston and Eliza Allen: The Marriage and the Mystery. By Elizabeth Crook. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 94, No. 1 (July 1990).

Republicans and the Rich. By Ross Douthat.

Republicans and the Rich. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, July 23, 2013.

Libertarian populism is viable and necessary. By Timothy P. Carney. Washington Examiner, July 22, 2013.

Why Republicans Miss the Realists. By Ross Douthat.

Why Republicans Miss the Realists. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, July 31, 2013.

White House Losing Its Grip on the Middle East? By Walter Russell Mead.

White House Losing Its Grip on the Middle East? By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, August 2, 2013.

The Death of Populism. By Victor Davis Hanson.

The Death of Populism. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, August 1, 2013.

Plenty of pleaders for rich and poor, but no politician speaks for the common man.

I and My Brother Against My Cousin. By Stanley Kurtz.

I and My Brother Against My Cousin. By Stanley Kurtz. The Weekly Standard, April 14, 2008.

Is Islam the key to understanding the Middle East? Tribalism offers a more profound—if neglected—insight into the region.

The Neocon Revival. By David Brooks.

The Neocon Revival. By David Brooks. New York Times, August 1, 2013.

The Neoconservative Persuasion. By Irving Kristol. The Weekly Standard, August 25, 2003.

Requiem for the Peace Process. By Lee Smith.

Requiem for the Peace Process. By Lee Smith. The Weekly Standard, July 31, 2013.

With the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, Middle East diplomacy has entered its mannerist phase.

Israeli-Palestinian Talks: The Perils of Pessimism. By Shlomi Eldar. Al-Monitor, August 1, 2013.


Smith:

John Kerry says he can get an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement within nine months that would lead to an independent Palestinian state. That’s ambitious to be sure, but Kerry’s optimism raises a key question: With Syria torn by civil war, Egypt in the midst of a meltdown that may lead to another Arab civil war, and the Iranian nuclear program still the region’s major strategic threat, why is the secretary of state pushing the Israeli-Palestinian peace process?

 

Perhaps with everyone else in the region tied down fighting for vital interests or mere survival, John Kerry imagines he has a unique opportunity for a historical breakthrough: For the price of a few land swaps, he’s going to get the Palestinian Authority to declare that the Arab war against Israel, which PA President Mahmoud Abbas will recognize as the Jewish state, is over once and for all—while everyone else in the region is too busy to notice. Years from now, Iran, Hamas, and Saudi Arabia, among others, will be startled to discover what transpired during those momentous nine months of 2013-14, but it will be too late to do anything about it, for Kerry’s comprehensive, just and lasting peace will have already entered history.

 

Or maybe Kerry is pushing the peace process simply because he is vain. Neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis believe a deal is possible at present but Kerry can sidestep that rather inconvenient detail because this is not about the Israelis or the Palestinians. Nor is it about the vital interests of the United States, which is hemorrhaging prestige throughout the Middle East while American allies are begging the White House to lead on the issues that truly matter. If Kerry cannot see what the rest of the region looks like at present, it’s because he likes what he sees in the mirror. As secretary of state why shouldn’t he, too, get his peace process just like so many shuttling diplomats before him? Kerry, according to the Daily Beast, has been preparing for the role for years now, with “meetings, late-night talks, personal visits, and phone calls with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and other key leaders in the Middle East.” So what if the curtain’s falling, Kerry’s memorized his lines so the show must go on.

 

The peace process was always as much performance art as it was policy. Regarding the former, it was intended to prove to our Arab allies that Washington is an honest broker that really didn’t favor Israel at their expense. As for the latter, it was meant to show that we are not an honest broker insofar as we back Israel so heavily that the only chance the Arabs have to secure any concessions from Jerusalem must come via Washington. And it is precisely by making a strength out of what the Arabist crowd considers a liability, the strategic relationship with Israel, that the United States distinguished itself as the regional power broker.

 

Nonetheless, within the history of the peace process one can discern a lengthy epic about American officials who, misunderstanding its strategic purpose and performative function, were captured by the siren song of the Arab moderates. Generations of Arab officials, intellectuals and activists have insisted that a solution to the Arab-Palestinian conflict is the key to a total peace sweeping over the rest of the Middle East. General James Mattis, former commander of U.S. Central Command, recently recalled the tune: “I paid a military security price every day as commander of CENTCOM because the Americans were seen biased in support of Israel,” Mattis told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer at the Aspen Security Forum. “And that [constrains] all the moderate Arabs who want to be with us, because they can’t come out publicly and support a people who don’t show respect for the Arab Palestinians.”

 

No doubt Gen. Mattis really did hear from his Arab interlocutors about the importance of the Palestinian issue. Perhaps he even heard it from Jordan’s King Abdullah II who has warned repeatedly over the years, like his father Hussein before him, that the window for peace is closing and we’d better get a deal done now before the Middle East goes up in flames. Astonishingly, in spite of the many decades worth of warnings from the Hashemite monarchs, the Middle East is still here.

 

As it turns out, what’s usually most important is what Arab moderates don’t typically tell American officials and journalists about the Palestinian issue. For instance, were Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, Hamas would rout the PA in a matter of months and leave King Abdullah with an Islamist group on his Western border in the middle of a three-year-long upheaval in the region that has left a trail of Arab rulers—moderate Arab rulers—in its wake. What keeps Abdullah up at night right now is the recurring nightmare of Kerry sinking his million-to-one shot and getting a deal for a failed Palestinian state.

 

Of course the Arab moderates marching through Mattis’s office berated the United States over the Palestinians, but what about the information that truly affects U.S. security? Here’s an admonition that might have been useful: “Sure, General, the conflict with Israel is a problem, but what’s really going to bring the house down on everyone’s head, including America’s, is if this 1,400-year-old Sunni-Shiite war goes hot again, especially if it hits the geographical center of the region, say, in Syria.” With Obama having turned his back on the Middle East, it would be salutary if, in lieu of a peace process, American officials used the time-out to re-evaluate what they have been told about the region and in turn relay to American audiences who, since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, have the common good sense to recognize the key issue is not that Americans won’t force Israelis to make peace with Arabs, but that the Arabs can’t make peace with themselves.

 

The peace process has entered its mannerist phase—it is nothing but a series of empty elegant formalisms. Does Martin Indyk, Kerry’s newly named Special Envoy for Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations, really need to add a sequel to his memoirs of the peace process, Innocent Abroad—Again? This is among the most cynical initiatives in the annals of American diplomacy, for Kerry sought a peace process against the wishes of the White House he serves. As the AP reported last month, “Some U.S. officials have scoffed at the notion that Kerry is getting anywhere [on Mideast peace], though they allow that the White House has given him until roughly September to produce a resumption of negotiations.” In other words, the administration gave Kerry a deadline, and if he couldn’t get it done by then he would have to drop his peace process and move on to something else.

 

Under normal circumstances, if the president of the United States says you have a few months to solve the region’s most famously thorny issue, you’d walk away from the meeting understanding that the president wants you to drop it. The last thing Obama wants is a reprise of the peace process to remind the world that this was one of his first-term failures, and that by repeatedly beating up on Israel he alienated many supporters. Under normal circumstances, the secretary of state would find another venue in which to exercise his diplomatic energies, but not if it’s John Kerry, for the peace process is his destiny.

 

To get the Palestinian Authority to the table, Kerry needed to sweeten the pot and made Israel release 104 prisoners responsible “for the deaths of 55 civilians, 15 soldiers, one female tourist and dozens of Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel.”  As Elliott Abrams writes: “My question is why the United States asks a friend to do what we would not do—release terrorists . . . Israel has at times undertaken huge prisoner releases, for example letting a thousand men out to get back the kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit. But that was their own sovereign decision, taken after long national debate. Here, we are pressing them to release prisoners.”

 

While watching Kerry enjoy his moment in the sun, it’s perhaps useful remembering some of the victims of those crimes, like Adi Moses, whose mother and brother were killed in 1987 when one of the newly liberated prisoners threw a firebomb at the family’s car. Earlier this week, she wrote an article pleading with Israeli authorities, and their American allies, to keep her tormenter in jail.

 

“I was 8 years old when this happened. While my father was rolling me in the sand to extinguish my burning body, I looked in the direction of our car and watched as my mother burned in front of my eyes. . . . With your decision to release the murderer you spit on the graves of my mother and my brother Tal. You erase this story from the pages of the History of the State of Israel. And in return for what?”

The Forgotten Rachels. By Tom Gross.

The Forgotten Rachels. By Tom Gross. Tom Gross: Mideast Media Analysis, October 22, 2005.

Anti-Israel propaganda sells out on the London stage.

Are We Rome Yet? By John Stossel.

Are We Rome Yet? By John Stossel. Real Clear Politics, July 31, 2013.

600 Lashes for Raif Badawi: Saudi Arabia’s Latest Savagery. By David Keyes.

600 Lashes for Raif Badawi: Saudi Arabia’s Latest Savagery. By David Keyes. The Daily Beast, August 1, 2013.

Three Signs Hamas Is Losing Its Grip on Gaza. By Ehud Yaari.

Three Signs Hamas Is Losing Its Grip on Gaza. By Ehud Yaari. The New Republic, July 31, 2013.

Samuel Huntington on Today’s Global Upheaval. By Robert Kaplan.

Samuel Huntington on Today’s Global Upheaval. By Robert Kaplan. Real Clear World, August 1, 2013. Also at Forbes.

Kaplan:

In 1968, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published Political Order in Changing Societies. Forty-five years later, the book remains without question the greatest guide to today’s current events. Forget the libraries of books on globalization, Political Order reigns supreme: arguably the most incisive, albeit impolite, work produced by a political scientist in the 20th century. If you want to understand the Arab Spring, the economic and social transition in China, or much else, ignore newspaper opinion pages and read Huntington.

 

The very first sentences of Political Order have elicited anger from Washington policy elites for decades now — precisely because they are so undeniable. “The most important political distinction among countries,” Huntington writes, “concerns not their form of government but their degree of government.” In other words, strong democracies and strong dictatorships have more in common than strong democracies and weak democracies. Thus, the United States always had more in common with the Soviet Union than with any fragile, tottering democracy in the Third World. This, in turn, is because order usually comes before freedom – for without a reasonable degree of administrative order, freedom can have little value. Huntington quotes the mid-20th century American journalist, Walter Lippmann: “There is no greater necessity for men who live in communities than that they be governed, self-governed if possible, well-governed if they are fortunate, but in any event, governed.”

 

Institutions, therefore, are more important than democracy. Indeed, Huntington, who died in 2008, asserts that America has little to teach a tumultuous world in transition because Americans are compromised by their own “happy history.” Americans assume a “unity of goodness”: that all good things like democracy, economic development, social justice and so on go together. But for many places with different historical experiences based on different geographies and circumstances that isn’t always the case. Americans, he goes on, essentially imported their political institutions from 17th century England, and so the drama throughout American history was usually how to limit government — how to make it less oppressive. But many countries in the developing world are saddled either with few institutions or illegitimate ones at that: so that they have to build an administrative order from scratch. Quite a few of the countries affected by the Arab Spring are in this category. So American advice is more dubious than supposed, because America’s experience is the opposite of the rest of the world.

 

Huntington is rightly obsessed with the need for institutions. For the more complex a society is, the more that institutions are required. The so-called public interest is really the interest in institutions. In modern states, loyalty is to institutions. To wit, Americans voluntarily pay taxes to the Internal Revenue Service and lose respect for those who are exposed as tax cheaters.

 

For without institutions like a judiciary, what and who is there to determine what exactly is right and wrong, and to enforce such distinctions? Societies in the Middle East and China today reflect societies that have reached levels of complexity where their current institutions no longer suffice and must be replaced by different or improved ones. The Arab Spring and the intense political infighting in China are, in truth, institutional crises. The issue is not democracy per se, because weak democracies can spawn ineffective institutional orders. What individual Arabs and Chinese really want is justice. And justice is ultimately the fruit of enlightened administration.

 

How do you know if a society has effective institutions? Huntington writes that one way is to see how good their militaries are. Because societies that have made war well — Sparta, Rome, Great Britain, America — have also been well-governed. For effective war-making requires deep organizations, which, in turn, requires trust and predictability. The ability to fight in large numbers is by itself a sign of civilization. Arab states whose regimes have fallen — Egypt, Libya, Syria — never had very good state armies. But sub-state armies in the Middle East — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mehdi Army in Iraq, the various rebel groups in Syria and militias in Libya — have often fought impressively. Huntington might postulate that this is an indication of new political formations that will eventually replace post-colonial states.

 

Huntington implies that today’s instability — the riotous formation of new institutional orders — is caused by urbanization and enlightenment. As societies become more urbanized, people come into close contact with strangers beyond their family groups, requiring the intense organization of police forces, sewage, street lighting, traffic and so forth. The main drama of the Middle East and China over the past half-century, remember, has been urbanization, which has affected religion, morals and much else. State autocrats have simply been unable to keep up with dynamic social change.

 

Huntington is full of uncomfortable, counterintuitive insights. He writes that large numbers of illiterate people in a democracy such as India’s can actually be stabilizing, since illiterates have relatively few demands; but as literacy increase, voters become more demanding, and their participation in democratic groupings like labor unions goes up, leading to instability. An India of more and more literate voters may experience more unrest.

 

As for corruption, rather than something to be reviled, it can be a sign of modernization, in which new sources of wealth and power are being created even as institutions cannot keep up. Corruption can also be a replacement for revolution. “He who corrupts a system’s police officers is more likely to identify with the system than he who storms the system’s police stations.”

 

In Huntington’s mind, monarchies, rather than reactionary, can often be more dedicated to real reform than modernizing dictatorships. For the monarch has historical legitimacy, even as he feels the need to prove himself through good works; while the secular dictator sees himself as the vanquisher of colonialism, and thus entitled to the spoils of power. Huntington thus helps a little to explain why monarchs such as those in Morocco, Jordan and Oman have been more humane than dictators such as those in Libya, Syria and Iraq.

 

As for military dictatorships, Huntington adds several twists. He writes, “In the world of oligarchy, the soldier is a radical; in the middle-class world he is a participant and arbiter; as the mass society looms on the horizon he becomes the conservative guardian of the existing order. Thus, paradoxically but understandably,” he goes on, “the more backward a society is, the more progressive the role of its military…” And so he explains why Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa underwent a plethora of military coups during the middle decades of the Cold War: The officer corps often represented the most enlightened branch of society at the time. Americans see the military as conservative only because of our own particular stage of development as a mass society.

 

The logic behind much of Huntington’s narrative is that the creation of order — not the mere holding of elections — is progressive. Only once order is established can popular pressure be constructively asserted to make such order less coercive and more institutionally subtle. Precisely because we inhabit an era of immense social change, there will be continual political upheaval, as human populations seek to live under more receptive institutional orders. To better navigate the ensuing crises, American leaders would do well to read Huntington, so as to nuance their often stuffy lectures to foreigners about how to reform.

President Obama: Celebrities Like Kim Kardashian, Kanye West Have Skewed the American Dream. By Nikki Schwab.

President Obama: Celebrities like Kim Kardashian, Kanye West have skewed the American Dream. By Nikki Schwab. Red Alert Politics, July 31, 2013.

Obama says poor relatives keep his kids grounded. By Kevin Liptak. CNN, August 1, 2013.


Schwab:

President Obama made an example of celebrity couple Kim Kardashian and Kanye West when he talked about the American Dream this week.

 

The president, chatting with journalist David Blum for an Amazon Singles Interview, said that folks his age often didn’t feel short changed when growing up, even if they didn’t have much.

 

“The reason was because the American dream involved some pretty basic stuff,” Obama said, ticking off a home, a job, education and healthcare. “But I don’t think people went around saying to themselves, ‘I need to have a 10,000 square-foot house.”

 

But now, the culture has augmented that dream, the president said.

 

“We weren’t exposed to the things we didn’t have in the same way that kids these days are,” he began. “There was not that window into the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Kids weren’t monitoring every day what Kim Kardashian was wearing, or where Kanye West was going on vacation, and thinking that somehow that was the mark of success.”

 

The POTUS sat down with Blum during his visit Tuesday to an Amazon.com fulfillment center in Chattanooga, Tenn., where he talked about the middle class. The interview was released via Amazon Kindle on Wednesday.

 

During the discussion, Obama also noted what job he might have if he hadn’t entered politics.

 

“I enjoy teaching. I taught for 10 years. Not full-time, but part-time at the University of Chicago Law School,” Obama said. “I could picture myself being a good teacher.”

Kerry’s Big-Bang Mideast Diplomacy. By David Ignatius.

Kerry’s Big-Bang Mideast Diplomacy. By David Ignatius. Real Clear Politics, August 1, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

Ignatius:

How can Secretary of State John Kerry succeed in the “mission impossible” of negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement when he faces the same intractable issues that have derailed so many previous peacemaking efforts?

 

Skepticism about Kerry’s project is nearly universal, and it’s understandable when you look at the graveyard of past negotiations. But some interesting dynamics beneath the surface should make observers cautious about premature burial announcements.

 

What Kerry has done, in effect, is get the two sides to grab hold of a stick of dynamite. If they can’t defuse it within nine months through an agreement, it’s going to blow up: The moderate Palestinian government in the West Bank would collapse; militant Palestinians would take statehood to the United Nations, probably this time with broad European support; an angry Arab League would withdraw its peace initiative. It would be a big mess for everyone.

 

Tzipi Livni, the chief Israeli negotiator, recalled at a State Department ceremony Tuesday that when she first talked with Kerry about a new round of peace talks five months ago, he told her that “failure is not an option.” By pushing the two sides into an actual negotiation, Kerry has put some teeth into that bromide. If they fail this time, it will cost the parties dearly, probably Israel most of all. That provides harsh leverage for Washington.

 

Kerry’s second advantage is that he’s ready to be an active broker in this deal rather than a passive listener or mediator. When the two sides reach impasses or get bogged down on side issues, Kerry will seek to break the logjam with U.S. proposals. By putting a nine-month fuse on his dynamite stick, Kerry limits stalling tactics of the sort adopted in the past by both sides.

 

Choosing Martin Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel, as special envoy to the talks is another useful prod. Indyk remains so well-known in Israel that when he visits, people treat him as if he were the permanent U.S. representative. Pity the regular ambassador.

 

Through his work at the Brookings Institution and its Saban Center, Indyk has gathered a copious network of personal contacts across the Middle East. He can request favors and call in chits from around the region. Indyk is a longtime friend, so I can’t pretend to be objective about him. But I think many would agree that because of Indyk’s experience and contacts, it will be hard for either side to game him.

 

The negotiations will also have momentum from a big team of U.S. experts that will be ready to advise both sides on technical issues, such as water and energy. And John Allen, the retired Marine general who was U.S. commander in Afghanistan, will continue to consult with the Israelis about how the United States can help them meet security challenges posed by a Palestinian state.

 

An intriguing option for Kerry is a settlement that leaves unresolved some especially difficult issues, such as the status and division of Jerusalem. Michael Gordon and Isabel Kersh­ner made this point in the New York Times on Tuesday when they noted that a deal wouldn’t necessarily mean “the end of claims by either side.” They could continue to disagree about who controls the al-Aqsa mosque, say, or the Western Wall. But for Israel to get the benefits of a full cessation of the conflict, it would have to resolve the hardest issues.

 

Kerry hasn’t yet gotten Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to endorse the U.S. position on the borders of the Palestinian state, despite strenuous efforts. But Kerry has assured the Palestinians that the United States favors the 1967 lines, plus mutually agreed swaps, a formula that should allow most West Bank settlers to remain within Israel.

 

The borders question is, at bottom, an Israeli political issue. Naftali Bennett, one of Netanyahu’s coalition partners, speaks passionately for the interests of the settlers, who want the issue to go away. But many Israelis agree with the view expressed by Israeli President Shimon Peres, who has said that withdrawal to the 1967 lines, with border swaps, would be acceptable.

 

One way to think about these negotiations is that they’re a kind of benign trap. Once the prey have been lured inside, it’s difficult for them to escape without either accomplishing the great work of peace or damaging themselves. Kerry would surely dispute that analogy. But unless it’s valid — unless failure really isn’t an option here because it would be so damaging — then the naysayers will probably be right.

Conservative Firebrands Want Scalps, Not Hollow Victories. By Tim Carney.

Conservative firebrands want scalps, not hollow victories. By Timothy P. Carney. Washington Examiner, July 30, 2013.

Needed: A Paradigm Shift in the “Middle East Peace Process.” By Shlomo Avineri.

Needed: a paradigm shift in the “Middle East peace process.” By Shlomo Avineri. Fathom, January 30, 2013. Also here.

Avineri:

Almost twenty years after the signing of the Oslo Agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the time has come for a new paradigm if one thinks seriously of moving ahead in addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel’s upcoming election may now further this need for thinking outside the box, as practically all contending parties are still caught in the language of “solving the conflict” that has until now failed to reach its declared goal. For almost two decades all Israeli governments, of the right and left, have tried but failed in this effort.

 

It is easy to personalise the issues: Netanyahu is not interested in moving forward; Bush did very little to further negotiations; Obama misjudged the difficulties; Abbas has failed to create one legitimate political entity, able to speak on behalf of all Palestinians. All this is true, yet does not go far enough to explain the failure – some deeper and more structural issues are involved.

 

No, “everybody” does not know the solution

 

The last time serious negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority took place under the Olmert government no agreement was reached, despite almost two years of continuous meetings by top officials from both sides. When negotiations reached the core issues of the conflict – borders/settlements, Jerusalem, refugees and security – it became clear that the gaps were too wide to overcome. This is significant, as both sides at that time represented the most conceivably moderate positions, and went into negotiations with a sincere commitment to a two-state solution. It was also in the political interests of both sides to reach an agreement. Had an agreement been reached, Olmert would in all probability still be Israel’s Prime Minister, and Mahmoud Abbas would have a trump card in his internal conflict with Hamas.

 

The disagreements preventing a deal were fundamental ones. On Jerusalem, no formula acceptable to both sides could be found, and hazy ideas about some international involvement in the administration of the Old City and the “Holy Basin” could not be translated into concrete arrangements. For the Palestinians, the “Right of Return” of 1948 refugees and their descendants (Ouda) continues to be a major building block of their national narrative. Even if the Palestinians were ready to negotiate numbers, they insisted on the principle, which to Israeli negotiators meant undermining and delegitimising the Jewish nation-state. And for Israel, the government insisted on some presence in the Jordan Valley and a complete demilitarisation of the future Palestinian state, which was rejected by the Palestinians as emasculating its sovereignty and independence. Moreover, no territorial swaps could address the issue of settlements and borders. As the Palestinians insisted on a full return to the 1967 lines, no Israeli government could conceivably evacuate a quarter of a million settlers.

 

These fundamental disagreements have not gone away. Even if negotiations between Israel and the PA are resumed, it is inconceivable that what was not acceptable to Olmert would be acceptable to a future Israeli government under Netanyahu. Or that a PA, emboldened by its support at the UN General Assembly, will be more flexible now than it was four years ago. When one recalls that for all the US pressure on both Israel and the Palestinians, President Obama’s special envoy, Senator George Mitchell, was not able in more than three years to even bring Israel and the PA to the negotiating table, it is unrealistic to imagine that negotiations, even if resumed, would end in something else other than failure. This would further exacerbate enmity and hatred on both sides, as did the failure in 2000 of the Camp David conference convened by President Clinton.

 

It is for these reasons that the reiteration of the conventional mantra about resuming negotiations is an exercise in futility. To maintain, as one sometimes hears in Europe, that “everybody knows” what the ultimate agreement would look like (1967 borders, Jerusalem the capital of two states, etc.) just overlooks the history of the conflict as well as the last twenty years. Since Oslo, which all subsequent peace attempts have been based on, all negotiations have failed. One can blame the Israelis, or the Palestinians or both, but this is immaterial: perhaps the Europeans agree how to solve the conflict, but neither side in the conflict does.

 

A new paradigm

 

If this is the case, what can be done? Perhaps a lesson can be learned from how similar conflicts have been addressed.

 

It is clear that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is both complex and multi-faceted, which is why – in part – a solution remains intractable. For obvious reasons, the territorial aspects have been seen as the major bone of contention between the two parties, but this is only part of the story. The conflict is also between two national movements and two historical narratives; it is about legitimacy and sovereignty; it entails military occupation, settlers and terrorism; it is not a religious conflict as such, but it has religious dimensions, which exacerbate it; and it involves, in one way or another, neighboring countries. Viewed through this prism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is similar to the conflicts in Cyprus, Bosnia, Kosovo and Kashmir. All of them have the same complex ingredients, though the intensity may differ, a divided Nicosia or Mitrovica has less historical and emotional resonance than a divided Jerusalem.

 

None of these conflicts have been resolved or seem likely to be resolved any time soon. The Annan plan for Cyprus, supported by the UN, US, EU, Russia, even Turkey and Greece, fell flat on its face when one player – the Greek Cypriots – rejected it; the Dayton agreements stopped the killings, ethnic cleansings and rapes in Bosnia, but failed to establish the envisaged multi-ethnic, multi-confessional confederate Bosnia-Herzegovina; Kosovo achieved its independence, but because Serbia has not accepted it yet, the conflict has not been resolved; and the dispute over Kashmir is also not close to being solved either.

 

Yet in all these cases, the absence of conflict resolution and the failure to reach a comprehensive, final status agreement has not prevented partial, step-by-step measures aimed at confidence-building and de-escalation. Some of these steps have been unilateral (as in the Turkish decision to open the crossings in Nicosia) or negotiated through a third party (as in the recent cross-border arrangements in Kosovo). To use political science jargon, none of these conflicts have been resolved: their aims are more modest: conflict management, conflict attenuation or conflict de-escalation.

 

At a time when the EU cannot solve Kosovo, it is presumptuous on its part to imagine that it can solve Israel-Palestine. Similarly, at a time when the US cannot make Serbia accept Kosovo’s independence, it is unrealistic to imagine it can push either the Israelis or the Palestinians, supported as they are by all Arab League countries, to make the concessions neither side is willing to make. Playing the blame game does not move the conflict one inch closer to a resolution.

 

What is needed is a paradigm change – a realisation, difficult as it may be, like in Cyprus, Kosovo and Bosnia that at the moment there is no possibility of reaching a final status agreement. So in the case of Israel-Palestine there are numerous ways to diminish the conflict, to achieve partial agreements and to create a less tense atmosphere, which may eventually help in bridging gaps that at the moment appear unbridgeable. There would be numerous steps that could be taken both by Israel and the PA in this direction, but if the international community continues to insist on a final status solution it will continue to undermine the chances of a less ambitious but more realistic approach to the issues involved.

 

There is another lesson to be learned from a previous failed attempt to move towards a final status agreement: when at Camp David in 2000 President Clinton failed to reach an agreement between Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Chairman Yasser Arafat, the consequences on both sides were not only frustration, but a heightened level of enmity, hatred and fear. This is a cautionary tale to all those who advocate another attempt at final status negotiations. They should bear in mind that the outcome of such another failure will not mean a return to square one, but may push both sides closer towards the abyss. Another failed attempt could further widen the gaps and deepen suspicion on both sides – there are penalties, both politically and psychologically, in failure.

Almost twenty years after Oslo, even those like myself who supported the process have to admit that while it was a major step forward – mutual acceptance of each side by the other – it failed to achieve its underlying subtext: an agreed two-state solution. Not realising what was envisaged at Oslo has endangered meaningful progress, and the time has come for the international community to lower its sights and attempt to reach attainable goals, not well-meaning but at the moment utopian ones which attempt to resolve the entire conflict.