The Breakup of the Kingdom of David: Biblical Geopolitics and the Limits of Statism (incomplete draft 1)

By Michael Kaplan

Limestone relief of Pharaoh Shoshenq I (biblical Shishak), Temple of Amun at Karnak, Egypt, listing cities conquered in his invasion of Israel.  Digital Karnak, UCLA.

In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, King Shishak of Egypt came up against Jerusalem; he took away the treasures of the house of the Lord and the treasures of the king’s house; he took everything. He also took away all the shields of gold that Solomon had made; so King Rehoboam made shields of bronze instead, and committed them to the hands of the officers of the guard, who kept the door of the king’s house. As often as the king went into the house of the Lord, the guard carried them and brought them back to the guardroom.

—1 Kings 14: 25-28. New Revised Standard Version


Israel’s King Solomon, whose wealth and wisdom have become the stuff of legend (and in the judgment of some scholars greatly exaggerated), died in 922 BC after a reign according to the Bible of nearly forty years. The king’s death was a moment of grave crisis for the Israelite monarchy created by Solomon’s father King David some 80 years earlier. Through war, diplomacy, treachery, and occasional cruelty, David had succeeded in forging a disparate group of loosely confederated highland tribes, clans, independent villages and Canaanite city-states, under constant threat from their richer and more powerful Philistine neighbors, into a new bureaucratic dynastic state: Israel. David’s Israel, with its new royal capital Jerusalem, was the first independent territorial state under local leadership ever to emerge in the land then called Canaan, later to be called Eretz Yisrael or Palestine.

David, in the judgment of his most recent biographer, “was a successful monarch, but he was a vile human being.” He is the pivotal figure of the Bible and the central political figure in Jewish history: the founding father of the Israelite nation who established Jerusalem as the focus of Jewish, and later Christian, religious faith, achievements which reverberate to the present day. The historical David was a masterful political leader and military strategist. He was also a cunning Near Eastern warlord and despot in the mold of Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad, who was transformed over the course of several centuries into the ideal king of the Judeo-Christian tradition, “a man after God’s own heart,” and the prototype of the Messiah. This process began during Solomon’s reign with the writing of an apology for David’s life and actions, a masterpiece of literature and propaganda later incorporated into the biblical books of Samuel. The Israel reborn in 1948 was the deliberate re-creation of David’s Israel in modern guise. As Joel Baden writes, the founders of the Zionist state “chose the name of David’s unified nation, linking the emergence of Israel in the twentieth century CE with the emergence of Israel in the tenth century BCE. . . . Geographically, politically, and ideologically, the Israel we know today is the embodiment of David’s legacy.”

The idealized David by Michelangelo. Wikipedia.

In 961 BC as David lay dying, his favorite wife Bathsheba, in league with her one time adversary the Prophet Nathan, engineered a palace coup that brought her son Solomon to the throne. Solomon built on David’s achievements, using diplomacy and dynastic marriages with princesses from neighboring states, to create a network of trade and commerce that enriched his kingdom. Yet Solomon’s autocratic rule, his imposition of high taxes and forced labor to support his public works program and opulent royal lifestyle, his favoritism toward his own southern tribe of Judah at the expense of the northern Israelite tribes, led to growing popular resentment. When Solomon’s son and successor Rehoboam went to the northern Israelite cultic center at Shechem (modern Nablus) to be anointed king by an assembly of northern elders, he arrogantly refused their demands that he lighten the state’s burden of taxation and conscription. Rejecting the counsel of his father’s advisors who urged him to compromise with the elders, and goaded on by his hotheaded young retainers, the king told the assembly, “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke; my father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.” (1 Kings 12:14). This was not what the elders hoped to hear. Seeing that they could expect no redress from the king the northern Israelites raised the banner of rebellion:

What share do we have in David?

   We have no inheritance in the son of Jesse.

To your tents, O Israel!

   Look now to your own house, O David.

When King Rehoboam, in a further display of royal arrogance and stupidity, sent Adoniram ben Abda, his minister of forced labor, to whip the rebels into submission, they stoned the hapless official to death. The king barely escaped with his own life by jumping into his chariot and fleeing back to Jerusalem. The northern assembly then chose Jeroboam ben Nebat, a former Solomonic administrator who had launched an unsuccessful rebellion against the old king, as king of a separate northern kingdom which took the name Israel. Rehoboam was left to rule the rump southern kingdom of Judah. The unified Israelite monarchy was never restored.



Khirbet Qeiyafa, a Judahite fortress in the Elah Valley, where the Bible says David slew Goliath. Excavations by Yosef Garfinkel unearthed a multichambered gate and artifacts dating to David’s time in the early 10th Century BC.  Greg Girard/National Geographic.

The breakup of the Israelite kingdom is an object lesson on the excesses of statism (while keeping in mind that 10th-century BC statism was quite different from and far less advanced than its 21st-century AD counterpart). American patriots in 1776 saw in Rehoboam’s abuse of the northern Israelites a paradigm of their own mistreatment at the hands of King George III, while the Israelite rebellion against the Davidic monarchy provided sacred legitimation for the American Revolution. The northern Israelite tribes valued their traditional autonomy and freedom from the burdens of intrusive and overbearing royal government. The richer and more culturally sophisticated northerners also resented having to bend the knee to a dynasty of jumped-up southern hillbillies. David and Solomon may have forcibly unified the tribes and subjected them to the royal establishment in Jerusalem, but they were never able to heal the social and political fissures in the kingdom. Indeed David’s, and especially Solomon’s, policies only widened those fissures by making the northern tribes bear the financial and human burdens of a monarchy that ignored their interests while devoting itself to the power and prosperity of Judah and Jerusalem. Hebrew University archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel concludes from recent excavations that the development of a centralized state was a century more advanced in Judah than among the northern Israelites (a conclusion disputed by other archaeologists). So when pushed to the brink by Rehoboam, the northern Israelites pushed back.

Solomon’s glory through Victorian eyes. The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon, by Sir Edward John Poynter, 1890. Wikimedia.

Israel first emerged as a people over three thousand years ago in the land then known as Canaan, later to be called Israel, Judah, and Palestine. It is the central article of the Jewish faith that God made a covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, promising the land to their descendants, the Children of Israel (benei-yisra’el), who would be as numerous as the stars, with the Bible as the record of Israel’s birthright.

The first reference to Israel outside the Bible – the first anywhere in fact, as it pre-dates the oldest written portions of the Bible by at least 200 years – was in a hieroglyphic inscription on the stele of Egypt’s Pharaoh Merneptah in 1207 BC. Israel is depicted in the stele as a socioethnic entity (a “people” rather than a city-state or territory) living in the central hill country of Canaan, the region now called Samaria. Ironically, the pharaoh claimed to have been the agent of Israel’s destruction: “Israel is laid waste, his seed is not.” Like many later would-be destroyers of Israel, Merneptah, whose father Rameses II was the most likely pharaoh of the Exodus, spoke too soon. (Percy Bysshe Shelly had some choice things to say about Rameses II and the hubris of kings in his poem “Ozymandias.”)

The Merneptah Stele

Civil strife and discord at home often leaves a nation vulnerable to threats from abroad. So it was with the now rival kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Pharaoh Shoshenq I (935-914 BC, the biblical Shishak) the Libyan warlord and usurper who established Egypt’s XXII Dynasty, tried to weaken Solomon’s grip on power by giving refuge to Jeroboam after his failed rebellion.

The Kingdom of Judah, ruled by the descendants of King David, along with the First Temple in Jerusalem, was destroyed by the Babylonians (modern Iraq) in 586 BC, and much of the population sent into exile. Fifty years later a restored Judahite commonwealth was established as a province of the Persian Empire and a Second Temple was built in Jerusalem. From this time forward a diaspora of Jewish communities were established throughout first the Persian, and later the Hellenistic and Roman empires. An independent Judaea under the Hasmonean Dynasty (which is celebrated at Hanukkah) would have a stormy existence for 80 years until falling under Roman rule in 63 BC. In the wake of violent and unsuccessful revolts against Rome in the first and second centuries AD, the Second Temple was destroyed (70 AD), and in 135 AD the Roman Emperor Hadrian changed Judaea’s name to Palestine in honor of Israel’s ancient enemies the Philistines. Palestine remained a province of Rome, which became a Christian empire in the fourth century, until its conquest by the armies of the Caliph Omar in 638 transformed it into an Arab Muslim land.

Meanwhile, the center of Jewish life would shift to the diaspora.






The Party of Andrew Jackson vs. the Party of Obama. By Jonathan Chait.

The Party of Andrew Jackson vs. the Party of Obama. By Jonathan Chait. New York Magazine, July 5, 2015.

Keep Andrew Jackson on the $20. By David Greenberg. Politico, June 14, 2015.

1913: Seeds of Conflict

1913: Seeds of Conflict. A film by Ben Loeterman. Video. PBS, June 30, 2015. YouTube. Also here.

1913: Seeds of Conflict website.





“Seeds of Conflict” could sow confusion. By Lyn Julius. The Times of Israel, June 29, 2015.

Can China Be Contained? By Andrew Browne.

Can China Be Contained? By Andrew Browne. Wall Street Journal, June 12, 2015.

Cold War Without the Fun. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, June 24, 2015.

H. W. Brands: “Liberals Still Don’t Take Reagan Seriously Enough.” Interviewed by Elias Isquith.

“Liberals still don’t take Reagan seriously enough”: New biographer says Reagan was postwar America’s FDR. By Elias Isquith. Salon, June 9, 2015.

Despite his giant influence on U.S. politics, many of us still don't understand the Gipper, H.W. Brands tells Salon.

Isquith and Brands:

For American political junkies — especially those who never liked him in the first place — it’s hard to imagine a figure in living memory whose persona and worldview has been more thoroughly combed-over, scrutinized and disseminated than that of the country’s 40th president, Ronald Wilson Reagan.

The Republican Party rank-and-file, of course, can’t get enough of him. Nary a day goes by during the 2016 campaign (which is happening more than 10 years after Reagan’s death, incidentally) without one or more high-ranking GOP candidates promising to be Ronaldus Magnus for the 21st century. But Democrats often have Reagan on the mind, too — especially the current president. In ways big and small, we seem to still be living in the house Reagan built.

Yet while most of us are familiar with “Ronald Reagan,” the icon and lightning rod, fewer of us quite understand Ronald Reagan, the man. And according to the celebrated historian H.W. Brands, who’s authored a new biography — titled, fittingly, “Reagan: The Life” —  the real Gipper was both more and less than the myth suggests. Recently, Salon spoke with Brands over the phone to discuss Reagan, his presidency and his ultimate legacy. Our conversation is below and has been edited for clarity and length.

Right off the bat, you argue that Reagan is to the second half of 20th century American politics what FDR was to the first half. That’s a strong claim — how do you defend it?

If you look at what happened during the Reagan years, there is a big change in American domestic politics and a big change in American foreign policy. Those are two ways by which presidents and their presidencies are measured.

Reagan began his presidency famously — or notoriously, depending on your point of view — by saying that government is not the solution, but the problem. I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that that is the attitude that has guided American politics pretty much ever since. If you look at the course of American history from the 1980s until now … from the ’30s to the ’60s and ’70s, new government programs came often and easily. You could look at the New Deal in the 1930s and the Great Society in the 1960s. Even Richard Nixon’s administration was liberal by today’s standard.

Since Reagan, new government programs have come rarely and with great difficulty. With Reagan, the conversation in American domestic and political life shifts in a conservative direction.

What about foreign policy?

In foreign policy, Reagan inherited the Cold War and the struggle against totalitarianism that began, really, at Pearl Harbor but continued into the Cold War. By the time Reagan left office, communism was on the verge of dissolution — within a very short time, within two years after Reagan left office, Soviet communism as a guiding principle was a deadletter.

So those areas — changing the conversation in a markedly conservative direction domestically; and essentially leading the United States to the brink of victory in the Cold War — are the two strongest pieces of evidence that Reagan’s presidency was extremely important.

How much was this because of Reagan’s individual talents, and how much was this the product of his being in the right place at the right time?

Any successful leader — especially a political leader in a democracy — is someone who has to suit the times. You can be the most talented person in the world and if the times aren’t appropriate, you’re not going to get anywhere.

I do make the point [in the book] that Reagan was exceedingly fortunate in his timing. If [former Federal Reserve chairman] Paul Volcker had come along later — if the recession that happened in 1981 and early ’82 had happened in 1983 and 1984 — then Reagan would have probably been swept from office in 1984 the way Republican members of Congress were swept from office in 1982.

The timing is very fortunate for Reagan; [upon leaving office], he could claim victory for his economic program. But, in fact, the victory, the improvement in the economy, owed a lot to forces beyond Reagan’s control.

Would you argue the same is true vis-à-vis the Cold War?

Reagan was looking for an interlocutor in the Soviet Union. He wanted somebody to talk to. He reached out to Leonid Brezhnev, but Brezhnev was too old and too set in his ways.

But then comes Mikhail Gorbachev, someone who is of a reform-framed mind, who is willing to look at the Soviet Union differently, and who is therefore willing to look at the United States differently. If not for Gorbachev, Reagan’s desire to lead the world to a situation beyond mutual assured destruction, beyond the shadow of nuclear war, would have been utterly frustrated; and Reagan would not be remember as somebody who led the United States to the brink of American victory in the Cold War.

The timing was everything. Reagan himself — his talents, his background — was probably a necessary condition to the things that happened. But he certainly was not a sufficient condition.

How do you understand Reagan’s relationship with white supremacy and racism? This has been one of the more contested elements of his legacy in recent years.

The first thing I’ll say is that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever — and in fact that there is evidence that would contradict it — that Reagan himself was a racist, or had any tendencies in that direction. Reagan was one who took equality seriously, and no one has ever charged that Reagan was a personal racist.

The fact of the matter was that Reagan was the candidate of a party, and the president of a party, that included a lot of people who had racist ideas. Reagan didn’t believe that it was any obligation of his to call out the racists in his party; he understood that if he could get racists to vote for him, he wasn’t going to reject their votes.

What about his frequent talk of states’ rights? That’s pretty widely seen as coded language intended to appeal to Southern whites who opposed African-American equality.

Reagan was a believer in states’ rights. This was independent of the question of race. Now, it definitely was the case that Southern reactionaries all cast their opposition to the civil rights movement in terms of states’ rights. There were those people who used states’ rights as a code word to go ahead and try to defend those white supremacist policies. But Reagan believed in state’s rights; he could say with a straight face that, generally speaking, policies that are made at the state-level are better than those made at the federal-level.

Reagan was smart enough to understand that there were people who would interpret this in a particular way. He did not feel obliged to disabuse them of that notion. In fact, he would use that notion in order to gain votes and get elected.

Another point of dispute has been whether he was really that involved in his own administration. There was a narrative on the left — then and now, actually — that he was an empty suit and a salesman and had little to do with actual governance. What did you find in that regard?

Reagan was the quintessential “big picture” guy. He had two goals as president and he reiterated them again and again. One was shrink government at home. The other was defeat communism abroad. When issues that crossed his desk dealt with those, then he was right on top of that. When issues diverged from that, he himself got distracted.

Towards the end of the book, I say that Reagan had these two big goals and he accomplished one and one-half of them. The one that he pretty much decisively accomplished was defeating communism, or putting the world to the edge where communism was about to collapse. The half-successful one was shrinking government at home. Because if you subdivide that into reducing taxes and reducing spending, he got the tax reductions, but he didn’t get the spending reductions. Part of this was a strategic decision on his part to go for tax cuts first; do the easy part first and leave the hard part until the second. And part of it was probably an underestimation by Reagan of the difficulty of getting spending cuts.

When you say he struggled on smaller issues, for lack of a better word, what do you have in mind?

He floundered in the Middle East. The Middle East is an area of policy where the details are everything; it’s not insignificant that Jimmy Carter, the quintessential detail man, achieved his greatest diplomatic triumph in the Middle East. Reagan got nothing like that, because Reagan didn’t master the details. He didn’t have the patience.

The biggest example of a failure on Reagan’s part was exactly where he was looking in the other direction: the Iran-Contra affair. Reagan sort of gave guidance, but then he left the folks in the West Wing — especially John Poindexter and Oliver North — to do what they wanted with minimal oversight. The result blew up in his face.

What are some truths about Reagan that you think liberals still don’t see or won’t acknowledge?

I would say liberals still don’t take Reagan seriously enough. They didn’t take him seriously while he was president and they didn’t think that he would accomplish what he wanted to accomplish.

When I started working on this book, I was kind of suspicious of Reagan being a master of policy. But by reading his diary, by reading minutes of top-level meetings — especially in foreign policy — [I saw] Reagan was really engaged. He knew what he was about. When I read the transcripts of Reagan’s several meeting with Gorbachev at Reykjavik in 1986, [I saw] a guy who really knew what he was trying to get at, was fully engaged, and came very close to getting an absolutely historic agreement that would have gotten rid of nuclear weapons between the superpowers.

And what are some truths about Reagan that you think conservatives still don’t see or won’t acknowledge?

What conservatives are uncomfortable acknowledging is that Reagan was a much better politician, and a much more pragmatic figure, than they would like him to be.

One of the reasons that Reagan remains today an icon for all Republicans, from just right-of-center to the most zealous Tea Party activist, is that Reagan’s rhetoric was 100 percent conservative. Reagan essentially gave the same speech from 1964, when he first hit the national scene, to 1989, when he gave what amounted to his farewell address. It was conservative — chapter and verse; and if you want to place Reagan on a pedestal as conservative Republicans do, then all you have to do is quote Reagan’s speeches.

But there was another Reagan; there was the practical Reagan. There was the rhetorical Reagan on the one hand, and the practical Reagan on the other hand. And the practical Reagan was the one who knew that the point of getting elected was to govern, not simply to just keep making speeches; and that you make progress in increments, that you don’t get the whole program at once. Reagan was one who cut deals. For example, Reagan was the tax-cutter, but he agreed to increase taxes on several occasions in the service of a broader, more important compromise.

President Obama Interviewed by Ilana Dayan on Israel Television Channel 2.

U.S. President Obama interviewed by Ilana Dayan on Israeli television; Extract from Uvda, Mako, Ch 2. Video. Haaretz.com, June 3, 2015. YouTube. Also at Real Clear Politics; Arutz Sheva 7; transcript at Vos Iz Neias?




The Middle East Interview: President Obama on ISIS, Iran, and Israel. By Jeffrey Goldberg. The Atlantic, May 21, 2015.

A Critique of Obama’s Understanding of Israel. By Jeffrey Goldberg and Yossi Kuperwaser. The Atlantic, June 1, 2015.

Obama Cares Too Much About Israel. By Eli Lake. Bloomberg View, May 24, 2015.

Obama Still Doesn’t Understand the Palestinians or Iran. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, June 3, 2015.

Obama says peace talks are pointless because Netanyahu won’t see the “best” in others. By Philip Weiss. Mondoweiss, June 3, 2015.

The Plight of the Middle East’s Christians. By Walter Russell Mead.

The Plight of the Middle East’s Christians. By Walter Russell Mead. Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2015. Also at Assyrian International News Agency.

Mead:

Ancient communities in Syria and Iraq are in mortal peril. Can the West find a way to preserve the Christian presence in the Middle East—and stave off a “clash of civilizations”?


The Christian communities of Syria and Iraq have survived 2,000 years of tumult and war. In some of them, prayers are still said in Aramaic, the language that Jesus used in daily life. These communities now tremble on the brink of destruction.

The numbers are stark. Almost 1.5 million Christians lived in Iraq under  Saddam Hussein. Between the U.S.-led invasion that toppled his regime in 2003 and the rise of Islamic State, three-fourths of the country’s Christians are believed to have fled Iraq or died in sectarian conflict. The carnage continues. Of the 300,000 Christians remaining in 2014, some 125,000 have been driven from their homes within the past year, according to a March report on “60 Minutes.”

Almost a third of Syrians were Christian as recently as the 1920s, but only about 10% of the country’s 22 million inhabitants at the onset of the current civil war were members of Christian communities. That long and slow relative decline has accelerated as hundreds of thousands of desperate Christians, along with millions of their Muslim fellow citizens, flee the fanaticism of Islamist rebels and the brutality of Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Violent oppression is nothing new for the Christians of these countries. The Ottoman Empire’s well-known genocidal violence against the Armenians during World War I was accompanied by similarly brutal and widespread mass murders of Assyrian Christians. And in the 1930s, in the ethnic and nationalist turmoil following the fall of the Ottomans, tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians were murdered in riots and massacres.

Where will it end?

The process of murder and “religious cleansing” may well continue until, for all practical purposes, the Christians of these countries simply disappear. Other Christian populations in the Middle East have been almost entirely wiped out or displaced. In 1900, most of Constantinople’s residents were Christian; today, of Istanbul’s population of some 14.4 million people, fewer than 150,000 identify with any faith other than Islam.

The years ahead may bring a similar fate to other Christian communities, consumed by the fires of fanaticism. But the risk is not just regional: The loss of a meaningful Christian presence in the Middle East could further polarize relations between Christians and Muslims around the world—and bring us a step closer to the kind of “clash of civilizations” that no sensible person wishes to see.

The violence of 2015 has deep roots in more than a century of brutal religious and ethnic wars not just in the Middle East but across Central and Eastern Europe as well. For all their obvious differences, the Ottoman, Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires were alike in being multiethnic and multiconfessional states. The collapse of these empires after World War I left vast territories to be divided among competing groups.

The process was neither smooth nor, in most cases, fair. Bitter conflicts—between Serbs and Kosovars, Germans and Poles, Jews and Palestinians, Greeks and Turks, Turks and Armenians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, to name just a few—led to repeated episodes of war and ethnic cleansing, leaving legacies of hatred and fear throughout the region.

Where the four pre-World War I empires once stood, there are now more than 40 states. The transformation satisfied the longing of many groups for national independence and opened the door to democracy in many countries, but for tens of millions of people, it led to unprecedented violence and displacement. Today’s strife in the region—with multi-confessional, multiethnic Syria and Iraq threatening to dissolve into smaller, more homogeneous units—is the latest act in a long, bloody tragedy.

During the many centuries of imperial rule, the peoples of the region became scattered and mixed. But the region was a salad bowl, not a melting pot; groups retained their distinctive customs and beliefs wherever they went, and different ones served different economic roles. Merchants and skilled workers might be German, Jewish, Armenian or any of a half-dozen other ethnic groups. Eastern Orthodox peasants might be ruled by Catholic or Muslim aristocrats. Rabbinical courts heard cases involving only Jews; the various groups of Christian clergy handled such matters among their flocks.

But the old arrangements could not withstand the rise of nationalism and calls for self-determination. When the Balkan peoples struggled to throw off Ottoman rule in the 19th and 20th centuries, they wanted ethnic nation states like the ones they saw in the West, such as Sweden, Denmark and France.

Wars of independence became wars of peoples and wars of religion. Turks massacred Christians, whom they suspected of sympathizing with the rebels, and Christians massacred and drove out Turkish civilians and Muslims on the side of the empire. And of course, from time to time, everyone took a turn persecuting the Jews. From the war for Greek independence that began in 1821 up through the chaotic collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1923, such wars swept through the region, and atrocities became almost routine. Peoples who had lived cheek by jowl from time immemorial participated in unspeakable brutalities against their neighbors.

Wars of identity break out when order breaks down—which is what happened across the region as the Ottoman and Russian empires collapsed. More recently, we have seen the return of such conflicts in Yugoslavia after Tito’s death and in the Caucasus and now Ukraine following the fall of the Soviet Union. In Syria and Iraq, a series of colonial masters and locally grown despots maintained a brutal order from the 1920s through the last decade. But neither the colonizers nor the despots could provide permanent security.

The role of Islamist fanaticism among Sunnis and Shiites in the latest round of violence should not be minimized, but Christians are not now and never have been the only victims of these wars. From vicious massacres in the Balkan wars of independence to the destruction of the Circassians (a predominantly Muslim people of the Caucasus), the mass deaths of Crimean Tatars and the more recent slaughters in Bosnia and Chechnya, Muslim communities have often fallen victim as well. In the spreading sectarian conflict between Shiites and Sunnis, the murdered innocents and penniless refugees fleeing for their lives are usually Muslim.

Still, in the wars of identity raging across the post-Ottoman Middle East, Muslims have more often been the perpetrators and Christians the victims. That is certainly true today in Iraq and Syria, where Christians are for the most part unarmed and much of the killing is being done in the name of radical Islam.

Over the centuries, Middle Eastern Christians have developed many survival strategies. One is to stay invisible. Christians have often survived best in remote areas, and those in more densely populated areas often do their best to avoid antagonizing their neighbors. Many Assyrian Christians fled into the mountainous regions of Syria and Iraq to escape Ottoman persecution during World War I, and the Armenians in the isolated, mountainous hinterlands fared better than their more visible compatriots in Istanbul.

Another survival strategy for Christians has been to find foreign protectors. In the 19th century, the Christian powers in Europe and the U.S. took an increasing interest in the situation of Christian and other minorities in the Ottoman lands. The Orthodox looked to Russia; Catholics in the region looked to France; Britain and the U.S. asserted a right to protect Ottoman Jews as early as the 1840s; and Armenians often looked to the U.S., among others, for help.

This strategy had its successes, but it proved costly. Turks justified the Armenian genocide as a necessary measure against a pro-Russian Armenian rebellion in World War I. Assyrian Christians provided troops for the British against Arab and Kurdish rebellions against British authority in the 1920s; they paid a heavy price when the British withdrew and the retaliations began.

As Christians in the Middle East have learned at great cost, the Western powers and so-called “international community” are weak reeds. They have been (and still are) slow to intervene, and their interventions have usually been halfhearted, short-term and subject to the vagaries of great-power rivalries.

Yet another Christian survival strategy was to support the development of a secular Arab identity in which Christians and Muslims could meet as equal citizens—just as Catholics and Protestants can be German or American citizens. Many of the most influential Arab nationalists (including many radical Palestinians) were of Christian origin.

People such as Michel Aflaq and Antun Sa’adeh of Syria and  George Habash of Palestine made significant contributions to Arab nationalist thought, and the era of secular Arab nationalism allowed many Christians to play more prominent roles in the region. Anti-Zionism also became one of the ways that the Christians of the Middle East could demonstrate their Arab bona fides. To this day, intense support for the Palestinian cause is common in Arab Christian communities.

Unfortunately for Christian hopes, secular Arab nationalism lost its allure. The titans of the nationalist era too often became ineffective despots presiding over failed states. As the intellectual pendulum of the Arab world has swung back toward Islamist ideas about politics, Christians have found themselves ever more marginalized.

For Christians, a final survival strategy was to cling to strong rulers. In Syria, Iraq and Egypt, they attached themselves to rulers such as Hafez al-Assad, Saddam and  Hosni Mubarak (and now Abdel Fattah Al Sisi). Such alliances had their uses for both parties. Christians achieved a measure of protection and stability; they were repressed no worse than anybody else, and a handful achieved wealth and political power.

For the despots, Christian allies served many of the purposes that Jews once did for kings in the Middle Ages. They were seen as loyal because they had no other place to turn—and as useful both for their services and because you could blame them when things went wrong (and, if necessary, throw them to the wolves). They could also be counted on as intermediaries who could present the regime’s case to outside powers. It was not for nothing that Saddam Hussein named  Tariq Aziz (a Chaldean Catholic baptized as Mikhail Yuhanna) as his foreign minister.

The deal between Middle Eastern despots and their Christian communities also served to conceal other divisions. In Iraq and Syria, the nominally secular Baathist regimes of Saddam and Assad were, in fact, governments that allowed a religious minority (Sunnis in Iraq, Alawites in Syria) to dominate the country’s majority. However much Christians may have disliked the cruelty of these rulers, they themselves were minorities, and they often preferred minority dictators over the risks of potentially hostile majority-run regimes.

The problem with this strategy is that dictators fall, and when they do, their supporters often face retaliation. The overthrow of Saddam and the raging challenge to Bashar al-Assad have left Iraqi and Syrian Christians without the protection they hoped for, exposing them to the vengeance of populations that blame them for supporting a hated oppressor.

Moreover, the continuing association in many Muslims’ minds between local Christians and the hated imperialists of the West makes local Christians attractive targets: You can always find one to kick if you can’t strike out directly at Israel or the U.S. “When America does a drone strike,” a 25-year-old Pakistani Christian student told Fox News, “they [Muslim mobs] come and blame us. They think we belong to America. It’s a simple mentality.”

The failure of traditional Christian survival strategies has occurred just as the regional order is beginning to collapse. Iran’s challenge to the balance of power has exacerbated sectarian tensions throughout the Middle East, sparking factional conflict and polarization in Syria and Iraq. While the Obama administration tries to withdraw from the region and tilt toward Iran, the kind of insecurity that has historically inflamed communal tensions in the Middle East— and led to genocidal violence—extends its reach every day.

Traditional strategies of accommodation will no longer serve. Christians face stark choices. They can “fort up,” creating defensible and well-armed enclaves that their enemies cannot conquer. They can flee, as millions have already done. Or they can wait to be massacred.

In the modern Middle East, the minorities that have survived, and in some cases thrived, have acquired a military capacity. The Jews, the Kurds, the Armenians, the Maronites and the Druse have not all created states, but they have all built redoubts. The Maronites (Lebanese Christians in communion with the Roman Catholic Church) and the Druse (a monotheistic religion distinct from both Christianity and Islam) both entrenched themselves in the mountains of Lebanon and built militias that have allowed them to survive recurring bouts of civil war.

Other communities have chosen the path of flight. Almost all the Jews of the Arab world now live in Israel. More Armenians and Circassians live outside their ancestral homelands than in them. Many Assyrian and Chaldean Christians already live in the West, and Copts and other Christians have been escaping in a steady flow.

The conscience of the West has been slow to wake to the peril of the dwindling minorities of the Middle East (including non-Christians such as the Yazidis, as well as the persecuted Baha’i of Iran and the Ahmadis of Pakistan), but Islamic State is changing that. In the wake of its atrocities, Pope Francis and, in the U.S., church leaders like New York’s Cardinal  Timothy Dolan are speaking up.

This is a very good thing, but advocates for the Christians and other endangered Middle East minorities must think hard about the available options. We must choose from among three courses of action.

We can help the region’s minorities “fort up,” as the Israelis, Kurds and Maronites have done. We can help them to escape and work with friends and allies around the world to help them find new homes and start new lives. Or we can do what history suggests, alas, as our most probable course: We can wring our hands and weep piously as the ancient Christian communities in Syria and Iraq are murdered, raped and starved into oblivion, one by one.

Camille Paglia: The Reason Interview

Everything’s Awesome and Camille Paglia is Unhappy! By Nick Gillespie and Todd Krainin. Reason, March 19, 2015. YouTube.

Russia Against Napoleon, 1807-1814. By Dominic Lieven.

The Tsar Liberates Europe? Russia against Napoleon, 1807-1814. By Dominic Lieven. Video. London School of Economics and Political Science, October 8, 2009. YouTube.

Jihad vs. Crusade. By Bernard Lewis.

Jihad vs. Crusade. By Bernard Lewis. Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2001.

Let’s Face ISIS Reality And Drop The Sophomoric Armchair Theologizing. By Mollie Hemingway. The Federalist, February 5, 2015.

Lewis:

President Bush’s use of the term “crusade” in calling for a powerful joint effort against terrorism was unfortunate, but excusable. In Western usage, this word has long since lost its original meaning of “a war for the cross,” and many are probably unaware that this is the derivation of the name. At present, “crusade” almost always means simply a vigorous campaign for a good cause. This cause may be political or military, though this is rare; more commonly, it is social, moral or environmental. In modern Western usage it is rarely if ever religious.

Yet “crusade” still touches a raw nerve in the Middle East, where the Crusades are seen and presented as early medieval precursors of European imperialism – aggressive, expansionist and predatory. I have no wish to defend or excuse the often atrocious behavior of the crusaders, both in their countries of origin and in the countries they invaded, but the imperialist parallel is highly misleading. The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad – a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.

At the time of the Crusades, when the Holy Land and some adjoining regions in Syria were conquered and for a while ruled by invaders from Europe, there seems to have been little awareness among Muslims of the nature of the movement that had brought the Europeans to the region. The crusaders established principalities in the Levant, which soon fitted into the pattern of Levantine regional politics. Even the crusader capture of Jerusalem aroused little attention at the time, and appeals for help to various Muslim capitals brought no response.

The real counter-crusade began when the crusaders – very foolishly – began to harry and attack the Muslim holy lands, namely the Hijaz in Arabia, containing the holy cities of Mecca and Medina where Mohammed was born, carried out his mission, and died. In the vast Arabic historiography of the Crusades period, there is frequent reference to these invaders, who are always called “Franks” or “infidels.” The words “Crusade” and “crusader” simply do not occur.

They begin to occur with increasing frequency in the 19th century, among modernized Arabic writers, as they became aware of Western historiography in Western languages. By now they are in common use. It is surely significant that Osama bin Laden, in his declaration of jihad against the United States, refers to the Americans as “crusaders” and lists their presence in Arabia as their first and primary offense. Their second offense is their use of Arabia as a base for their attack on Iraq. The issue of Jerusalem and support for “the petty state of the Jews” come third.

The literal meaning of the Arabic word “jihad” is striving, and its common use derives from the Koranic phrase "striving in the path of God." Some Muslims, particularly in modern times, have interpreted the duty of jihad in a spiritual and moral sense. The more common interpretation, and that of the overwhelming majority of the classical jurists and commentators, presents jihad as armed struggle for Islam against infidels and apostates. Unlike “crusade,” it has retained its religious and military connotation into modern times.

Being a religious obligation, jihad is elaborately regulated in sharia law, which discusses in minute detail such matters as the opening, conduct, interruption and cessation of hostilities, the treatment of prisoners and non-combatants, the use of weapons, etc. In an offensive war, jihad is a collective obligation of the entire community, and may therefore be discharged by volunteers and professionals. In a defensive war, it is an individual obligation of every able-bodied Muslim.

In his declaration of 1998, Osama bin Laden specifically invokes this rule: “For more than seven years the United States is occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia, plundering its riches, overwhelming its rulers, humiliating its people, threatening its neighbors, and using its bases in the peninsula as a spearhead to fight against the neighboring Islamic peoples.” In view of this, “to kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who can, in any country where this is possible, until the Aqsa mosque and the Haram mosque are freed from their grip, and until their armies, shattered and broken-winged, depart from all the lands of Islam, incapable of threatening any Muslim.”

Mohammed himself led the first jihad, in the wars of the Muslims against the pagans in Arabia. The jihad continued under his successors, with a series of wars that brought the Middle East, including the Holy Land, under Arab Muslim rule and then continued eastward into Asia, westward into Africa, and three times into Europe – the Moors in Spain, the Tatars in Russia, the Turks in the Balkans. The Crusade was part of the European counterattack. The Christian re-conquest succeeded in Spain, Russia and eventually the Balkans; it failed to recover the Holy Land of Christendom.

In Islamic usage the term martyrdom is normally interpreted to mean death in a jihad, and the reward is eternal bliss, described in some detail in early religious texts. Suicide is another matter.

Classical Islam in all its different forms and versions has never permitted suicide. This is seen as a mortal sin, and brings eternal punishment in the form of the unending repetition of the act by which the suicide killed himself. The classical jurists, in discussing the laws of war, distinguish clearly between a soldier who faces certain death at the hands of the enemy, and one who kills himself by his own hand. The first goes to heaven, the other to hell. In recent years, some jurists and scholars have blurred this distinction, and promised the joys of paradise to the suicide bomber. Others retain the more traditional view that suicide in any form is totally forbidden.

Similarly, the laws of jihad categorically preclude wanton and indiscriminate slaughter. The warriors in the holy war are urged not to harm non-combatants, women and children, “unless they attack you first.” Even such questions as missile and chemical warfare are addressed, the first in relation to mangonels and catapults, the other to the use of poison-tipped arrows and poisoning enemy water supplies. Here the jurists differ – some permit, some restrict, some forbid these forms of warfare. A point on which they insist is the need for a clear declaration of war before beginning hostilities, and for proper warning before resuming hostilities after a truce.

What the classical jurists of Islam never remotely considered is the kind of unprovoked, unannounced mass slaughter of uninvolved civil populations that we saw in New York two weeks ago. For this there is no precedent and no authority in Islam. Indeed it is difficult to find precedents even in the rich annals of human wickedness.

RIP, “Emerging Democratic Majority.” By Walter Russell Mead.

RIP, “Emerging Democratic Majority.” By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, February 2, 2015.

The Emerging Republican Advantage. By John B. Judis. The National Journal, January 31, 2015.

Doomed by the South: Why the emerging Democratic majority may never happen. By Michael Lind. Salon, February 17, 2015.

Putin’s Orthodox Conservatives vs. Russia’s Unorthodox Liberals. By Eugene Bai.

Putin’s Orthodox conservatives vs. Russia’s unorthodox liberals. By Eugene Bai. Russia Direct, January 20, 2015.

There Is No Diplomatic Solution to the Arab-Israeli Conflict. By Yoel Meltzer.

There is no diplomatic solution. By Yoel Meltzer. Ynet News, January 25, 2015.

How Did Politics Get So Personal? By Thomas B. Edsall.

How Did Politics Get So Personal? By Thomas B. Edsall. New York Times, January 28, 2015.

Why the Iran Speech to Congress is Netanyahu’s Biggest Blunder Yet. By Peter Beinart.

Why the Iran speech to Congress is Netanyahu’s biggest blunder yet. By Peter Beinart. Haaretz, January 28, 2015.

Beinart:

By blatantly dissing Obama, Bibi is endangering his support among the “Jacksonians” who support Israel the most.

How big a blunder did Benjamin Netanyahu commit by arranging to slam Barack Obama’s Iran policy in a speech to Congress without informing the White House first? Listen to the recent exchange between Fox News anchors Chris Wallace and Shepard Smith. Iran “is an existential threat,” declared Wallace. “Whatever Netanyahu wants to think and say about that is fine. But for him to come here to ignore the president, to not even let him know he was coming, and to sneak in to come talk before Congress with the president’s opponents to criticize the president’s policy, that’s a different thing.” Smith was even harsher: “It just seems like they think we don’t pay any attention and we’re just a bunch of complete morons, the United States citizens, like we wouldn’t pick up on what’s happening here.”

To hear Netanyahu criticized so bluntly on Fox, the conservative bastion where Israel is usually above reproach, is remarkable. Even more intriguing is the nature of that criticism. Wallace and Smith aren’t angry at Bibi for being hawkish; Wallace flatly agrees that Iran represents an “existential threat.” They’re angry at him for being insolent. For decades now, Netanyahu has alienated American progressives. With this incident, he’s alienated some American “Jacksonians” too.

In his landmark 1999 book, Special Providence, Walter Russell Mead divides American foreign policy into four traditions: Jeffersonian, Wilsonian, Hamiltonian and Jacksonian. Jeffersonians see overseas empires as a threat to domestic liberty (think Ron Paul), and thus suspect Israel of dragging the United States into wars that drain our treasury and sap our freedom. Wilsonians champion global human rights (think Samantha Power), and while some in this school champion Israel as a bastion of democracy, others condemn it for mistreating Palestinians. Hamiltonians want to make the world safe for American commerce (think Brent Scowcroft), and some in this camp resent Israel for undermining America’s relations with the oil producers of the Middle East. It is the fourth group, Jacksonians, whom Mead argues anchor Israel’s public support.

They anchor it because Jacksonians are Manicheans: They draw sharp distinctions between the civilized West and its barbaric foes. And they see Israel – because it is a democracy, because many of its people hail from Europe and because it is Jewish (many Jacksonians believe Jewish control of the Holy Land is part of God’s plan) – as the West’s outpost in hostile, Islamic terrain. Jacksonians don’t question Israel’s ruthless response to terrorism because they don’t question America’s ruthless response to terrorism. In Mead’s words, they “strongly believe that as long as Palestinians engage in terrorism, Israel has an unlimited and absolute right of self defense… If the terrorists shield themselves behind civilians, that only shows how evil they are – and is an extra reason why you have both the right and the duty to eliminate them no matter what it takes.”

Given America’s ongoing battle with jihadist terror, and the anti-Muslim feeling it has spawned on the Fox News-watching right, Jacksonians are unlikely to criticize Israel on moral grounds anytime soon. But they might criticize it on nationalist grounds. While Jeffersonians focus on defending domestic liberty, Wilsonians focus on supporting liberty overseas and Hamiltonians emphasize free trade, Jacksonians care most about national honor. They may not particularly like president Obama, but they still don’t want to see him disrespected by a foreign power.

The danger for Netanyahu is that Jacksonians come to see him less as America’s ally against a common foe and more like the guy playing us for fools. Ordinary Jacksonians may not know that after his first meeting with Netanyahu, Bill Clinton remarked, “Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?” They may not know that in a private meeting with settlers in 2001, Netanyahu said, “America is a thing you can move very easily.”

They may not even remember the way Bibi lectured Obama at a White House press conference in 2011 after the president proposed peace talks based on the 1967 lines plus land swaps.

But with this latest incident, the reputation for arrogance and duplicity that Netanyahu has long enjoyed among American elites is seeping out to the public at large. It’s not just Fox’s Shepard Smith who last week objected to Netanyahu treating Americans like “we’re just a bunch of complete morons.” HBO’s Bill Maher, who, while liberal on most issues, has won conservative acclaim in recent months for his critiques of Islam, said after news of Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, “We’re getting very close on the Iran issue to allowing Israel to write American policy.” It’s noteworthy that Jim Webb, the former Marine, Reagan administration official and long-shot 2016 presidential candidate who has written at length about Jacksonian culture, was during his time in the senate one of AIPAC’s biggest foes on Iran.

Are most Jacksonians about to turn on Israel? Not likely. But among some, the “Israel as insolent” narrative now competes with the narrative of Israel as the West’s outpost in the Middle East. To avoid fueling it, Bibi is going to have show president Obama a bit more respect. And when you see Obama as Neville Chamberlain and yourself as Winston Churchill, that’s not an easy thing to do.

Killing Ragheads for Jesus. By Chris Hedges.

Killing Ragheads for Jesus. By Chris Hedges. Truthdig, January 25, 2015.