Women in Syrian Kurdish Militia Prefer Death to Surrender.

Women in Syrian Kurdish Militia: We’d Rather Kill Ourselves than Surrender. MEMRI TV, Video Clip No. 3971, August 5, 2013. YouTube. Transcript.

Free Syrian Army Chief of Staff Salim Idris: Israel Is an Enemy Country.

Free Syrian Army Chief of Staff Salim Idris: Israel Is an Enemy Country; With Proper Weapons, We Can Topple Al-Assad within 40 Days. MEMRI TV, Video Clip No. 3835, May 8, 2013. Transcript.

U.S.-Backed Syrian Rebel Commander: “Israel Is An Enemy Country”; Assad and Hizballah “Israeli Collaborators.” By Terrence P. Jeffrey. CNSNews.com, September 5, 2013.

A New Era in the Middle East. By Barry Rubin.

A New Era in the Middle East. By Barry Rubin. Jerusalem Post, September 9, 2013.

The New American Dream: It’s Not What You Think. By Adam Levin.

The New American Dream: It’s Not What You Think. By Adam Levin. ABC News, September 8, 2013.

Obama’s Successful Foreign Policy Failure. By Norman Podhoretz.

Obama’s Successful Foreign Policy Failure. By Norman Podhoretz. Wall Street Journal, September 8, 2013.

Syrian Slapstick. By Conrad Black. National Post, September 7, 2013. Also at the New York Sun.

Obama on Syria: Incoherent Incompetence – or the Decline of America by Design? By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, September 9, 2013.

Intermarriage: Can Anything Be Done? By Jack Wertheimer.

Intermarriage: Can Anything Be Done? By Jack Wertheimer. Mosaic, September 2013.

Reverse Course on Intermarriage? By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, September 3, 2013.

Peace on Paper Is Not Peace on the Ground. By Yan Barakat.

Peace on paper is not peace on the ground. By Yan Barakat. Jerusalem Post, September 2, 2013.

So Who Still Thinks Israel Is the Root of Middle East Problems? By Dominic Lawson.

So who still thinks Israel is the root of Middle East problems? By Dominic Lawson. The Independent, September 2, 2013.

Lawson:

When regimes in the Middle East feel threatened by their own people, they immediately seek to blame the insurrection on Israel or “the Jews.”

 

Forget the massacre of thousands in Syria and Egypt, whether by chemical weapons or more conventional methods of mass slaughter. The Middle Eastern issue galvanising some of our musical mega-stars and their followers, even now, is the treatment by Israel of Palestinians. A fortnight ago the violinist Nigel Kennedy told the audience at a Proms concert that Israel should “get rid of apartheid” – his tendentious reference to the treatment of the Arab minority within that country.

 

Kennedy’s remarks were cheered by many in the audience at the Royal Albert Hall, but the BBC cut them from its later television broadcast of the concert, allegedly following a complaint by Lady Deech, a former governor of the corporation. The London-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign fizzed into action, declaring that “suppressing free speech and political dissent is the norm for state broadcasters under dictatorships. It is worrying when we start to see this kind of suppression being practiced by our own state broadcaster.”

 

This remarkable suggestion that the BBC was acting as state censor on behalf of government (rather than merely demonstrating its own determination not to see its great music festival turned into a platform for contentious political slogans) is an example of how the state of Israel makes so many people lose all sense of perspective.

 

So it goes with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters who immediately issued a call to arms “to my colleagues in rock’n’roll” over the treatment given to “my brother Nigel Kennedy.” Waters denounced “one Baroness Deech (née Fraenkel), who disputed the fact that Israel is an apartheid state”. What’s with the “née Fraenkel?” Presumably this is the rock star’s way of letting us know that Deech is – aha! – a Jew. Enough said – although Waters did go on to say: “I have many very close Jewish friends.”

 

Perhaps some of those friends – whether or not they adhere to Jewish dietary laws – might be tiring of his latest porcine stunt, in which Pink Floyd’s pig balloon is imprinted with a Star of David before being “symbolically” shot down. With a delightful irony, this active boycotter of all things Israeli is now himself facing calls to be boycotted, from the admittedly small Jewish population of Dusseldorf, which German city is Waters’ next destination on his current tour.

 

You might dismiss this as completely irrelevant to the slaughter on the streets of Damascus – and in any rational sense it is – were it not for the fact that the Syrian Free Press, one of Bashar-Al Assad’s propaganda outlets, has been extolling Waters in recent weeks (when not too busy claiming that the murder of hundreds of children by Sarin nerve gas was actually organised by the CIA on behalf of Israel).

 

Given the longstanding iconography of anti-Semitism within the Middle East, it is perhaps not surprising that when regimes in the region feel threatened by their own people, they immediately seek to blame the insurrection on Israel or “the Jews.” When the wave of popular uprisings sometimes known as “the Arab Spring” reached Syria, Damascus’s envoy in London went on BBC’s Newsnight to tell a clearly startled Jeremy Paxman that “the Israelis could be behind it . . . they could be behind any bad thing in the world.”

 

Actually, the Israeli government was most discomfited by the uprisings in the region, rather preferring the dictators it knew to the possibility of Islamist regimes in their place. It is Israeli citizens who are now stampeding for gas masks, not those of the US, in preparation for what might follow if President Obama does unleash part of America’s vast arsenal in the direction of sites believed to hold Assad’s chemical weapons.

 

It is true that Israel in 2007 sent eight fighter jets laden with 17 tons of high explosives to demolish the Dair Alzour site in Syria, which the International Atomic Energy Authority has since concluded was the base of a “gas cooled graphite moderated nuclear reactor not configured to produce electricity . . . built with the assistance of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.” So Israel is indeed ferociously single-minded in pursuing its self-defence within the region.

 

Yet the idea that Israel is the proximate cause of any tension within that part of the world – and therefore of the sea of blood sweeping through Egypt and Syria – is paranoiac when not deliberately mendacious. In many cases, the origins of the problems go back to the death of the prophet Mohamed, and the split between the followers who believed his successor should be appointed under Arab tribal tradition – later known as the Sunni – and those who insisted his successor should be from his family, and nominated Mohamed’s cousin and son-in-law Ali – the group which became known as Shia Muslims. 

In certain Arab countries, power had been held for generations by the Sunni, even while a majority of the population might have been Shia. This was the case in Iraq, where a sectarian civil war was precipitated by the disastrously misconceived US invasion. The opposite is true of Syria, a majority Sunni country, yet ruled by Alawites, a branch of the Shia. Not surprisingly, the rebels there are overwhelmingly Sunni, backed by the Sunni regimes of Saudi Arabia and Qatar; and Bashar’s main backer is the Shia regime of Iran.

 

This tribal and sectarian dispute, which has the potential to become the Muslim equivalent of the Thirty Years War, has about as much to do with Israel as did the conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. And the peoples involved care very little, if at all, about the fate of the Palestinians – certainly much less than do Nigel Kennedy and Roger Waters.

 

Yet some western governments still fall for the bizarre idea that if the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians were to be sorted, then this would help to solve all the other conflicts in the region. Thus the French foreign minister Laurent Fabius declared last week, following a meeting with the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: “The Israeli-Palestinian issue is . . . perhaps the central issue of the region.”

 

To be fair to Fabius, that is the sort of thing visiting dignitaries are expected to say when in Ramallah. But, in the midst of the conflagrations in Egypt and Syria, it does bring to mind the remark of the late French ambassador in London, Daniel Bernard, who in 2001 delivered himself of the view that “all the current troubles in the world are because of that shitty little country Israel.”

 

Hyperbole has surrounded that little nation ever since it was created in 1948 and the secretary of the Arab League pronounced, as five Arab countries launched a joint attack on the one-day-old state: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre.” Now the exterminations and massacres are Arab on Arab; but somehow it will still be said to be all to do with Israel.

 

I think I made a similar point on this page over six years ago – but unfortunately this is the last of my columns for The Independent. To those readers who have enjoyed reading them as much as I did writing them, I’m sorry to desert you; to those who did not – you can calm down now.

Same War, Different Country. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Same War, Different Country. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, September 7, 2013.

Friedman:

Say, did you see the news from Libya — the last country we bombed because its leader crossed a red line or was about to? Here’s a dispatch from Libya in the Sept. 3 British newspaper, The Independent:

 

“Libya has plunged unnoticed into its worst political and economic crisis since the defeat of Qaddafi two years ago. Government authority is disintegrating in all parts of the country putting in doubt claims by American, British and French politicians that NATO’s military action in Libya in 2011 was an outstanding example of a successful foreign military intervention, which should be repeated in Syria. ... Output of Libya’s prized high-quality crude oil has plunged from 1.4 million barrels a day earlier this year to just 160,000 barrels a day now.”

 

I keep reading about how Iraq was the bad war and Libya was the good war and Afghanistan was the necessary war and Bosnia was the moral war and Syria is now another necessary war. Guess what! They are all the same war.

 

They are all the story of what happens when multisectarian societies, most of them Muslim or Arab, are held together for decades by dictators ruling vertically, from the top down, with iron fists and then have their dictators toppled, either by internal or external forces. And they are all the story of how the people in these countries respond to the fact that with the dictator gone they can only be governed horizontally — by the constituent communities themselves writing their own social contracts for how to live together as equal citizens, without an iron fist from above. And, as I’ve said before, they are all the story of how difficult it is to go from Saddam to Jefferson — from vertical rule to horizontal rule — without falling into Hobbes or Khomeini.

In Bosnia, after much ethnic cleansing between warring communities, NATO came in and stabilized and codified what is in effect a partition. We acted on the ground as “the army of the center.” In Iraq, we toppled the dictator and then, after making every mistake in the book, we got the parties to write a new social contract. To make that possible, we policed the lines between sects and eliminated a lot of the worst jihadists in the Shiite and Sunni ranks. We acted on the ground as the “army of the center.” But then we left before anything could take root. Ditto Afghanistan.

 

The Obama team wanted to be smarter in Libya: No boots on the ground. So we decapitated that dictator from the air. But then our ambassador got murdered, because, without boots on the ground to referee, and act as the army of the center, Hobbes took hold before Jefferson.

 

If we were to decapitate the Syrian regime from the air, the same thing would likely happen there. For any chance of a multisectarian democratic outcome in Syria, you need to win two wars on the ground: one against the ruling Assad-Alawite-Iranian-Hezbollah-Shiite alliance; and, once that one is over, you’d have to defeat the Sunni Islamists and pro-Al Qaeda jihadists. Without an army of the center (which no one will provide) to back up the few decent Free Syrian Army units, both will be uphill fights.

 

The center exists in these countries, but it is weak and unorganized. It’s because these are pluralistic societies — mixtures of tribes and religious sects, namely Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, Kurds, Druze and Turkmen — but they lack any sense of citizenship or deep ethic of pluralism. That is, tolerance, cooperation and compromise. They could hold together as long as there was a dictator to “protect” (and divide) everyone from everyone else. But when the dictator goes, and you are a pluralistic society but lack pluralism, you can’t build anything because there is never enough trust for one community to cede power to another — not without an army of the center to protect everyone from everyone.

 

In short, the problem now across the Arab East is not just poison gas, but poisoned hearts. Each tribe or sect believes it is in a rule-or-die struggle against the next, and when everyone believes this, it becomes self-fulfilling.

 

That means Syria and Iraq will both likely devolve into self-governing, largely homogeneous, ethnic and religious units, like Kurdistan. And, if we are lucky, these units will find a modus vivendi, as happened in Lebanon after 14 years of civil war. And then maybe, over time, these smaller units will voluntarily come together into larger, more functional states.

 

I still believe our response to Assad’s poison gas attack should be “arm and shame,” as I wrote on Wednesday. But, please do spare me the lecture that America’s credibility is at stake here. Really? Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting since the 7th century over who is the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad’s spiritual and political leadership, and our credibility is on the line? Really? Their civilization has missed every big modern global trend — the religious Reformation, democratization, feminism and entrepreneurial and innovative capitalism — and our credibility is on the line? I don’t think so.

 

We’ve struggled for a long time, and still are, learning to tolerate “the other.” That struggle has to happen in the Arab/Muslim world, otherwise nothing we do matters. What is the difference between the Arab awakening in 2011 and South Africa’s transition to democracy in the 1990s? America? No. The quality of local leadership and the degree of tolerance.

The New Economy of Letters. By Jill Lepore.

The New Economy of Letters. By Jill Lepore. The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 3, 2013. Also here.

The Professor: Jill Lepore’s Fatal Flaw. By Rachel Shteir. The New Republic, November 4, 2012.

Luther Season 3 Finale.

London cop John Luther (Idris Elba) and genius murderer Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson) have a complicated yet friendly relationship in
 Luther. (Photo: Robert Viglasky).

Luther finale: Creator Neil Cross on that final moment. By Mandi Bierly. Entertainment Weekly, September 7, 2013.

Ruth Wilson makes Luther character a seductive psycho. By Brian Truitt. USA Today, September 6, 2013.

Luther’s Ruth Wilson on Playing Alice Morgan and Showtime’s The Affair. Vulture, September 3, 2013.

Ruth or dare: While Hollywood is crazy for British actress Ruth Wilson. By Jane Gordon. Daily Mail, July 27, 2013.

No one to ride shotgun: Ruth Wilson cuts a lonely figure at Dublin premiere of Lone Ranger . . . without leading men Depp and Hammer. By Fay Strang. Daily Mail, August 7, 2013.

Ruth Wilson talks Alice: Luther Series 3. Video. TopTVshows2013, July 20, 2013. YouTube.




Do You Believe in Evil? Alice and Luther: Luther, BBC. Video. BBCWorldwide, June 26, 2013. YouTube.




Alice and John | White Blank Page (Luther). Video. EternalSmile107, August 6, 2013. YouTube.




Luther: John and Alice. Serial Killer. Video. yotb0ka, August 29, 2013. YouTube.




The Black Keys: Never Gonna Give You Up. Video. Jen Braidley, January 15, 2013. YouTube. Also here, here, here. Played during the closing scene of the Luther finale.

We Need a New Road Map for the Jewish People. By Loolwa Khazzoom.

We Need a New Road Map for the Jewish People. By Loolwa Khazzoom. New America Media, June 16, 2003.

Khazzoom:

JERUSALEM—Jews across the globe worry whether the road map to peace with Palestinians is dead, or can be salvaged. To me it is critical that Jews and Arabs find a path to peace. But as an Israeli Jew with roots in Iraq, I’m disturbed when the Jewish world continuously emphasizes building relationships between Jews and non-Jews while it ignores a deep diversity issue among our own.

 

We Mizrahim, 900,000 Middle Eastern and North African Jewish refugees, were forced to flee from our homes about 50 years ago. Arab states confiscated and nationalized billions of dollars worth of our property, yet Jewish leaders have made barely a peep of protest. We are hardly invisible: We are half Israel’s Jewish population.

 

When Mizrahim came to Israel, everything we offered – thousands of years of Jewish history, culture, religious traditions, scholarship, and daily experience – was devalued. Viewed as primitive and barbaric, we were marginalized and treated as if destined to fail – an attitude that proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Today, Mizrahim make up the overwhelming majority of Jews in Israeli slums and prisons.

 

When that which is disdained in us is exactly the Middle Eastern and North African culture we share with our Arab neighbors, and when Jew-on-Jew racism against Mizrahim has gone unaddressed for five decades, how can Jewish-Arab bridge building have any integrity or expectations of success?

 

The only way out of the Mizrahi spiral downward was to run as fast and as far as possible from our native Middle Eastern and North African ways. There are many successful Mizrahim in Israel, but the price has been dissociation from our roots and shame about our heritage.

 

Today, Ethiopian Israelis are going through the same bleaching process, but worse. Their very Jewish identity was officially denied upon entry into Israel, and scores were forced to convert to Judaism (as if they were not already Jews), including the kes – the equivalent of rabbis in the community. More humiliation came through the separation of families – some family members accepted as Jews, others not; some brought to Israel, others left to rot in Addis Ababa.

 

Recently I went to a Jerusalem demonstration where thousands protesting treatment of Ethiopian Jews had gathered in front of the Office of the Government. I found myself facing a long fence separating me from the crowd, a fence that proved to be symbolic: On one side, demonstrators were all black. On the other side, we reporters were not.

 

I climbed through a hole in the fence.

 

Around me protesters shouted, “Mother! Father! Sister! Brother!” A young man named Amalu Alamoe, who had completed his three year military service and was going to college, said, “My parents are in Ethiopia. I can’t concentrate, because I’m so worried about them.” Amaloe’s mother and father are among the thousands of Falash Mura trapped in Addis Ababa, many suffering from hunger and disease.

 

Falash Mura, Ethiopian Jews who converted to Christianity under economic pressure from Christian missionaries and death threats from Christian neighbors, secretly remained Jews. During a 1991 Israeli airlift, Jews came from remote villages across Ethiopia to return to Zion – a dream for 3,000 years. Falash Mura, however, were not allowed to board the planes. Israel’s rationale: they were not practicing Jews.

 

Over the years, Falash Mura continued congregating in Addis Ababa, in increasingly worse conditions. Israel airlifted several thousand for humanitarian reasons, but not because it recognized them as Jews. About 18,000 Falash Mura are now in Addis Ababa; most have family in Israel.

 

On May 23, Israel’s Chief Rabbi declared that Falash Mura are “one hundred per cent Jews, without a doubt” and should “immediately be brought to Israel . . . to rescue them from the jaws of death.”

 

A Ministry of the Interior spokesman, Tipi Rabinovitch, said the government is concerned that the list of Falash Mura will be never-ending. This past decade, however, Israel actively scouted out and absorbed 1 million Jewish immigrants from Russia. According to the group Jewish Agency for Israel, almost 250,000 were in fact non-Jews.

 

Another official argument is economics: “Falash Mura come from another kind of culture, another kind of country and society,” said Aric Puder, spokesman for the Ministry of Immigration and Absorption. “We need to give a lot of special programs in order to absorb them into the Israeli society.”

 

“They look at us with closed eyes,” says Alamu Mondevro, a demonstrator who says he’s frustrated by the assumption that the Ethiopian-Israeli cultural, spiritual, and intellectual exchange is a one-way street.

 

Rather than humbly learning what our Ethiopian sisters and brothers have to teach, Israel is once again treating fellow Jews as primitive, barbaric and destined to fail. The government, in turn, is paying the financial price.

 

So as Jews everywhere clamor desperately to build bridges between Jews and Arabs, I challenge us to look at our own people and build bridges within. As our great sage Hillel said, “If I am not for myself, who is for me?”

Iraq War Marked a Defining Moment for Jews. By Joel Kotkin.

War Marks a Defining Moment for Jews. By Joel Kotkin. Jewish Journal, April 3, 2003. Also at New America Media.

Kotkin:

The current war with Iraq marks a defining moment in the lives of American Jews and their lives in this country. For generations, Jews have lived, for the most part, on the left-wing edge of the American commonwealth.

 

They have been in Hollywood, in the political world, academia and the media generally hostile to the idea of the projection of American power and the idea of a new American empire.

 

This may soon be changing. Although initially somewhat less supportive of the Iraq invasion than other Americans, Jews are far more behind the projection of American power, arguably, than at any time since World War II. Over half of Jews strongly supported the Bush policy before the outbreak of hostility, according to the Pew Research Center; that percentage has likely increased more recently, as has occurred in the rest of the population.

 

How should Jews deal with the fact that America, by invading Iraq, has become in many ways an openly more assertive kind of empire?

 

This is no exaggeration. The utter failure of the European “allies” and the U.N. to stop Iraq’s weapons programs has forced the United States, with whatever allies it can muster, to operate largely without NATO, E.U. or U.N. approval.

 

Yet is becoming an empire necessarily bad?

 

It depends, clearly, on the nature of the empire. Given the current world chaos, not only in the Middle East but in North Asia as well, some power needs to assert itself over the outlaw regimes that seek to gain weapons of mass destruction.

 

The U.N. is useless for this; France too interested in selling its products; Germany too shell-shocked by its past; Russia still resentful of its decline. Only America can, or better, will, provide a counterweight for order.

 

Jews, for many reasons, need to rally to this notion, not only because of Iraq’s lethal anti-Semitic and anti-Israel stance, but because Jews, as an exposed minority, need a legal, responsible ordered world system. The alternative – a world controlled by the likes of Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il – is terrifying.

 

This support should not be simply couched in terms of support for Israel. The latent anti-Semitic elements on the left and right from Arab activists to Democratic Rep. James Moran and Pat Buchanan can easily make the point that Jews pushed the Iraq war simply for Israel’s sake. Would they, for example, back a possible strike at North Korea or somewhere else that could be launched for the same principles?

 

In a sense, we need to transcend two now powerful notions of Jewish identity. The first, now largely predominant, is one tied up with the current State of Israel.

 

This loyalty is understandable but not sufficient for American Jews’ political identity. As great an idea as the Jewish State may be, it is only a comparatively small force or ideal compared to that projected by the might of the diverse American republic.

 

The other is what could be called the “perpetual shtetl” notion of Judaism. In this, we are always victims and must associate with those forces – minorities, Third World nations, oppressed genders and sexual groups – no matter what the consequences to ourselves or the nation. This view represents a kind of nostalgic identification with either czarist oppression of the last century or with the experiences of the 1960s.

 

Neither of these views takes into account the new world situation. Today it is only America – in Iraq today, in Bosnia before and perhaps North Korea tomorrow – that stands between global disorder, including the eventual destruction of Israel and any hope for progress in the 21st century.

 

This American empire represents something new and worth our loyalty. It was designed, as Thomas Jefferson suggested, as “an empire for liberty.” We do not seek to conquer Iraq like scores of invaders leading up to the Turks or British, most recently.

 

After our victory in 1945, we did not occupy permanently Germany or Japan. Indeed, we even endure strong dissent from these countries and those we saved from conquest, like France and South Korea. We acknowledge that dissent is a testament to our national virtues.

 

But is this new empire good for the Jews?

 

Throughout our history, Jews have flourished under strong, and at least basically just, empires. This was true under Cyrus the Great of Persia, under Alexander and the Ptolemies of Egypt, where Jews constructed their greatest centers of learning, first in Babylon and then Alexandria. By the time of the birth of Christ, and before the collapse of the Judaic State, two-thirds of all Jews already lived outside Palestine, mostly in areas under some form of strong imperial control.

 

Even under Rome, which extinguished Jewish independence, many of our scholars, teachers, craftsmen and traders found a comfortable existence. Many became citizens, perhaps most famously, Saul of Tarsus, later to be known as St. Paul. Indeed, after the Second Revolt and the expulsion from Jerusalem, Jews largely benefited from Pax Romana.

 

This was particularly true under the enlightened Antonine emperors. Jewish cultural and community life flourished from the Galilee – Tiberias alone boasted 13 synagogues – to Mesopotamia, in Alexandria, Spain, France and Rome, itself.

 

It was under Roman rule, for example, that the Mishnah was written. Synagogues were even established and named after emperors like Severus. Under Rome, we became, for the first time, a truly Diaspora people with global influence.

This was no accident. At its best, Rome, like America, posed an ideal of breathtaking scope and cosmopolitan vision. It sought to be a transnational empire open to diverse races and, in exchange for loyalty, allowing a wide breadth of religious practice and philosophical practice.

 

“Rome,” wrote Areistedes, a Greek writer in the second century, “is a citadel which has all the peoples of the earth as its villagers.”

 

This universalist notion was perhaps best expressed by Marcus Aurelius, the emperor and philosopher, who assumed the principate in 161 C.E. at the death of highly regarded Antoninus Pius. Aurelius claimed that he arose each morning to “do the work of man.”

 

“For me, Antoninus,”Aurelius wrote, “my city and fatherland is Rome, but as a man, the world.”

When the order of this empire came undone, it was a disaster for the Jews. As cities declined, commerce waned and superstition, including within both Christianity and Judaism, waxed, our civilization declined. It was only with new and healthier imperial structures – notably the Persian Sassanians and, ironically, the early Islamic empire – that Jewish culture began to revive again, most notably in Muslim-controlled Spain.

 

Today’s American empire, not surprisingly, now serves as the primary center of Jewish culture, creativity and commerce. Israel is important, but it is essentially a dependency of the American empire.

 

The connections of Israel to Europe, so beloved by many liberal Israelis, are likely to weaken further as anti-Semitism and pro-Islamicist force grow, particularly in France. Israelis, likely in the hundreds of thousands, gravitate here.

 

The question is what do Jews owe as citizens of this empire?

 

I think we have much to offer. To survive, America must keep its moral compass. It is right for us to question unjust acts and also require virtue, particularly in areas such as overconsumption of fossil fuels. Our intellectual and commercial sharpness, and history-shaped experience, represent an important asset to America.

 

Will this mean a new American Jewish identity?

 

Yes, to some extent. Clearly the war in Iraq will accelerate the gradual shift of Jews toward the center and, to a lesser extent, even to the right.

 

Both the old shtetl mentality and that of the 1960s will also fade, particularly among the young and more recent newcomers to the country. Recent Russian or Persian immigrants are not likely to be as enraptured by an old Stalinist like Castro or willing to cut a break to an anti-Semitic monster like Saddam, as those Jews still romantically attached to the spent utopianism of the left.

 

At the same time, the left, the traditional home for many Jews, seems destined to become increasingly inhospitable to Jews. We have already seen the marginalization of pro-Israel leftists.

 

The antiwar movement, with its powerful links in both Europe and America, with those sympathetic or even supportive of terrorists, places the opposition uncomfortably in bed with those who want to kill Jews, simply because they are Jews, in Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, Tunisia and New York – or LAX and Sherman Oaks.

 

Does this mean all Jews will become conservatives after the war?

 

No, although most will become further to the right on foreign policy, as the fact that few Jews in Congress, including liberals, have been prominent in the opposition to the war. But they will not, I believe, become a bunch of Rush Limbaugh or even Dennis Praeger “dittoheads.” There are simply too many issues – abortion, school prayer and economic justice – that separate most Jews from the Republican mainstream.

 

But, Jews, like other Americans, will emerge from this war a changed people. We will come, I believe, with an enhanced notion of connection to the American empire and to our critical place within it.

Under the Arab Street. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Under the Arab Street. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, October 23, 2002.

Arab Activists Move from Street Protests to Basement Bomb-Making. By Rami G. Khouri. Albion Monitor, October 22, 2002. Also at New America Media.

In Defense of Losers. By Barbara G. Ellis.

In Defense of Losers. By Barbara G. Ellis. Truthout, May 29, 2013.

Average Is Over. By Tyler Cowen.

Who Will Prosper in the New World. By Tyler Cowen. New York Times, August 31, 2013.

To Succeed, Obey the Robots. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, September 7, 2013.

Mead:

Do what the robots tell you, and you’ll succeed. That’s one of the messages of Average is Over, the latest book from TAI board member Tyler Cowen. The book explores how America’s economy, culture, and politics will be transformed in age in which computers and robots can increasingly do a lot of traditional human tasks. Cowen has a piece in the Times adapted from the book, as well as a great interview with TechCrunch, explaining more.

 

The Times article breaks people down into two categories: those who will do well in the “machine economy,” and those who won’t. One of the categories here especially caught our attention:

There will be a lot more wealth in this brave new world, but it won’t be very evenly distributed because a lot of human labor won’t seem like a special or scarce resource. Capturing the attention of customers with just the right human touch will command an increasing premium. Don’t forget that Mark Zuckerberg was a psychology major in addition to being a tech genius. Sheer technical skill can be done by the machines, but integrating the tech side with an attention-grabbing innovation is a lot harder.

What Cowen calls “the marketing touch” jibes with what we’ve been saying about the service jobs of the future. Cowen is right that technology will increase income inequality, which will leave the 99 percent with two choices: to “club” the money out of the one percent, or “charm” it out of them by offering services presented with a marketing flair. Like Cowen, we think the charmers will do the best in the new economy, and ultimately their success will improve quality of life will increase for everyone.

 

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation. By Tyler Cowen. New York: Dutton Adult, 2013.

How Technology Wrecks the Middle Class. By David H. Autor and David Dorn. New York Times, August 24, 2013.

Average Is Over. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, January 24, 2012.

Was America’s Prosperity an Accident of History? By Benjamin Wallace-Wells. NJBR, July 22, 2013. The Blip with related articles.

Keen On . . . Smart Machines: The Next Big Thing For Smart Human Beings. By Andrew Keen. Video. Interview with Tyler Cowen. TechCrunch, September 3, 2013. YouTube.




Cowen:

Self-driving vehicles threaten to send truck drivers to the unemployment office. Computer programs can now write journalistic accounts of sporting events and stock price movements. There are even computers that can grade essay exams with reasonable accuracy, which could revolutionize my own job, teaching. Increasingly, machines are providing not only the brawn but the brains, too, and that raises the question of where humans fit into this picture — who will prosper and who won’t in this new kind of machine economy?

 

Who will do well?

 

THE CONSCIENTIOUS: Within five years we are likely to have the world’s best education, or close to it, online and free. But not everyone will sit down and go through the material without a professor pushing them to do the work.

 

Those who are motivated to use online resources will do much, much better in the generations to come. It’s already the case that the best students from India are at the top in many Coursera classes, putting America’s arguably less motivated bright young people to shame. “Free” doesn’t really help you if you don’t make an effort.

 

PEOPLE WHO LISTEN TO COMPUTERS: Your smartphone will record data on your life and, when asked, will tell you what to do, drawing on data from your home or from your spouse and friends if need be. “You’ve thrown out that bread the last three times you’ve bought it, give it a pass” will be a text message of the future. How about “Now is not the time to start another argument with your wife”? The GPS is just the beginning of computer-guided instruction.

 

Take your smartphone on a date, and it might vibrate in your pocket to indicate “Kiss her now.” If you hesitate for fear of being seen as pushy, it may write: “Who cares if you look bad? You are sampling optimally in the quest for a lifetime companion.”Those who won’t listen, or who rebel out of spite, will be missing out on glittering prizes. Those of us who listen, while often envied, may feel more like puppets with deflated pride.

 

PEOPLE WITH A MARKETING TOUCH: There will be a lot more wealth in this brave new world, but it won’t be very evenly distributed because a lot of human labor won’t seem like a special or scarce resource. Capturing the attention of customers with just the right human touch will command an increasing premium. Don’t forget that Mark Zuckerberg was a psychology major in addition to being a tech genius. Sheer technical skill can be done by the machines, but integrating the tech side with an attention-grabbing innovation is a lot harder.

 

MOTIVATORS: A lot of jobs will consist of making people feel either very good or very bad about themselves. Coaches, mentors and disciplinarians will spread to many areas of life, at least for those of us who can stand to listen to them. These people will cajole us, flatter us and shame us into improving our lives, our work habits and our consumption. That’s why so many people go to yoga class instead of relying on the podcast. Managers who are motivators of first-rate talent will see their earnings continue to rise.

 

Who will be most likely to suffer from this technological revolution?

 

PEOPLE WITH DELICATE FEELINGS: Computing and software will make it easier to measure performance and productivity.

 

It will be harder to gloss over our failings and maintain self-deception. In essence everyone will suffer the fate of professional chess players, who always know when they have lost a game, have an exact numerical rating for their overall performance, and find excuses for failure hard to come by.

 

Individuals will have many measures of their proficiency. They will have an incentive to disclose that information to get the better job or social opportunity. You’ll assume the worst about those who keep secrets, and so openness will reign. Many of us will start to hate the idea of Big Data.

 

PEOPLE UNLUCKY IN HEALTH CARE: Quality surgery and cancer treatment cannot be automated very easily. They will be highly expensive, and unlucky health breaks will be all the more tragic because not everyone will be able to afford the best treatments.

 

With marvelous diagnosis available online, some people will get the right treatments early on, whereas others will know exactly what they are dying from.

 

PEOPLE WHO DON’T NEED MONEY: We are used to thinking in terms of rich, poor and middle class, but those categories will change. Berlin’s eastern neighborhoods and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, are a window onto our future. These urban areas are full of people who are bright, culturally literate, Internet-savvy and far from committed to the idea of hard work directed toward earning a good middle-class living. We’ll need a new name for the group of people who have the incomes of the lower middle class and the cultural habits of the wealthy or upper middle class. They will spread a libertarian worldview that working for other people full time is an abominable way to get by.

 

POLITICAL RADICALS: A mechanized, computer-driven, highly unequal future is sometimes viewed as a recipe for rebellion. But the Edward J. Snowden saga shows this won’t be easy, as tech is at least as much an instrument for surveillance and control as it is for revolt. We’re also aging rapidly, and that tends to make society more peaceful, less violent and less extreme in all directions. It was the 1960s, a peak era for manufacturing jobs and the American middle class, that brought so much social turmoil and unrest. The more that work is done by machines, the less compelling is the case for putting your manufacturing in a distant country where wages are low. If there is any big winner from all of these trends, it is probably the good ol’ United States.

Canaanite Cult Stone in a Jewish Farm House. By Noah Wiener.

Canaanite Cult Stones in a Jewish Farm House. By Noah Wiener. Bible History Daily, September 4, 2013.

Damaged Representation: The Figurines from Bronze Age Tell Sabi Abyad, Syria, and the Archaeology of Disregard. By Noah Wiener. MA Thesis. University of Leiden, November 2011.

Sacred Stones in the Desert. By Uzi Avner. Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 27, No. 3 (May/June 2001). Also here.

Pagan Yahwism: The Folk Religion of Ancient Israel. By Ephraim Stern. Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 27, No. 3 (May/June 2001). Also here.

Asherah, Consort of Yahweh? New Evidence from Kuntillet ‘Ajrûd. By William G. Dever. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 255 (Summer 1984).

Bait and Switch. By Bruce Ackerman.

Bait and Switch. By Bruce Ackerman. Foreign Policy, September 3, 2013. Also here.

Obama’s “limited” strikes are just the prelude to massive intervention in the Middle East. And Congress shouldn’t fall for it.

Understanding Egyptian Nationalism. By Bassem Sabry.

Understanding Egyptian Nationalism. By Bassem Sabry. Al-Monitor, September 5, 2013.

Tech Mania Goes to College. By David L. Kirp.

Tech Mania Goes to College. By David L. Kirp. The Nation, September 4, 2013. From the September 23, 2013 issue.

Are MOOCs—massive open online courses—the utopia of affordable higher education, or just the latest fad?

Inside the Coursera Hype Machine. By Jon Wiener. The Nation, September 4, 2013. From the September 23, 2013 issue.

The company has attracted tens of millions in venture capital—but if you’re looking for the Amazon of online higher ed, try iTunes U.

Finding the Via Media Online After the NSA Leaks. By Walter Russell Mead.

Finding the Via Media Online after the NSA Leaks. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, September 6, 2013.

Jumana Hadeed, a Syrian Woman, Confronts John McCain at a Town Hall.

Syrian Woman Confronts McCain at Town Hall: “I Beg You.” By Diane Sweet. Occupy America, September 6, 2013.

Also at: Time, Business Insider, Infowars.

Syrian Woman Rips Into McCain at Town Hall for His Support for Bombing Syria. Video. Susan Duclos, September 5, 2013. YouTube. Also here.

Talking to Palestinians Who Won’t Talk Back. By Yair Rosenberg.

Talking to Palestinians Who Won’t Talk Back. By Yair Rosenberg. Tablet, September 4, 2013.

NY Times, MSNBC Whitewash BDS. By Yair Rosenberg. Tablet, February 6, 2013.

Rosenberg:

When I was an undergraduate, the Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance invited the Palestine Solidarity Committee to the movies–specifically Boston’s Jewish and Palestine Film Festivals. It was a creative concept for a coexistence event. The response from the PSC, however, was less inspired. The organization explained that while PJA was welcome to join them at the Palestine Film Festival, and that some PSC members might be interested in attending the Jewish one, under no circumstances could the fact that Palestinians accompanied PJA to the Jewish Film Festival be advertised. PSC would not officially co-sponsor such an outing. In other words, the Jewish community was welcome to offer its empathy and legitimacy to the Palestinian perspective, but the Palestinian community would not reciprocate. The event did not take place.

 

This was not an isolated incident. As hostilities raged in Gaza in early 2009, PJA, Harvard Students for Israel, the Society of Arab Students, and the Harvard Islamic Society organized a peace vigil with a simple email: “Join us as we mourn the loss of human life in the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. We pray that one day we will be able to truly co-exist in peace, security, and health.” Candles were held aloft while both Jewish and Islamic prayers for peace were movingly recited in the cold evening air. The only organization that boycotted the gathering was the Palestine Solidarity Committee. Some months later, one of their board members published an op-ed arguing that Israel’s ambassador and former Harvard professor Michael Oren should be barred from campus.

 

I was reminded of these stories, and many others, when reading Peter Beinart’s latest article in the New York Review of Books, “American Jewish Cocoon.” In it, Beinart rightly calls out American Jews for historically failing to engage with their Palestinian counterparts. “For the most part, Palestinians do not speak in American synagogues or write in the Jewish press.” As a consequence, he says, “the organized American Jewish community [is] a closed intellectual space, isolated from the experiences and perspectives of roughly half the people under Israeli control. And the result is that American Jewish leaders, even those who harbor no animosity toward Palestinians, know little about the reality of their lives.”

 

This is all true, which is why you should read and consider Beinart’s eloquent essay in full. But it is not the whole truth–and those seeking to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict need to understand why. Because as it turns out, more and more Jews are reaching out to Palestinians, only to find that they no longer have anyone to talk to. As one officer for OneVoice, the grassroots peace-building movement, has observed, where once it was difficult to get Jews into a room with Palestinians, now it has become difficult to find a Palestinian who will share the stage with a Zionist Jew.

 

***

 

On Tuesday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was supposed to share a pre-Rosh Hashana toast with the over 30 members of the Knesset’s two-state solution caucus. Abbas had invited the Jewish lawmakers to Ramallah to reciprocate their hosting him at the Knesset on July 31–only the second time a Palestinian flag was unfurled at the Israeli parliament. But on Monday, he cancelled the toast, reportedly “because he came under pressure from the anti-normalization movement in Ramallah.” This, too, was not an isolated incident.

 

For its August issue, Forbes ran a cover story entitled “Peace Through Profits? Inside the Secret Tech Ventures that are Reshaping the Israeli-Arab-Palestinian World.” In the piece, investigative journalist Richard Behar detailed how Israeli and Palestinian entrepreneurs have been quietly working together on high-tech projects, effectively forging the economic infrastructure for coexistence. Its optimism was rare and refreshing. It was also short-lived. This past Wednesday, Behar published a follow-up about his story’s reception. “Virtually every Israeli who contacted me reacted positively,” he wrote. “But the vast majority of Palestinians who were featured by Forbes reacted with disappointment, upset, and sometimes fear or fury… Some worry that the story will harm their businesses by sparking retaliation from Arab extremists. One says he’s already seeing such a backlash.” A Palestinian CEO even asked Behar to take down the article, adding, “You should have run it by us first. The first thing we would have told you is move the word ‘peace’ out of the article.”

 

These examples are just from the last week. Innumerable others–from boycotts of mixed Israeli-Palestinian soccer teams, to crusades against the Israeli-Palestinian orchestra founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, to successful shuttering of coexistence concerts by threats of violence–can easily be adduced. The anti-normalization movement–which advocates total boycott of all institutions and organizations that do not openly disavow Zionism, and works to exact a social, political, and economic price from those who breach it–grows every day. A representative manifesto, signed by Palestinian student unions in the occupied territories and around the world, explicitly condemns the work of “organizations like Seeds of Peace, One Voice, NIR School, IPCRI, Panorama, and others specifically target Palestinian youth to engage them in dialog with Israelis.”

 

Beinart is aware of anti-normalization’s perils, but he devotes only two of his essay’s 46 paragraphs to it. Given his target audience–American Jews–this focus on one side’s sins is understandable. But it has the effect of indicting Jews in the pages of the NYRB for a lamentable situation that is not entirely their fault, while casting Palestinian isolationism as a mere footnote to American Jewry’s malaise. Moreover, such a narrow frame does not merely elide Palestinians; it also brackets out the many younger members of the Jewish community who have gone to great lengths to interact with their Palestinian counterparts–only to be rebuffed by the acolytes of anti-normalization.

 

***

 

“I recently spoke to a group of Jewish high school students who are being trained to become advocates for Israel when they go to college,” writes Beinart. “They were smart, earnest, passionate. When I asked if any had read a book by a Palestinian, barely any raised their hands.” Open up the New York Times, however, and one will find a very different story. “Several years ago, six teenagers at the SAR yeshiva high school in Riverdale came to the principal with a request,” reported the Times in 2009. “They wanted to study Arabic.” The principal said yes, and today there are over 40 students studying the language. “I feel like lots of people have misconceptions about Arabs and Palestinians,” one of those students told the Times, “and if I speak Arabic I can better understand the culture and understand what is really going on.”

 

SAR High School, which regularly sends graduates to Harvard, Yale and Princeton, is not alone. Ramaz, the elite Manhattan Modern Orthodox prep school, offers Arabic as well. “A small but growing number of Jewish day schools across the United States–including Modern Orthodox, Conservative and community schools,” The Forward noted in 2009, “have started to teach Arabic.” Why? A student from Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Maryland told The Forward, “One day I want an Arab to feel like a random American Jewish girl cares about him and his culture. I know that nothing I could possibly do could change the situation in the Middle East, but maybe if one Arab could meet a Jewish girl that cares, that could do something to tip the scale.” This phenomenon is not restricted to high school. At Harvard, it was a source of constant amusement that the university’s Arabic language classes were filled with American Jews. One was more likely to find students hawking Arabic textbooks on the Hillel listserv than a Jewish Study Bible.

 

University campuses are a particular source of concern for Beinart. He spends four paragraphs critiquing the Israel engagement guidelines of Hillel International, noting that they are “vague” and arguing that they tend to stifle conversation. “Those standards make it almost impossible for Jewish campus organizations to invite a Palestinian speaker,” he writes, adding “even moderate Palestinians like former prime minister Salam Fayyad, a favorite of America and Israel, support boycotting goods produced in the settlements,” and would therefore be unwelcome in Hillel. This was news to me, as I first learned about the idea of boycotting settlement goods at Harvard Hillel from Palestinian peace activist Aziz Abu Sarah. Indeed, in practice, the vagueness of Hillel’s non-binding guidelines has often given individual Hillel directors across the country the latitude to allow for a wide range of views. Which is why one prominent settlement boycott activist has become a fixture in campus Hillel houses: Peter Beinart.

 

In other words, for every anecdote of American Jewish isolation Beinart provides, one can easily find a countervailing instance of openness, particularly among young Jews. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for their prospective Palestinian partners.

 

Who are the faces of Palestine on campus? As Beinart acknowledges in his piece, they are activists like Ali Abunimah, founder of the Electronic Intifada, who not only vehemently opposes a two-state solution, but repeatedly claims that “Zionism is anti-Semitism,” and actively shames those who engage with Zionists. He personally shouted down former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the University of Chicago. And when Columbia University professor Katherine Franke–who supports Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against the Jewish state but not anti-normalization–dared to meet with J Street and other liberal Zionist activists in an effort to forge common ground, Abunimah’s site publicly criticized her.

 

Another prominent Palestinian intellectual on campus, Joseph Massad, associate professor Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, has made a career out of scholarship that attempts to equate Zionism with anti-Semitism, as well as link it with Nazism. And Omar Barghoutti, the master spokesperson for the BDS and anti-normalization movements, refuses to engage whatsoever with Zionists, and famously asserted that Israel “was Palestine, and there is no reason why it should not be renamed Palestine.” These individuals and their many disciples on campus work assiduously to undermine any prospect of Jewish Zionist-Palestinian rapprochement: they have shouted down Israel’s most dovish leader, Ehud Olmert, in multiple forums; assailed Ambassador Michael Oren and called for him to be banned from campus; and even disrupted Israeli cultural events abroad with no actual political component. For the advocates of anti-normalization, it is not enough to reject dialogue with Zionist groups–such conversation must be actively silenced.

 

***

 

Thus, the tragic irony of the rise of anti-normalization among Palestinians is that it coincides with the rise of a new generation of American Jews who are most open to dialogue. Unlike their elders, these young Jews didn’t grow up in the shadow of war and intifada. They’ve experienced Israel as a secure and powerful state, and so are themselves secure enough to reach out to their Palestinian interlocutors. But in a cruel twist of fate, even as many American Jews have finally emerged from their cocoon, they’ve found that there isn’t anyone outside who wants to talk to them. Where in the past, many Palestinians were eager to press their case, years of stagnation and occupation have empowered the rejectionists, who accept nothing less than the dissolution of Israel.

 

“When I was an undergrad student, there were many panels and debates between Israelis and Palestinians, or their surrogates,” recounts one longtime peace activist in Haaretz. “But today you can count on one hand the number of events where Israelis and Palestinians have joint public events.” While young American Jews are increasingly bringing a positive-sum outlook to their campus communities, their Palestinian counterparts have increasingly accepted a zero-sum approach. “As we in the Jewish community finally come out of our own internal Jewish conversation,” the activist laments, “we will face a Palestinian community that is only willing to speak to us about a one-state solution.”

 

Ultimately, then, the best metaphor for the sad saga of Jewish-Palestinian dialogue is not Beinart’s image of a cocoon. Rather, the two communities have been like ships passing in the night, each just missing the window of opportunity to see and reach the other. Admittedly, this is not as satisfying a narrative as an indictment of the American Jewish establishment, or a simple condemnation of Palestinian extremism. It doesn’t have heroes and villains, or a straightforward reckoning of right and wrong. But then, few things about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict actually do.