A Yellow Light for Government. By Michael Gerson.

A Yellow Light for Government. By Michael Gerson. Real Clear Politics, January 7, 2014. Also at the Washington Post.

Gerson:

One of the main problems with an unremittingly hostile view of government — held by many associated with the tea party, libertarianism and “constitutionalism” — is that it obscures and undermines the social contributions of a truly conservative vision of government.

 

Politics requires a guiding principle of public action. For popular liberalism, it is often the rule of good intentions: If it sounds good, do it. Social problems can be solved by compassionate, efficient regulation and bureaucratic management — which is seldom efficient and invites unintended consequences in complex, unmanageable systems (say, the one-sixth of the U.S. economy devoted to health care). The signal light for government intervention is stuck on green.

 

For libertarians and their ideological relatives, the guiding principle is the maximization of individual liberty. It is a theory of government consisting mainly of limits and boundaries. The light is almost always red.

 

Conservatism (as Peter Wehner and I explain in our recent National Affairs essay, “A Conservative Vision of Government”) offers a different principle of public action — though one a bit more difficult to explain than “go” or “stop.” In the traditional conservative view, individual liberty is ennobled and ordered within social institutions — families, religious communities, neighborhoods, voluntary associations, local governments and nations. The success of individuals is tied to the health of these institutions, which prepare people for the responsible exercise of freedom and the duties of citizenship.

 

This is a limiting principle: Higher levels of government should show deference to private associations and local institutions. But this is also a guide to appropriate governmental action — needed when local and private institutions are enervated or insufficient in scale to achieve the public good.

 

So conservatism is a governing vision that allows for a yellow light: careful, measured public interventions to encourage the health of civil society. There are no simple rules here. Some communities — disproportionately affected by family breakdown, community chaos or damaging economic trends — will need more active help. But government should, as the first resort, set the table for private action and private institutions — creating a context in which civil society can flourish.

 

This goal has moral and cultural implications. Government has a necessary (if limited) role in reinforcing the social norms and expectations that make the work of civic institutions both possible and easier. Some forms of liberty — say, the freedom to destroy oneself with hard drugs or to exploit other men and women in the sex trade — not only degrade human nature but also damage and undermine families and communities and ultimately deprive the nation of competent, self-governing citizens. (The principle applies, more mildly, to softer drugs. By what governing theory did the citizens of Colorado — surveying the challenges of global economic competition, educational mediocrity and unhealthy lifestyles — decide that the answer is the proliferation of stoners?)

 

But conservatives also need to take seriously the economic implications of this governing vision. Just as citizens must be prepared for the exercise of liberty, individuals must be given the skills and values — human capital — that will allow them to succeed in a free economy.

 

This is the essence of equal opportunity. But it is not a natural social condition. And many conservatives have failed to recognize the extent to which this defining American promise has been hollowed out.

 

Economic mobility has stalled for many poorer Americans, resulting in persistent, intergenerational inequality. This problem is more complex than an income gap. It involves wide disparities in parental time and investment, in community involvement and in academic accomplishment. These are traceable to a number of factors that defy easy ideological categorization, including the collapse of working-class families and the flight of decent blue-collar jobs.

 

Where are the creative conservative policy ideas to strengthen civil society and private enterprise in places where the playing field of equal opportunity is scandalously tilted? Such a project is not unprecedented. In the 1990s, a cadre of conservative reformers achieved success against three seemingly intractable problems: welfare dependency, drug use and violent crime.

 

This history highlights the current conservative divide. Many in the tea party and libertarian wings, if left to their own devices, would say almost nothing about these matters. Yet a number of Republican governors and members of Congress — see recent efforts by Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Rep. Paul Ryan (Wis.) — promise a more constructive spirit of governance.

 

The appeal of conservatism as a governing vision now depends on the transformation of this nascent effort into a movement that is strong enough to redefine a party.

Two States for Two Peoples? When Pigs Fly. By Moshe Arens.

Two states for two peoples? When pigs fly. By Moshe Arens. Haaretz, January 7, 2014. Also here.

Arens:

John Kerry has arrived in the area once again and in his pocket is a framework agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority which he expects Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas to sign off on, sooner rather than later. It presumably addresses the “core issues”: the borders of the Palestinian state-to-be, its capital, the Palestinian refugees, the territorial “swaps,” security arrangements, and Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. In other words, the whole lot – everything that has made an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority a mission impossible until now, but which according to the U.S. secretary of state will now turn it into mission possible.

 

But the bottom line, the be-all and end-all of the suggested agreement, is that once implemented there will be three Palestinian states without a single Jew in any of them: East Palestine (Jordan), West Palestine (Judea and Samaria), and South Palestine (the Gaza Strip). The exclusion of Jews from these territories is, of course, not one of the principles listed in the framework agreement, but it is the basis without which, as things stand at the moment, that agreement falls apart. Call it “two states for two people” until you’re blue in the face and pigs can fly. But it’s four states for two people – three without Jews and one whose population is 20-percent Arab.

 

A precondition for this arrangement, though not explicitly stated in the proposed framework agreement, is that all of the area, down to the last square kilometer, conquered by the Jordanian army in its invasion of Palestine in 1948, must be turned over to the West Palestinian state. If towns or settlements with a sizable Jewish population located beyond the 1949 armistice lines – i.e., the so-called settlement blocs – are to be included in the State of Israel, they must be “swapped” for unpopulated areas that are currently part of the state, which will be turned over as compensation to West Palestine. Thus, the latter will contain no Jews but will cover the exact number of square kilometers as did the area under Jordanian occupation until 1967. Why the Jordanian attempt to destroy the State of Israel in 1948 should become the basis for Palestinian territorial claims is an issue Kerry prefers not to address; he simply expects Israel to swallow it.

 

Kerry may not be aware of the fact that the territory of all three Palestinian states, together with that of today’s Israel, was intended to constitute the territory of the Jewish state, in accordance with the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, bestowed upon Britain after World War I. One of the provisions there was that Jewish settlement on the land was to be encouraged by the Mandatory power.

 

It was Winston Churchill, as Britain’s colonial secretary, who arbitrarily decided to turn over the area east of the Jordan to Abdullah, the son of Hussein, the sharif of Mecca, and to close it to Jewish immigration and settlement. This is now the Kingdom of Jordan, whose population is 70-percent Palestinian; today Jordanian law calls for the death penalty to be handed down to anyone selling land to a Jew. The Jewish settlements that were established in Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip during the days of the British Mandate in Palestine were destroyed by the Egyptian and Jordanian armies during the May 15, 1948 invasion, and their inhabitants were killed or deported.

 

Kerry’s framework agreement in effect implies that Judea and Samaria – before becoming a third Palestinian state – be cleared of all Jews. This position is hardly consistent with the principles of democratic rule, and is not likely to be supported by most people in the democratic world. Whether Israel can subscribe to such a principle is a decision the Israeli government will have to take – unless Mahmoud Abbas surprises us all and declares that he would welcome Jews in the Palestinian state he wishes to establish.

Two Types of Negotiators: Warriors and Shopkeepers. By Guy Bechor.

Two Types of Negotiators: Warriors and Shopkeepers (or Jordan is part of the solution). By Guy Bechor. Ynet News, January 3, 2014.

The West Fails to Understand the Nature of the Muslim Brotherhood. By Zvi Mazel.

The Muslim Brotherhood: Wolf not even in sheep’s clothing. By Zvi Mazel. Jerusalem Post, January 4, 2013.

Jesus of Palestine? By Clifford D. May.

Jesus of Palestine? By Clifford D. May. National Review Online, January 2, 2013. Also at Israel Hayom.

Fallujah, al-Qaeda, and American Sacrifice. By Tom Rogan.

Fallujah, al-Qaeda, and American Sacrifice. By Tom Rogan. National Review Online, January 7, 2014.

Many Iraqis are alive today because of the Americans who died in Fallujah.

Israel Was a Mistake. By Richard Cohen.

Hunker Down With History. By Richard Cohen. Washington Post, July 18, 2006. Also here.

. . . No, It’s Survival. By Richard Cohen. Washington Post, July 25, 2006. Also here.

Was Israel a Mistake? By Andrew Sullivan. The Atlantic, June 9, 2010.

A history lesson. Israel Matzav, July 18, 2006.

A geography lesson. Israel Matzav, July 25, 2006.

Andrew Sullivan: “Israel was a mistake.” Israel Matzav, June 10, 2010.


Cohen [Hunker Down]:

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.

This is why the Israeli-Arab war, now transformed into the Israeli-Muslim war (Iran is not an Arab state), persists and widens. It is why the conflict mutates and festers. It is why Israel is now fighting an organization, Hezbollah, that did not exist 30 years ago and why Hezbollah is being supported by a nation, Iran, that was once a tacit ally of Israel’s. The underlying, subterranean hatred of the Jewish state in the Islamic world just keeps bubbling to the surface. The leaders of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and some other Arab countries may condemn Hezbollah, but I doubt the proverbial man in their street shares that view.

There is no point in condemning Hezbollah. Zealots are not amenable to reason. And there’s not much point, either, in condemning Hamas. It is a fetid, anti-Semitic outfit whose organizing principle is hatred of Israel. There is, though, a point in cautioning Israel to exercise restraint – not for the sake of its enemies but for itself. Whatever happens, Israel must not use its military might to win back what it has already chosen to lose: the buffer zone in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip itself.

Hard-line critics of Ariel Sharon, the now-comatose Israeli leader who initiated the pullout from Gaza, always said this would happen: Gaza would become a terrorist haven. They said that the moderate Palestinian Authority would not be able to control the militants and that Gaza would be used to fire rockets into Israel and to launch terrorist raids. This is precisely what has happened.

It is also true, as some critics warned, that Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon was seen by its enemies – and claimed by Hezbollah – as a defeat for the mighty Jewish state. Hezbollah took credit for this, as well it should. Its persistent attacks bled Israel. In the end, Israel got out and the United Nations promised it a secure border. The Lebanese army would see to that. (And the check is in the mail.)

All that the critics warned has come true. But worse than what is happening now would be a retaking of those territories. That would put Israel smack back to where it was, subjugating a restless, angry population and having the world look on as it committed the inevitable sins of an occupying power. The smart choice is to pull back to defensible – but hardly impervious – borders. That includes getting out of most of the West Bank – and waiting (and hoping) that history will get distracted and move on to something else. This will take some time, and in the meantime terrorism and rocket attacks will continue.

In his forthcoming book, The War of the World, the admirably readable British historian Niall Ferguson devotes considerable space to the horrific history of the Jews in 19th- and 20th-century Europe. Never mind the Holocaust. In 1905 there were pogroms in 660 different places in Russia, and more than 800 Jews were killed – all this in a period of less than two weeks. This was the reality of life for many of Europe’s Jews.

Little wonder so many of them emigrated to the United States, Canada, Argentina or South Africa. Little wonder others embraced the dream of Zionism and went to Palestine, first a colony of Turkey and later of Britain. They were in effect running for their lives. Most of those who remained – 97.5 percent of Poland’s Jews, for instance – were murdered in the Holocaust.

Another gifted British historian, Tony Judt, wraps up his recent book Postwar with an epilogue on how the sine qua non of the modern civilized state is recognition of the Holocaust. Much of the Islamic world, notably Iran under its Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stands outside that circle, refusing to make even a little space for the Jews of Europe and, later, those from the Islamic world. They see Israel not as a mistake but as a crime. Until they change their view, the longest war of the 20th century will persist deep into the 21st. It is best for Israel to hunker down.

Cohen [No, It’s Survival]:

If by chance you have the search engine LexisNexis and you punch in the words “Israel” and “disproportionate,” you run the risk of blowing up your computer or darkening your entire neighborhood. Just limiting the search to newspapers and magazines of the past week will turn up “more than 1,000 documents.”  Israel may or may not be the land of milk and honey, but it certainly seems to be the land of disproportionate military response – and a good thing, too.

The list of those who have accused Israel of not being in harmony with its enemies is long and, alas, distinguished. It includes, of course, the United Nations and its secretary general, Kofi Annan. It also includes a whole bunch of European newspapers whose editorial pages call for Israel to respond, it seems, with only one missile for every one tossed its way. Such neat proportion is a recipe for doom.

The dire consequences of proportionality are so clear that it makes you wonder if it is a fig leaf for anti-Israel sentiment in general. Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness. For Israel, a small country within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from any enemy’s back yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is suicide. The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to reestablish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights.

Israel has been in dire need of such deterrence ever since it pulled out of Lebanon in 2000 and, just recently, the Gaza Strip. In Lebanon, it effectively got into a proportional hit-and-respond cycle with Hezbollah. It cost Israel 901 dead and Hezbollah an announced 1,375, too close to parity to make a lasting difference. Whatever the figures, it does not change the fact that Israeli conscripts or reservists do not think death and martyrdom are the same thing. No virgins await Jews in heaven.

Gaza, too, was a retreat. There are many ways to mask it but no way to change the reality. The government of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon concluded that Israel was incapable of controlling a densely populated area full of people who hated the occupation. Israel will in due course reach the same conclusion when it comes to the West Bank, although the present war has almost certainly set back that timetable. The fact remains that for Israel to survive, it must withdraw to boundaries that are easily defensible and hard to breach.

It’s clear now that those boundaries – a wall, a fence, a whatever – are immaterial when it comes to missiles. Hezbollah, with the aid of Iran and Syria, has shown that it is no longer necessary to send a dazed suicide bomber over the border – all that is needed is the requisite amount of thrust and a warhead. That being the case, it’s either stupid or mean for anyone to call for proportionality. The only way to ensure that babies don’t die in their cribs and old people in the streets is to make the Lebanese or the Palestinians understand that if they, no matter how reluctantly, host those rockets, they will pay a very, very steep price.

Readers of my recent column on the Middle East can accuse me of many things, but not a lack of realism. I know Israel’s imperfections, but I also exalt and admire its achievements. Lacking religious conviction, I fear for its future and note the ominous spread of European-style anti- Semitism throughout the Muslim world – and its boomerang return to Europe as a mindless form of anti-Zionism.

Israel is, as I have often said, unfortunately located, gentrifying a pretty bad neighborhood. But the world is full of dislocated peoples, and we ourselves live in a country where the Indians were pushed out of the way so that – oh, what irony! – the owners of slaves could spread liberty and democracy from sea to shining sea. As for Europe, who today cries for the Greeks of Anatolia or the Germans of Bohemia?

These calls for proportionality rankle. They fall on my ears not as genteel expressions of fairness, some ditsy Marquess of Queensberry idea of war, but as ugly sentiments pregnant with antipathy toward the only democratic state in the Middle East. After the Holocaust, after 1,000 years of mayhem and murder, the only proportionality that counts is zero for zero. If Israel’s enemies want that, they can have it in a moment.

Who’s to Blame? In Media, Palestinians Avoid Responsibility. By Barry Rubin.

Who’s to Blame? In Media, Palestinians Avoid Responsibility. By Barry Rubin. PJ Media, January 2, 2014. Also at the Jerusalem Post.

Why Is There Really No Palestinian State?: The 1-State Solution. By Barry Rubin. PJ Media, January 3, 2014.


Rubin [Who’s to Blame?]:

The presentation of the Palestinian Authority’s arguments is pitiful. Take, for example, the December 25, 2013, New York Times op-ed by Ali Jarbawi, “The Coming Intifada.”

These days, life appears to be going along as normal for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Appearances can be deceptive, however. Prior to the 1987 intifada, too, things appeared to be normal – until they exploded, much to everyone’s surprise. But no one should be surprised if a new intifada erupts in the next few months. Many experts, even those within the Israeli security apparatus, like the former Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, are predicting it.

Note that this is supposed to be the victimization argument. Thus, even if Palestinians refused the UN Partition Plan (1947) as well as Camp David (2000) and don’t even pay their electric bills, they are nonetheless eternal victims; their problem does not have anything to do with their actions.

 

Actually, ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan did not predict an intifada. He said it was possible that an intifada could occur. In fact, the Mossad report said that it was quite possible that an intifada would not occur. Dagan was thus misquoted, and an intifada is not definite.

 

“We Palestinians are living through the worst situation in years. And, despite surface appearances of normal, mundane, routine everyday life under occupation, four significant factors have begun to interact that may disrupt the seemingly stable status quo,” wrote Jarbawi.

 

Indeed, it is certain that the conditions of the Palestinians have not improved over time – despite having received billions of dollars in aid, much of which was stolen or wasted.

 

And if they truly are in the worst situation in 50 years, who is to blame? The situation of the Palestinians is due to decisions made by Palestinian rulers, negotiators and terrorists.

The first, and most potent [factor], is the collapse of any hope that the occupation will ever end and Palestinians will attain their freedom and independence. This hope had allowed Palestinians to endure the daily injustices of occupation in the expectation of a better future. It is this same hope that led them to support negotiations with Israel and the idea of a two-state solution.

Again, this is an extremely selective view of the situation over the past half-century. For example, “The Palestinians’ strategic mistake was to think that conceding 78 percent of the land of historical Palestine in 1993 would be enough.” Note the subtlety here, as the author is in fact hinting that the Palestinians should have demanded a one-state solution.

 

The peace negotiations (1993-2000) were based on the premise that there would be a two-state solution. “It didn’t occur to them that Israel wanted to split this remaining land with them, leaving them with – in the best of cases – a state of leftovers. And the price that is being demanded for this state is so exorbitant that the Palestinian Authority cannot sell it, nor can the Palestinians accept it.”

 

In fact, the “exorbitant” price for the Palestinians consisted of the recognition of a Jewish state in exchange for the recognition of an Arab state, the cessation of terrorist attacks on Israel, and other similar conditions. Yet in the previous month alone there were at least five murderous attacks on Israelis, a bomb on a bus within Israel, a border attack against Israel from Gaza, and the – especially creative – effort of a member of the PA security forces who had requested to be treated for an eye injury in Israel, intending to use that humanitarian gesture as an opportunity to commit a terror attack on an Israeli hospital.

 

Every day, there are verbal attacks on Israel as well. In other words, Israel is only offered peace as a propaganda measure.

 

“The promised Palestinian state will be nothing but a shadow entity completely ruled by Israel,” Jarbawi continues. Remember that if the Gaza Strip is being included in the 22% allegedly offered to Palestinians, Gaza is not controlled by the PA . Therefore the PA has no authority to be negotiating about Gaza and Hamas is not ready to accept Israel under any conditions.

 

Meanwhile, another op-ed, “Israel’s Jim Crow Treatment of Palestinians Continues” by Ahmed Tibi in The Hill – a publication that is widely read by Congressional staff – claims that in the negotiations on a two-state solution Israel is subjecting Palestinians to “‘Jim Crow’ treatment.” In other words, Tibi’s claim is that the problem is not a conflict between two national groups, but rather a systematic racist one, in which Palestinians are always the victim.

 

Note that since 1994, Palestinians have had self-government and have voted to determine who would rule in the West Bank and Gaza. After two decades of Palestinian selfrule, including its own armed forces and economy, and after having received billions of dollars in aid, Tibi is arguing that the Palestinians should never be held responsible for ruling themselves.

 

In a recent poll, two-thirds of Jewish Israelis agreed that they would hear the Palestinian narrative in school. Can you imagine the opposite? Of course not. Some years ago, I actually lectured at a Palestinian university and apparently my affiliation was omitted from the syllabus.

 

Despite 50 years of cross-border terrorist attacks against Israel, missiles fired against Israel, attempts of boycotts against Israel, and failure to pay Israel for providing electricity to the Palestinian territories, The New York Times article claims, “The Authority’s financial insolvency is creating more problems for Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, especially the young.” If a PA government that has existed for two decades wants a situation in which stability is impossible, how can the virtual state of war be blamed on Israelis? Note that when Israel withdrew from the Gaza settlements in 2005, the equipment that was left behind was either stolen or broken by Palestinians. And who started the rocket wars? For 50 years, Palestinian attacks and victims have been bragged about.

 

The basic construction of the argument is this: We fought and attacked Israelis and yet throughout the years, only the Israelis were responsible for our suffering. How can the PA make peace with Israel? How credible can it be? After two decades of self-rule, Palestinian public figures can say that Israelis don’t want peace and that Jews subject Palestinian to Jim Crow treatment, yet Israelis and Jews say nothing of the kind and yet are condemned as horrible oppressors and racists.

Another Failed Revolution Against Capitalism. By Andres Oppenheimer.

Mexico’s Indian rebels — isolated and poorer. By Andres Oppenheimer. Miami Herald, January 6, 2014.

Recognize Israel to Achieve Peace. By Steve Huntley.

Recognize Israel to achieve peace. By Steve Huntley. Chicago Sun-Times, January 6, 2014.

Huntley:

The Palestinians, no doubt with the support of their Arab allies, are refusing in peace negotiations to recognize Israel as the Jewish state. Hmm. They never seem to have an issue with the Jewish nature of Israel when denouncing it. The term “Zionist entity” comes to mind.

 

During the current round of American-sponsored peace talks, Secretary of State John Kerry, to his credit, has pressed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to recognize Israel as the Jewish homeland. In an interview with a London-based Arabic newspaper, the chief Palestinian negotiator revealed that Abbas had written President Barack Obama declaring that “we will not be able to accept Israel as a Jewish state.”

 

In an interview last year with a Jordanian newspaper reported by a Hezbollah news service, Abbas referred to Israel as “the Zionist entity.” It certainly wasn’t the first time Abbas or other Palestinian leaders had used the word Zionist, an expression of Jewish nationalism. His ambassador to Egypt repeated the term in a lecture a few months ago in which he also called Israel “the real and clear enemy.”

 

The phrase “Zionist entity” is a staple of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim media and propaganda. And this is when they are being, by their standards, diplomatic. Most Palestinian propaganda is abhorrent. For example, on the November anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death, a Palestinian TV children’s program had a young girl saying, “The Jews poisoned him and I hate them very much.” Out of the mouths of babes comes lying Palestinian sewage.

 

Nor do Palestinians have any trouble acknowledging the Jewish heart of Israel in their terrorism. Rockets are aimed at Jewish towns like Sderot. You don’t hear about Hamas and other terrorist groups picking Arab villages in Israel as targets for their crude missiles.

 

The murderers and thugs who waged Arafat’s terror war during the last decade against Israeli civilians, including women, children and the elderly, made sure their victims were Jewish. They exploded a bomb at a disco frequented by Jewish teenagers. No known hangout for Arab Israeli youth was attacked. A Jewish religious feast, not a Muslim one, was the occasion for one notable bloodbath. Bombs were detonated on buses on routes carrying Jewish commuters.

 

No, it’s only when it comes to making peace that Abbas and the Palestinians have a problem admitting that Israel is the Jewish state. The reason is simple: Abbas hasn’t given up the Arab dream of wiping “the Zionist entity” off the map.

 

In his letter to Obama, Abbas repeats the Palestinian demand for a “right of return” to Israel of Palestinians who left the country during the 1948 war and of their descendants. That would be a deluge of millions of Palestinians that would indeed mean Israel would not be a Jewish state. This demographic bomb would be Abbas’ way of waging war by other means.

 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will end only when the Arab and Muslim world truly wants it to end and recognizes the permanence of the Jewish homeland.

Rolling Stone’s Anti-Capitalist Message. By Jesse A. Myerson.

Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For. By Jesse A. Myerson. Rolling Stone, January 3, 2014.

Jesse A. Myerson Twitter.

Jesse Myerson throws down: five ideas that (may?) represent the left wing of the possible. By Kathleen Geier. Washington Monthly, January 4, 2014.

Jesse Myerson, Occupy “Leader” Turned Far-Left Rolling Stone “Journalist,” Explains It All. By Tom Blumer. NewsBusters, January 4, 2014.

Sorry, Rolling Stone, Millennials Won’t Fall For Those Reforms. By Maura Pennington. Forbes, January 5, 2014.

A millennial’s Rolling Stone rant offers up some tired old “solutions.” By Jonah Goldberg. Los Angeles Times, January 7, 2014. Also at National Review Online.

In defense of Rolling Stone Millennial writer Jesse Myerson. By Emmett Rensin. Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2014.

Rolling Stone article on economic reforms sparks debate. Video. By Ben Shapiro with Megyn Kelly. The Kelly File. Fox News, January 6, 2014. YouTube. YouTube.




Is it Communism if conservatives support it? Interview with Jesse Myerson. Video. All In with Chris Hayes. MSNBC, January 7, 2014.

Rolling Stone Writer Who Backs “Full Communism” Defends Piece on MSNBC. By Noah Rothman. Mediaite, January 8, 2014.

Rolling Stone columnist pushing socialist reforms defends piece on MSNBC. By Melissa Quinn. Red Alert Politics, January 8, 2014.

Winds of Change Still Blowing Through Groves of Academe. By Walter Russell Mead.

Winds of Change Still Blowing Through Groves of Academe. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, January 3, 2014.

Yes, Academia, Winter Is Still Coming. By Walter Russell Mead and staff. The American Interest, January 6, 2014.

Can’t Get Tenure? Then Get a Real Job. By Megan McArdle. Bloomberg, January 3, 2014.

The MOOC Fraud. By Jakub Grygiel. The American Interest, December 19, 2013. From the January/February 2014 issue.

Are Virtual Labs the Next Step for MOOCs. By Walter Russell Mead and staff. The American Interest, January 6, 2014.

Winter Is Coming, and Humanities Profs Can’t Wish It Away. By Walter Russell Mead and Staff. The American Interest, January 14, 2014.

Another Reason Not to Get a Ph.D. By Walter Russell Mead and Staff. The American Interest, January 17, 2014.

A New Course: Converting a Passion for History into a Private Sector Career. By Joshua Wolff. AHA Perspectives on History, January 2014.

Misplaced Priorities in Academia: A Tale of Two Pictures. By Jonathan Marks. Commentary, January 19, 2014.

Ariel Sharon: A Man of His Times. By Alan Dershowitz.

Ariel Sharon: A man of his times. By Alan Dershowitz. New York Daily News, January 5, 2014.

Where Is the Palestinian Ben-Gurion? By Efraim Karsh.

Where is the Palestinian Ben-Gurion? By Efraim Karsh. Jerusalem Post, September 15, 2011.

Karsh:

Sixty-four years after partitioning Palestine into two independent states – one Jewish, the other Arab – the UN General Assembly is set again to vote on the same issue. While this time around Palestinian leaders appear to be preaching compromise, closer scrutiny reveals this to be a tactical rather than a strategic change of heart, stemming from the different circumstances of the two votes and aimed at disguising their lingering unwillingness (or perhaps inability) to live with a two-state solution.

 

In 1947, prior to the first UN General Assembly vote, Palestinian leaders rejected any form of Jewish self-determination in Palestine. Hajj Amin Husseini, their most prominent leader from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, upheld that “there is no place in Palestine for two races.” All areas conquered by the Arabs during the 1948 war were cleansed of Jews.

 

These days the Palestinians can hardly ask the UN to dismantle one of its longest standing member states and to expel its citizens.

 

Yet by seeking international recognition of their statehood and pressure for a complete Israeli withdrawal without a peace agreement, or, indeed, any quid pro quo, they are continuing their predecessors’ rejection of a negotiated settlement and laying the diplomatic groundwork for the renewal of the assault on the Jewish state.

 

The PLO’s hallowed National Covenant envisages the permanent departure of most Jews from Israel. PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s phased strategy of June 1974, which was never disowned, stipulates that any territory gained through diplomacy would merely be a springboard for the “complete liberation of Palestine.” At the negotiating table during the Oslo years, the PLO’s most adamant demand was for the subversion of Israel’s demographic composition by forcing it to accept the so-called “right of return” and allow refugees of the 1948 war, and their descendants, to return to territory that is now part of the state of Israel. At the moment Jews presently constitute about 80 percent of Israel’s seven million- strong population; by 2020, nearly one in four Israelis will be Arab, owing to this sector’s far higher birth rate. Were millions of Palestinians to be resettled within Israel, it would soon cease to be a majority Jewish state and everybody knows it.

 

To present the “right of return” as a nonnegotiable demand is not to negotiate at all, particularly when Palestinian leaders themselves refuse to accept alien minorities as part of a peace settlement: In June, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas told the Arab League that the future Palestinian state should be free of Israelis (that is Jews, since virtually no other Israelis live in the West Bank). He reiterated this vision of a Judenrein Palestine last month, telling a delegation of visiting members of Congress that “I am seeking a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with Jerusalem as its capital, empty of settlements.”

 

Like Husseini, Arafat was far more interested in destroying the Jewish national cause than in leading his own people to statehood. As far back as 1978, he told his close friend and collaborator, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, that the Palestinians lacked the traditions, unity and discipline to have a successful state. He was right. It was the Palestinians’ lack of communal solidarity – the willingness to subordinate personal interest to the collective good – that accounted for their collapse and dispersion during the 1948 war. The subsequent physical separation of the various parts of the Palestinian Diaspora and longstanding cleavages between West Bankers and Gazans prevented the crystallization of a cohesive national identity.

 

Sadly, Arafat had no intention of redressing this predicament. Given control of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza as part of the Oslo process, he made his bleak prognosis a self-fulfilling prophecy, establishing an oppressive and corrupt regime in the worst tradition of Arab dictatorships, while launching the most destructive confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians since the 1948 war.

 

In the process, he destroyed the fragile civil society and relatively productive economy that had developed in the interim.

 

Two years ago, in a bold departure from this destructive path, PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad embarked on the first state building effort in Palestinian history, one that has had some successes. However, while he recently pronounced his initiative a mission accomplished amid the diplomatic buildup to the UN vote, he knows better. Abbas’s presidency, and by extension Fayyad’s own premiership, remain unconstitutional. Not only because Abbas defied Hamas’s landslide victory in the January 2006 parliamentary elections by establishing an alternative government headed by Fayyad, but also because his own presidency expired in January 2009.

 

Fayyad barely challenged the corrupt and dysfunctional system established by Arafat.

 

The two groups dominating Palestinian life, the PLO and Hamas, remain armed groups (and active practitioners of terrorism) rather than political parties – an assured recipe for a failed state. (The Oslo Accords charged the PA with dismantling all armed groups in the West Bank and Gaza, but Arafat never bothered to comply.) Even if Abbas were to genuinely commit himself to reform after the attainment of statehood, his tenuous authority would continue to be defied by Hamas, which has not only transformed the Gaza Strip into a an Islamist micro-state but also wields considerable power and influence in the West Bank.

 

Whatever the UN vote may achieve, it will not be a step toward Palestinian statehood.

 

Contrary to the received wisdom, Israel was established not by a UN General Assembly resolution but through the unwavering determination of the Zionist leadership, or rather David Ben-Gurion, shortly to become Israel’s first prime minister, in the face of mounting international skepticism regarding partition (in March 1948 the US administration effectively backed down from the idea) and doubts about the new state’s ability to fend off both Palestinian violence and a pan-Arab attempt to abort it at birth.

 

In doing so, Ben-Gurion could rely on an extraordinarily resilient and vibrant national community, armed with an unwavering sense of purpose and an extensive network of political, social and economic institutions built over decades of pre-state national development.

 

In this respect, eighteen years after being given the chance to establish their own state free of Israel’s occupation, and despite the billions of dollars in international aid poured into this effort, the Palestinians have barely made it out of the gate. One can only hope that the international community will at long last pressure Palestinian leaders to own up to their obligations and opt for a true build-up of civil society that will ensure their constituents a decent and peaceful existence, rather than seek illusionary shortcuts and intensified conflict with Israel.

The Catastrophe Called Nakba. By Sam Sokol.

The Catastrophe Called Nakba. By Sam Sokol. Middle East Forum, May 10, 2012. Also at Secular Zionist. Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Sokol:

“All of the world knows what happened here in 1948,’ Daoud Abu Lebdeh says, while leaning against a table in a coffee shop on the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus.

 

“The Israeli soldiers or the Israeli militias like the Hagana, Kahane, the Irgun and Lehi came here and they [kicked] the people outside from their homes.”

 

Daoud is a nondescript man of 24 from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Joz. A correspondent and blogger with the Palestinian website the Middle East Post, Daoud has come highly recommended as an expert on the Nakba, the “catastrophe” of the birth of the State of Israel, and concurrently, the start of the Palestinian refugee problem, by Fatah Youth activist and Jerusalemite Mousa Abassi.

 

Except for the historical inaccuracy of placing the radical Jewish nationalist movement of Kahanism in the 1940s, several decades too early, Daoud’s statement echoes the standard Palestinian narrative of the Nakba, a topic which comes up every year as Arabs within Israel, the Palestinian Authority and around the world commemorate the what they see as the tragedy of Israel’s establishment on May 14, 1948.

 

Elaborating on the Palestinian narrative regarding what they have termed “ethnic cleansing,” Daoud explains that “the English books, the American history books, it’s all the same. There is nothing to change. The whole world knows what happened here.”

 

“[The Jews] came here and established their own state [and] until today they have prevented us [from] establishing our state near to their state.”

 

The Palestinian narrative is very clear. According to Daoud and the Arab version of events, the Zionist movement began bringing in Jews to Palestine, then a peaceful backwater of the Ottoman Empire in which a distinct Palestinian culture had developed over centuries.

 

Having convinced the British to back their nationalist goals at the expense of the local Palestinians, the Jews began to bring in illegal immigrants and eventually drove the Palestinians out of their homes in an orgy of violence and massacre.

 

The Jews, explains Daoud, have no claim to any part of Palestine.

 

Asked why his predecessors did not accept the 1947 United Nations partition plan, unlike the Zionist movement which endorsed it wholeheartedly, and instead chose to go to war, the Palestinian journalist grabs my iPhone off of the table.

 

“I have taken your phone,” he says. “What do you do?” The partition resolution, he claims, was like someone stealing a smartphone and then asking to split it. He asserts that the Zionist movement had no claim to any part of the land and that asking the Arabs to accept that they did was a trampling of their rights.

 

According to Daoud, the ancient Jewish presence in Israel, preceding the arrival of Arabs and Islam to the country by thousands of years, does not have any bearing on the current political reality.

 

Asked why, he counters that the Jewish presence in this land is similar to that of the Muslim Moors who conquered Spain.

 

“Just as I can’t, in the name of Islam, go to Spain to occupy it and [expel] the Spanish because [in the past we were there],” he says, “it’s the same thing that you [Israel] are doing now. It’s not my problem that [King] David was here and Muhammad was there.”

 

The Palestinian focus on the Nakba, and on the return to homes lost in the fighting and subsequent Arab mass flight from Israel in 1948, has intensified over the past few years, he asserts. Despite an emphasis on the Nakba, and Israel’s illegitimacy, in the PA’s educational curriculum since the early 1990s, Daoud is sure that his people have grown more attached to the Nakba narrative because they are disillusioned by the failure to achieve a two-state solution.

 

However, despite the popularity and wide currency enjoyed by the Palestinian version of events, not everybody subscribes to the Nakba narrative.

 

Efraim Karsh, an expatriate Israeli, historian and Arabist, is the editor of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Quarterly, published by Dr. Daniel Pipes’s think tank the Middle East Forum, and, speaking with the Post by Skype from his home in the city of brotherly love, affirms his contention that the popular version of events is based on erroneous sources.

 

Karsh, who recently published Palestine Betrayed, a history of the Nakba, explains that it is precisely the widespread acceptance of Palestinian historiography that has stood in the way of implementing a two-state solution and accounts for, in his view, Palestinian intransigence.

 

An accurate history of the conflict, he opens, should be independent of political ideology. He believes history has no relation to political ideology. He himself, he continues, is an advocate of the two-state paradigm, despite his absolute rejection of the Palestinian narrative.

 

One of Karsh’s main contentions in his book is the responsibility of the Palestinian and outside Arab leadership for the events of 1948.

 

“In 1947, prior to the first UN General Assembly vote, Palestinian leaders rejected any form of Jewish self-determination in Palestine. Hajj Amin Husseini, their most prominent leader from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, upheld that ‘there is no place in Palestine for two races.’ All areas conquered by the Arabs during the 1948 war were cleansed of Jews,” he wrote in this newspaper last year.

 

Delving through Arab, Israeli and British archives, Karsh in Palestine Betrayed paints a portrait of a divided and not at all cohesive Palestinian-Arab society that, as he put it “all but disintegrated, with 300,000-340,000 of its members fleeing their homes to other parts of Palestine and to the neighboring Arab states.”

 

Writing that “nowhere at the time was the collapse and dispersion of Palestinian Arab society al-Nakba, ‘the catastrophe,’ as it would come to be known in Palestinian and Arab discourse – described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by Jews,” Karsh went on to quote contemporary Palestinian Arab leader Musa Alami, who stated that “If ultimately the Palestinians evacuated their country, it was not out of cowardice, but because they had lost all confidence in the existing system of defense.”

 

Even more damning, in Karsh’s eyes, is a statement by Sir John Troutbeck, the head of the British Middle East Office in Cairo, regarding a 1949 fact-finding mission to the Gaza Strip.

 

“‘We know who our enemies are,’ they [the Arab refugees] will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes.”

 

Referring to these and similar statements, Karsh tells the Post that “the beginning of my book basically tells it all. In 1948-1949 no one among the Palestinians spoke about the Jews as responsible for their plight. It came only later, ex post facto, that they started explaining why they ran away. If you look, there are quotes of refugees in Gaza in 1949 telling the British ‘look, our leaders, the Arabs, they pushed us out but not the Jews’ so I cannot think that you need much more than this [to understand the situation].”

 

In the Fifties, Karsh says, the narrative began to change, with the plight of the Palestinian refugees being used as a tool in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

 

“In the Fifties you see the discredited Arab leaders like the Mufti and others begin an attempt to basically absolve themselves or rehabilitate themselves in their constituents,” he says.

 

This alternative narrative, combined with statements by Daoud regarding repeated Israeli rejections of Palestinian peace offers which Karsh rejects as untrue, paint a picture, he says, of a people unwilling to face reality.

 

The current Palestinian historiography is “a combination of ignorance and reluctance to reconcile themselves to reality [and] the result is very dispiriting for the future for peace,” he continues.

 

Certainly, the PA’s continuing demand for the “right of return” would be looked upon differently by a world that believed the Palestinian exodus to be the fault of the Arab states and local communal leaders.

 

In fact, Karsh continues, while there has been, even after the Roman exile, a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel for millennia, the very concept of Palestinian nationalism is a 20th-century creation.

 

Among his sources, Karsh quotes former Arab nationalist, Knesset member and alleged Hezbollah spy Azmi Bishara, who once made an appearance on Israeli television to announce that he doesn’t “think there is a Palestinian nation at all. I think there is an Arab nation.

 

“I always thought so and I did not change my mind. I do not think there is a Palestinian nation, I think its a colonialist invention – Palestinian nation. When were there any Palestinians? Where did it come from? I think there is an Arab nation. I never turned to be a Palestinian nationalist, despite my decisive struggle against the occupation. I think that until the end of the 19th century, Palestine was the south of Greater Syria.”

 

Of course, Daoud is having none of this. He says that while he is ready to accept a two-state solution, there really is no legitimate Jewish sovereignty in Palestine and that the entire conflict is the fault of Zionist territorial hunger and ethnic cleansing. Karsh’s opinion, he believes, is the historical revision, not the current Nakba narrative.

 

“The Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis. What we don’t know is why we the Palestinians must pay the price for that.”

2014: Finally, the Liberal Moment? By George Packer.

A Year to Test Liberalism’s Fighting Faith. By George Packer. The New Yorker, January 3, 2014.

Packer:

Is 2014, finally, the liberal moment?

 

With the financial crisis and Barack Obama’s ascent to the Presidency, 2008 struck many observers—including this one—as reminiscent of the watershed election year 1932. Even Obama’s personal moderation recalled the careful, budget-balancing F.D.R. of that campaign. It was national calamity and need that would push President Roosevelt in a more radical direction, and it seemed that similar events—bank failures, mass unemployment, epidemic foreclosures, despair—would drive President Obama the same way, toward equally far-reaching policies.

 

It didn’t happen like that, and for many reasons: this time around, the onset of an incipient depression nearly coincided with the arrival of the new Administration, and the hard times never ran quite deep enough to unite the country; the new President showed his inexperience, governed more cautiously than he had campaigned, and lost the rhetorical power that had connected him to the voters; his opponents, far from beaten, grew more extreme than ever; key institutions like Congress, the media, and corporations were no longer responsive to the demands of democracy; the public had lost its trust. And so we’ve had five years of far-from-unmitigated letdown.

 

The new year began with the inauguration of Bill de Blasio. In his first address as this city’s new Mayor, he aligned himself with New Yorkers from that earlier era: Roosevelt himself; Al Smith, the reform-minded machine pol, who fought for improved working conditions in sweatshops and later turned against the New Deal; Frances Perkins, the social worker who became Roosevelt’s labor secretary and implemented the forty-hour week and the minimum wage; and Fiorello La Guardia, de Blasio’s favorite predecessor in the mayor’s office, a Republican who, according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “played the broker between New York radicalism and the progressivism of inner America.”

 

Along with Elizabeth Warren, de Blasio is the most visible face and potent voice of a new political spirit. For the first time in decades, liberalism is once again becoming “a fighting faith” (Whitman’s phrase, revived by Schlesinger). This spirit has almost nothing to do with the perpetual battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, or the Center for American Progress against the Third Way, or Clinton vs. Warren in 2016. It is the political articulation of a wide and deep sense of outrage and disenchantment, which is why it has legs. It has to do with a sense that the deck is stacked in favor of the few, that ordinary people’s aspirations hardly stand a chance.

 

Americans are loath to feel that way, which is why the moment has been such a long time coming. It took form through the crises of 2008, the muddled legislative battles of 2009-10, the Occupy memes and protests of 2011, the electoral campaigns around the country for a higher minimum wage, and the emergence of inequality as the focal point of profound economic discontents. Obama gave a speech about it in Osawatomie, Kansas, in the wake of Occupy, and last year he pushed it toward the center of his second Inaugural Address, and last month, speaking in a poor Washington neighborhood, he gave it his fullest consideration to date, calling inequality “the defining challenge of our time” and pledging to devote his second term to confronting it.

 

But breakthroughs rarely happen in second terms, not even in Roosevelt’s, certainly not in today’s Washington. Obama’s contribution to fighting inequality and enlarging opportunity is already law, a historic one—the Affordable Care Act. Therein lies his Presidency’s claim to greatness, and its pathos: not just the political bloodshed, the flawed rollout, and the uncertain implementation but also the sense—which Obama perhaps shares—that he should have achieved even more. If there’s a new liberal moment, President Obama may have missed it.

 

Anyone who’s disgusted with the politics and economics of inequality should wish Bill de Blasio well. He made it his theme and rode it to an overwhelming victory, in the process surprising opinionmakers who live on the winning side of the divide with the news that large numbers of other New Yorkers feel left out and discarded. It’s unclear how much the Mayor of New York can do about entrenched economic unfairness, beyond bringing to bear the power of rhetoric. It’s also unclear whether de Blasio is the mayor to do it. New York’s mayors are managers more than policymakers—that’s where they succeed or fail. It’s risky for de Blasio’s tenure to symbolize so much when his power to realize the vision is so limited. I admire him for aiming so high, but it’s like watching a man set out on a tightrope strung between skyscrapers.

 

De Blasio’s speech at City Hall was a ringing affirmation of his own cause; as such, it placed an immense magnifying glass over his mayoralty, one that also projects a target. The inaugural ceremonies were an unusually ideological and harsh indictment of the Bloomberg years and Bloomberg’s New York. A minister described the city as a “plantation.” Letitia James, the new public advocate, portrayed New York as a heartless place with a “Dickensian” justice system, where the only person who cares about the homeless and hungry is, apparently, Letitia James. De Blasio, though more tempered, cast his “progressive” vision starkly against the “far-right” policies of recent years—fair, accurate, but divisive. You don’t have to be a member of the one per cent to feel uneasy with the us-against-them tone of the proceedings.

 

De Blasio won in a landslide, but his mandate won’t extend beyond the first severely botched snow removal, the first transit disaster, the first spike in violent crime. New York is a city with many power centers, all of them more or less booby-trapped. De Blasio, with more than just garbage pickup riding on his term, is going to need all the help he can get.

What the Pope Meant to Say. By William McGurn.

What the Pope meant to say. By William McGurn. New York Post, January 3, 2014.