Thomas Friedman: “The Middle East Finally Wore Us Out.”

Thomas Friedman on fading foreign news. Interviewed by Howard Kurtz. Video. Media Buzz. Fox News, December 22, 2013. YouTube.




Friedman:

The Middle East finally wore us out, you know, in a sense, even myself. Where it is just so many things going the wrong way in so many places. . . . Not worn out in the sense of my own intellectual curiosity which is still there. But worn out in the sense of I try to write a solutions-oriented column. I don’t do pessimism very well. I find myself out of ideas when it comes to how to navigate out of the problems of this region.

The Arab War Against the Jews. By Ruth Wisse.

The Arab War Against the Jews. By Ruth Wisse. Video. TorahCafé, February 2013.

Professor Ruth Wisse: The Arab War Against the Jews. By Mike Lumish. Israel Thrives, February 28, 2013.

Lumish:

Harvard Professor of Yiddish and Literary Studies, Ruth Wisse, is the author of the very important work, Jews and Power. I’ve put a recent video of Professor Wisse on the right side-bar of Israel Thrives and will leave it there for a week or so. I would very much encourage you guys to give her a close listen because her view is both pristine and correct. This is someone who is not the least bit muddled in her thinking on the Long Arab War Against the Jews.

 

This conflict is not a conflict between equals.  It is an aggression from the much larger Arab-Muslim population in the Middle East toward their former dhimmis and slaves. It represents a hatred toward pluralism in that part of the world by the Arab majority and the refusal to accept the legitimacy of another people on their own land.

 

She argues, correctly, that anti-Zionism is actually worse than anti-Semitism because it incorporates all that anti-Semitism is while expanding it to deny Jewish sovereignty and Jewish self-defense on the land where Jews historically came from.

 

She also maintains that the organization of politics around hatred for the Jew within the Muslim Middle East, as well as within the international left, is not really about the Jews, at all, but about opposition to liberal democracy. The Jewish State of Israel is merely a proxy. It is a fashionable target through which opposition to liberal democracy, and therefore the United States, organizes itself.

 

One thing is certain, if political anti-Semitism, which is the very definition of anti-Zionism, means anything it means portraying Jews as a villain, either as Jews, individually, or in the collective, for the purpose of building political bridges with others around a common hatred.

 

My problem with the international left, and with “progressive Zionists,” the political movements that I come out of, is that they accept the fundamental notion of Jewish guilt upon which the entire ideological structure of political anti-Zionist anti-Semitism is built.

 

In this way, whatever their best intentions, they nonetheless promote the kind of hostility toward us that results in violence and mass killings and war.

 

Until we recognize that we are not guilty of the charges leveled against us (and we aren’t) then we can never convince anyone else of this truth and therefore we can never relieve ourselves of this perpetual hostility.

 

If “as-a-Jew” you tend to think that the Jews of the Middle East, via the government of Israel, is persecuting the Arabs under an imperialistic “Occupation” then you are promoting hatred toward us based on false grounds. There is no “Occupation.” There is 6 million Jews surrounded by 400 million Arabs and those Jews want nothing so much in this world other than to be left the hell alone.

 

What you call the “Occupation” is nothing other than the means of an historically abused minority to finally protect itself from a much larger and hostile majority population in a part of the world where, outside of Israel, itself, very few people share your alleged values of “social justice” and “human rights.”


Anti-Semitism and Tikkun Olam: How Jews Can Best Repair a World in Crisis. By Dr. Ruth Wisse. Video. Shalom TV, January 7, 2013. YouTube.

The ASA’s Boycott of Israel Is Not as Troubling as It Seems. By David Greenberg.

The ASA’s Boycott of Israel Is Not as Troubling as It Seems. By David Greenberg. The New Republic, December 19, 2013.

The Shame of the American Studies Association. By Gary Kulik. History News Network, December 23, 2013.

Divest This!


Greenberg:

The American Studies Association’s decision to boycott Israel has made front-page news. The New York Times described the resolution—which bars members from cooperating with Israeli universities—as momentous: “a milestone” for anti-Israel forces, a signal that the boycott against the Jewish state “has begun to make strides in the United States.” Maximalist supporters of the Palestinian cause cheered. Others felt the blast of a chill wind.

 

Make no mistake: the vote is troubling, redolent of some of the darkest moments in modern history. In singling out Israel, of all the world’s imperfect actors, as worthy of ostracism, in designating the Jewish state as uniquely deserving of isolation and economic strangulation, the ASA boycotters have joined the ranks of those who—from the anti-Jewish campaigns of nineteenth-century Europe through the notorious Arab League boycott that dissipated only after Camp David and Oslo—believed that the remnant of humanity known as the Jewish people possesses too much power and must be brought to heel. Their campaign seeks not the defensible goal of ending West Bank settlements as part of a peace agreement, but the essentially anti-Semitic end of marginalizing, delegitimizing, even eliminating the Jewish state.

 

But while the anti-Jewish character of the boycott is (or should be) plain, and while any such display of prejudice is always cause for concern, it’s important to keep this stunt in perspective. Who, precisely, voted for this boycott? Whom does the American Studies Association, with its august-sounding name, represent? What, really, does this vote mean?

 

In truth, it has been a while since the ASA commanded wide respect as a heavyweight professional organization, and its politics are no bellwether of prevailing ideas in higher education. Like the high-school delinquents who from time to time spray swastikas on a Long Island synagogue wall, occasioning transient alarm and winding up on the local news, the ASA boycott ringleaders are by and large a fringe of malcontents—thugs with credentials, vandals in tweed.

 

It’s important for outsiders to this drama to know that the field of American Studies has in recent years lost much of its luster, as Alan Wolfe of Boston College detailed in these pages a decade ago. There are, of course, plenty of reputable professors in American Studies departments around the country, within the ASA, and even among its leaders. But unless you’re a regular at the ASA’s conferences, you’ll likely be confounded by what has come to supplant the mix of U.S. history, literature, and culture that you dabbled in during college.

 

Once an interdisciplinary inquiry into the character of American society, the field used to be led by such eminences as John Hope Franklin, Daniel Aaron, and Daniel Boorstin. With the “post-colonial” turn in academia, however, using the nation-state as a unit of study came to seem parochial in many quarters. One positive result was a surge of creative new scholarship, focusing on how American ideas spread abroad or how America is seen in the eyes of the world or the ways that cultural phenomena transcended national boundaries. But at the same time, much of the energy in AmStud shifted to a cadre of dogmatists who espoused a cartoon view of the United States as a global oppressor. Imperialism, neocolonialism, and neoliberalism became buzzwords and bugaboos.

 

Moreover, if a large portion of American Studies as a field has descended into ideology and cant, the ASA as a body has led the way. By recklessly merging scholarship and activism, the association has driven away many of the most accomplished writers and thinkers who actually study the United States of America. In gathering support for a letter opposing the boycott, I was amazed by how many of the most serious AmStud scholars told me that they had quit the organization or let their membership lapse, often because of its ridiculous politics. Some typical replies:

 

“The ASA is a disgrace, a shell of its former self. It has been taken up by folks in ideological overdrive who use it as a vehicle for their favorite causes,” emailed David Hollinger, a history professor at UC Berkeley and a former president of the Organization of American Historians.

 

“Obviously this is an outrage. But If I'm surprised, I'm not shocked, given American Studies’ pseudo-scholarly drift in recent years,” said Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton University and contributing editor at this magazine, who ran Princeton’s American Studies program for years.

 

“What a disgrace,” said Steve Whitfield, professor of American civilization at Brandeis. “Unfortunately I resigned in a huff from the ASA over two decades ago, so I can’t resign again.”

 

It’s telling that many of the notable scholars who publicly opposed the boycott—Andrew Delbanco, Morris Dickstein, David J. Garrow, Todd Gitlin, Laura Kalman, Jackson Lears, Kathy Peiss, and numerous others—couldn’t vote on the resolution because they didn’t belong to the ASA. Nor is it a coincidence that many other notable opponents—Patricia Nelson Limerick, Elaine Tyler May, Alice Kessler-Harris, Linda Kerber—were past presidents of the ASA. Despite its name, the organization can no longer claim to represent the professors who actually run and populate American Studies programs around the country, or those whose work actually explores the history and character of American culture.

 

Finally, just as the ASA may not represent actual practitioners of American studies, it’s far from clear that the vote even represents the ASA. The anti-Israel measure was hatched by ASA leaders with scant publicity and placed on the agenda with little warning. This stratagem allowed its promoters to get all their ducks in a row, staffing tables to hand out pro-boycott literature—and lollipops!—to attendees at this year’s conference in Washington the weekend before Thanksgiving. Opponents or skeptics had little chance to prepare their own materials or even make plans to attend the meeting.

 

Using techniques out of the old Communist playbook, ASA officials made a pretense of open debate while packing the meetings so as to preclude true discussion. A “Town Hall” organized by Curtis Marez, the association’s president, featured six speakers echoing each other’s agitprop likening Israel to an apartheid state. Organizers passed the boycott resolution around the room of nearly 500 for signing, though no comparable document was circulated for the opposition. (Indeed, after the conference, the National Council—itself stocked with boycott supporters—refused to distribute dissenting arguments to ASA members or post them to its website.) Following the Town Hall, the participants attended an award ceremony (recipient: Angela Davis, a leading boycott advocate) and then the Presidential Address, in which Marez stumped for the measure. An “open discussion” the next day was similarly one-sided.

 

Even the vote of the ASA membership was contrived to ensure passage. The council decreed that any member who wished to abstain had to dig up his or her ASA ID number, log on to the website—and abstain. Needless to say, few took the trouble. Most people abstained by actually abstaining, but their abstentions didn’t count. Fully mobilized, the anti-Israel activists won a decisive majority of the of the 1,252 votes cast—which was also, it is important to underscore, a decisive minority of the body’s actual membership of roughly 5,000. (When I asked Marez and John Stephens, executive director of the ASA, for a response to any aspect of this piece, Stephens directed me to this site without further comment.)

 

In short, the people who approved this resolution were a few hundred strong, the fringe of a fringe. This is not to dismiss concerns about anti-Israel sentiment on campuses today, which is rising and ominous. The ASA vote should be a loud wake-up call, not so much to the Israeli government (which has bigger problems to worry about, including some of its own ministers) as to the American academy. Organized, highly motivated activists are already mobilizing to commandeer other professional associations to advance their extremist agenda, facing minimal resistance because—as Jon Stewart said in the face of a massive Tea Party rally—the rest of us have lives. Those who treasure academic freedom and deplore ethnic discrimination need to take note and fight back.

 

Still, notwithstanding cries from the right, academia has not yet been captured by the zealots. Groups like the American Association of University Professors have weighed in strongly against the boycott, as did a cohort of some 400 university presidents several years back. Collaborations between American and Israeli universities continue apace. As the ASA flap was unfolding, Cornell University and Israel’s Technion were moving forward with their joint Cornell NYC Tech campus—destined to be an intellectually exciting greenhouse of innovation and research in engineering and technology. The vast majority of American professors who currently attend conferences in Israel or co-author papers with Israeli scholars will feel no compunction about continuing to do so.

 

The anti-Israel activists within the American Studies Association may be patting themselves on the back, congratulating themselves on their effort to marginalize Israel. But there is reason to ask whether they, having squandered the good name of a once-proud organization, are in fact simply marginalizing themselves.

Israel and the Disparity Between Academia and Commerce. By David Bergstein.

Israel and the Disparity Between Academia and Commerce. By David Bergstein. The Algemeiner, December 20, 2013.

Bergstein:

Members of the American Studies Association announced Monday that they had voted by a margin of 2:1 in favor of boycotting Israeli academic institutions to protest Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. According to the ASA’s website, their rationale for said boycott stems from, “Israel’s violations of international law and U.N. resolutions.”

 

Such academic boycotts against Israel have occurred for years in Britain — the most infamous example taking place in 2002, when two academic journals fired Israeli professors from their boards on account of their nationality. The ASA’s vote marks the second such occurrence in the US, with the Association for Asian American Studies being the first to do so in April. However, additional academic boycotts may be on the horizon, as the New York Times reported that the Modern Language Association is set to debate “a resolution calling on the State Department to criticize Israel for barring American professors from going to Gaza and the West Bank when invited by Palestinian universities.”

 

By stark contrast, Israel is receiving unprecedented support from the business world, with American companies in particular demonstrating interest in establishing partnerships with Israeli companies and investing in Israel.

 

Warren Buffett has touted Israel as the “most promising investment hub” outside the US, and in May his own Berkshire Hathaway invested $2 billion for a 20 percent stock ownership of Israeli toolmaker, Iscar (he previously owned the other 80%).  As reported by Forbes magazine in 2012, “of its (Iscar’s) 3,000 Israeli employees, roughly half are Jewish and half Arab.”

 

In November, Apple Inc. acquired Tel Aviv-based PrimeSense for a reported $350 million.  The move marked the second acquisition of an Israeli company by Apple, having purchased flash storage chip maker Anobit in 2012.

 

In July, Israeli navigation company, Waze, was acquired by Google for a reported $1 billion. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, has said that “investing in Israel was one of Google’s best decisions.” In the last three years, Apple, Google and Facebook have acquired 10 Israeli companies.

 

So why the disparity between the worlds of commerce and academia?

 

I submit that academics have the luxury of operating in theory, while those in business have the burden of applying theory to real world problems. In other words, idealism as opposed to realism. When I conferred with some of my business associates as to why Israel is consistently denigrated on campuses but lauded on Wall Street, they concurred. In short, they felt that academia is not accountable, in the succeed versus fail sense of the word, while commerce most definitely is.

 

Academics can point to Israeli policies in the West Bank and immediately declare them unjust. But without considering critical details — not the least of which being that Israel faces continuous imminent threats to its own existence by numerous enemies sworn to annihilate the Jewish state — or submitting anything resembling a viable alternative, those type of assertions are idealistic and impractical.

 

A theory that does not work in practice is, by its very definition, a flawed theory. This is something that separates those who succeed in the world of business from those who fail. The same cannot be said for academia.

 

Academics can posit theory upon theory, all of which may have broad appeal on the surface and seem quite enticing. Yet, rarely do we see whether or not a theory succeeds when applied in the real world. The academic boycott is a perfect example. Though considered largely symbolic by academia, the boycott can be interpreted as a signal to those without a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of Israel and its policies that such actions from Israel’s strongest ally are acceptable. The potential domino effect from one or two small academic boycotts could eventually threaten Israel’s security, its economic development, and its existence.

 

What will be said of the academic boycott, should such a worst-case scenario unfold? Will the academic boycott be viewed as the impetus for such a calamity? Most likely, the academics who endorsed the boycott will continue operating in their ivory towers, unfettered and without regard for whether future theories will be presented despite their flaws.

 

The state of Israel must remain vigilant and proactive, otherwise it will cease to exist. The same is true in the business world. Israel and American commerce have formed a mutually beneficial partnership. When will the same be said for Israel and American academia?

An Arab & A Jew On: ASA’s Academic Boycott.

An Arab & A Jew On: ASA’s Academic Boycott. Hosted by Ahmed Shihab-Eldin and Mike Sacks. Guests: Chemi Shalev and Yousef Munayyer. HuffPost Live, December 19, 2013.

“An Arab & A Jew” debate BDS and the future of Israel/Palestine. By Annie Robbins. Mondoweiss, December 21, 2013.

Liberal Zionism in the Era of BDS. By Charles H. Manekin.

Liberal Zionism in the Era of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement. By Charles H. Manekin (Jerry Haber). The Daily Beast, December 20, 2013.

Kerry Forces Israel’s Moment of Decision. By Caroline Glick.

Kerry forces Israel’s moment of decision. By Caroline Glick. Jerusalem Post, December 16, 2013. Also at CarolineGlick.com.

Glick:

Facing the Palestinians’ continued defiance of the very notion of peaceful coexistence with Israel, Kerry is planning to present his own peace deal next month and try to force Israel to accept it.

 

There was a ghoulish creepiness to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Israel last week. Here we were, beset by the greatest winter storm in a hundred years. All roads to Jerusalem were sealed off. Tens of thousands of Jerusalemites and residents of surrounding areas were locked down in their houses, without power, heat, telephone service or water.

 

And all of the sudden, out of nowhere, Kerry appeared. As Hamas-ruled Gazans begged the supposedly hated IDF to come and save them from the floods, and as Israel took over rescue operations for stranded Palestinians living under the rule of the PLO ’s gangster kleptocracy in Judea and Samaria, here was Kerry, telling us that we’d better accept the deal he plans to present us next month, or face the wrath of the US and Europe, and suffer another Palestinian terror war.

 

What is going on? Why can’t Kerry leave Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the rest of the country alone, even for a week, in the middle of a blizzard of biblical proportions? According to leaks from the now five month old negotiations, after 20 rounds of talks, the Palestinians have not budged from the positions they have held to for the past 50 years. They do not accept Israel’s right to exist. They do not recognize the existence of the Jewish people. They do not believe that the Jews have the right to freedom or self-determination. They insist on taking control of our 3,000 year old capital. They demand that we surrender our ability to defend ourselves from foreign aggression and Palestinian attacks and infiltration from the east.

 

There is nothing new here, of course, This was the case 13 years ago at the Camp David summit. This was the case during the Annapolis summit in 2007 and 2008.

 

This was the case when PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas rejected then prime minister Ehud Olmert’s offer of peace in 2008.

 

Facing the Palestinians’ continued defiance of the very notion of peaceful coexistence with Israel, Kerry is planning to present his own peace deal next month and try to force Israel to accept it. Although the text of Kerry’s deal has not yet been revealed, we know exactly what it will involve just by listening to what he has already told us.

 

In his speech at the Saban Forum on December 7, Kerry said, “For many years the broad contours of an eventual solution have been absolutely clear, and they were crystallized for the world in December of 2000 when president Clinton laid down the parameters for a final-status agreement. They were reaffirmed through the Annapolis process during the Bush administration.”

 

The Clinton parameters involved a near complete American embrace of the PLO ’s maximalist demands. The Annapolis guidelines went even further in the PLO ’s direction.

 

And now, Kerry intends to put forth his own parameters that will be even more forthcoming to the PLO than either the Clinton or Bush administrations were.

 

Like the Clinton and Bush plans, the Kerry parameters will involve Israeli surrender of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount to the PLO , which rejects the historical fact that two Jewish temples were built at the site that was and remains the cradle of Jewish civilization and history and holiest site to Judaism.

 

They will involve the mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria to make room for an anti-Semitic, Jew-free state that maintains its devotion to the destruction of the rump Jewish state.

 

Kerry’s framework deal will involve the mass immigration of hundreds of thousands of foreign-born Arabs, who have been living in al-Qaida-, Hamas- and PLO -controlled UN-run “refugee camps,” for the past four generations.

 

Kerry’s plan will require Israeli society to destroy its cohesion through the dismemberment and destruction of hundreds of Jewish communities. As occurred before the Gaza withdrawal, it will require the government to oversee the demonization and criminalization of well over three million law abiding, patriotic Israeli citizens who oppose the mass expulsions.

 

Kerry’s parameters will require Israel to surrender its ability to defend itself against foreign aggression and Palestinian attacks. As for the Palestinians, implementation of the Kerry parameters will guarantee that all moderate elements in their society, including among Israeli Arabs, will be overwhelmed and destroyed. The PLO state in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, like the Hamas state in Gaza, will be breeding grounds for global jihadists. They will actively incite, organize and oversee an armed insurrection of the Arabs of the Galilee and the Negev, meting out punishment for all dissenters.

 

As for the US forces that Kerry proposes deploying to the Jew-free PLO state, they will be targeted by the Palestinians, just as the Palestinians and the Syrians attacked US Marines in Beirut 30 years ago. And like the Marines in Beirut, they will be withdrawn in humiliation and defeat, but the lesson – that the Arabs perceive the Americans and Jews as enemies of equal weight – will not be learned. And, at any rate, unable to defend itself after agreeing to Kerry’s parameters, Israel will cease to be a strategic ally and be transformed into a strategic basket case. Its destruction will interest Kerry and his supporters just as much as the destruction of South Vietnam interested them in 1975.

 

Aside from being a more anti-Israel version of the Clinton parameters and Bush’s framework, Kerry’s parameters, and framework deal, have one other unique and particularly dangerous feature. Until now, US peace plans followed former prime minister Ehud Barak’s dictum that “nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to.”

 

That is, no hypothetical Israeli concession on Jerusalem, for instance, will be binding unless a final deal is concluded.

 

Kerry indicated at the Saban Forum that his goal is to coerce Israel into making irrevocable concessions up front, before the Palestinians agree to peaceful coexistence.

 

As he put it, “A basic framework will have to address all the core issues – borders, security, refugees, Jerusalem, mutual recognition, and an end of claims. And it will have to establish agreed guidelines for subsequent negotiations that will fill out the details in a full-on peace treaty.”

 

For the past five and a half years, Netanyahu’s strategy for dealing with US President Barack Obama has been to try to survive him. He’s withstood Obama’s constant demand for Israeli national suicide for “peace” by giving the bare minimum of revocable concession possible to keep Obama at bay.

 

But with Kerry poised to shove his lethal parameters down our throats, parameters that will require Israel to irrevocably accept terms of peace that will destroy the country, it is obvious that Netanyahu needs to adopt a longer-term strategy. Our goal cannot be limited to waiting out Obama. Our goal must be to extricate Israel from the two-state trap.

 

Yes, Israel will pay a huge price for jumping ship. For 20 years, non-leftist Israeli leaders have been trying to go along to get along with the Left, and the Americans and their ever-escalating demands. But Kerry’s obsessive harping, and his insistence on pushing forward with his disastrous framework deal forces our hand.

 

Either we pay a huge price now, or accept our destruction within five to 15 years.

Obama’s Four-State Solution. By Caroline Glick.

Obama’s four-state solution. By Caroline B. Glick. Jerusalem Post, December 9, 2013. Also at CarolineGlick.com.

Glick:

Israel has no reason to withdraw from Judea and Samaria. Absorbing the areas into sovereign Israel will not endanger the country demographically.

 

Inadvertently, President Barack Obama just made an important contribution to our understanding of the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

 

Since Hamas ousted all PLO forces from the Gaza Strip in 2007, Gaza has operated as a separate political entity from Judea and Samaria. Indeed, it has been a de facto independent Palestinian state, controlled by Hamas.

 

Gaza’s only connection to Judea and Samaria has been financial. Every month, the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority in Judea and Samaria transfers tens of millions of dollars in US and other international donor funds to Gaza to finance the terror state.

 

Despite the clear distinction between the two areas, the US and the rest of the world have continued to insist that an Israeli-PLO peace deal will cover Gaza as well as Judea and Samaria. Obama always insists that a future Palestinian state must be “territorially contiguous,” meaning in a final deal Israel will be required to cut itself in half in order to give the Palestinians a land corridor connecting Gaza with Judea and Samaria.

 

But during his remarks at the Saban Forum on Saturday, Obama let the cat out of the bag. Gaza, he admitted, is a separate entity. A peace deal, he explained, “is going to have to happen in stages.”

 

As he sees it, a peace deal will involve an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. A post-Israel Judea and Samaria will be so wonderful that the Gazans will decide to join it.

 

Obama explained, “If there is a model where young Palestinians in Gaza are looking and seeing that in the West Bank Palestinians are able to live in dignity, with self-determination, and suddenly their economy is booming and trade is taking place because they have created an environment in which Israel is confident about its security and a lot of the old barriers to commerce and educational exchange and all that has begun to break down, that’s something that the young people of Gaza are going to want. And the pressure that will be placed for the residents of Gaza to experience that same future is something that is going to be I think overwhelmingly appealing.”

 

Before considering whether Gazans will likely behave as Obama expects them to, we need to consider the implications of his assertion that Gaza will not be automatically included in a peace deal.

 

Israelis and Palestinians engage one another for different reasons. Israelis are told we need to engage the Palestinians because they pose a demographic threat to our continued viability as a Jewish state.

 

In his remarks at the Saban Forum, Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that the Palestinian “demographic time bomb” is an existential threat on the level of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. If we don’t vacate Judea and Samaria as we vacated Gaza, he warned, we will be doomed as a Jewish nation state.

 

For the Palestinians, the peace process is supposed to lead to a satisfaction of their assumed yearning for self-determination as a nation.

 

Israeli demographics and Palestinian nationalism have been the basic assumptions upon which the peace process has been based. But the Obama-recognized fact that Gaza is a separate political entity demonstrates the emptiness of both.

 

The truth is that the “demographic time bomb” is a PLO-concocted lie. In its 1997 census, the PLO falsified its data and inflated the number of Palestinians by 50 percent.

 

They then projected natural growth and immigration rates that bore no relation whatsoever to reality.

 

In truth, demography is one of Israel’s strongest advantages, not an existential threat. Were Israel to absorb the Palestinian populations of Gaza and Judea and Samaria tomorrow, Israel’s Jewish majority would be reduced from 78% to well over 50%. While Israel’s Jewish identity would not be in doubt, it would be weakened.

 

On the other hand, without Gaza, there is no demographic threat to Israel’s Jewish majority. If Israel applies its sovereignty over Judea and Samaria and offers a path to citizenship to its Palestinian residents, Israel would still retain a two-thirds Jewish majority. And if current fertility and immigration rates hold, within 15 to 20 years, Jews could well restore their 80 percent majority overall.

 

Then there is the Palestinian nationalism issue.

 

Obama’s acknowledgement that Gazans will have to be convinced to join a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria exposes the lie at the heart of it. Since the League of Nations assigned both sides of the Jordan River to the Jewish people in 1922, the international community has insisted that the path to peace will be forged by taking land from the Jews and giving it to the Arabs.

 

First we had a two-state solution when Jordan, with its overwhelming Palestinian majority, was carved out of the Jewish territory.

 

For the past 20 years, we have been told that we need a three-state solution with another Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

 

Since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, we have had two Palestinian states – in Gaza and Jordan. And yet, the Gazans who we are told are motivated by nationalist aspirations have refused to declare an independent Palestinian state in Gaza. And now Obama is talking about a four-state solution – three Palestines and one rump Israel.

 

The Palestinians’ refusal to ever view the areas under their control as the focus of their nationalist aspirations indicates that there is something awry in the international community’s assumption that the Palestinians are motivated by nationalist aspirations.

 

And that brings us to Obama’s projection that once the Gazans see how great things are in post-Israel Judea and Samaria, they will join the peace train. We’ve been told things like this before.

 

In 1993 we were told that the Palestinians as a whole would embrace peace once Israel recognized the PLO and allowed it to set up an autonomous government in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. In the event, the Palestinians became more violent and radicalized and anti-Jewish under PLO rule, until in 2006 they elected Hamas to lead them.

 

In 2005 we were told that once Israel vacated Gaza, the Gazans would abandon their war against Israel and use their energies to transform Gaza into a Middle Eastern Singapore. Instead they transformed it into a Middle Eastern Afghanistan.

 

In 2007, after Hamas ousted the PLO from Gaza, we were told that the international community would pour so much money into the PLO-run PA in Judea and Samaria that the Gazans would decide that they want the PLO back. Instead, Hamas has grown more popular in Judea and Samaria.

 

In other words, there is no reason to think Obama’s sunny projection is correct.

 

Clearly without meaning to, Obama told us the truth.

 

There is no demographic time bomb. Israel has no reason to withdraw from Judea and Samaria. Absorbing the areas into sovereign Israel will not endanger the country demographically.

 

And the fact that the Gazans do not see themselves as part of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, (or in Jordan), shows that the Palestinian national movement is not what it has been billed as. Obama’s four-state solution is not about demography or Palestinian nationalism.

 

It is about making up reasons to force Israel to surrender its strategic and historic heartland.

The Tragic Situation. By David Brooks.

The Tragic Situation. By David Brooks. New York Times, December 19, 2013.

David Brooks comes out against the occupation. By Philip Weiss. Mondoweiss, December 20, 2013.

Secretary Kerry’s Derring-Do. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Secretary Kerry’s Derring-Do. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, December 17, 2013.

An “Arab Idol” Wows His Fans in America. By Lindsay Crouse.

An “Arab Idol” Wows His Fans in America. By Lindsay Crouse. New York Times, December 18, 2013.

Neanderthals and the Dead. By John Noble Wilford.

Neanderthals and the Dead. By John Noble Wilford. New York Times, December 16, 2013.

Evidence supporting an intentional Neandertal burial at La Chapelle-aux-Saints. By William Rendu et al. PNAS, published online, December 16, 2013. [check back in 6 months to download PDF]

Toe Fossil Provides Complete Neanderthal Genome. By Carl Zimmer.

Top Fossil Provides Complete Neanderthal Genome. By Carl Zimmer. New York Times, December 18, 2013.

Archaic humans: Four makes a party. By Ewan Birney and Jonathan K. Pritchard. Nature, published online, December 18, 2013.

The complete genome sequence of Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains. By Kay Prüfer et al. Nature, published online, December 18, 2013.

Abstract:

We present a high-quality genome sequence of a Neanderthal woman from Siberia. We show that her parents were related at the level of half-siblings and that mating among close relatives was common among her recent ancestors. We also sequenced the genome of a Neanderthal from the Caucasus to low coverage. An analysis of the relationships and population history of available archaic genomes and 25 present-day human genomes shows that several gene flow events occurred among Neanderthals, Denisovans and early modern humans, possibly including gene flow into Denisovans from an unknown archaic group. Thus, interbreeding, albeit of low magnitude, occurred among many hominin groups in the Late Pleistocene. In addition, the high-quality Neanderthal genome allows us to establish a definitive list of substitutions that became fixed in modern humans after their separation from the ancestors of Neanderthals and Denisovans.

A possible model of gene flow events in the Late Pleistocene. The direction and estimated magnitude of inferred gene flow events are shown. Branch lengths and timing of gene flows are not drawn to scale. The dashed line indicates that it is uncertain if Denisovan gene flow into modern humans in mainland Asia occurred directly or via Oceania. D.I. denotes the introgressing Denisovan, N.I. the introgressing Neanderthal. Note that the age of the archaic genomes precludes detection of gene-flow from modern humans into the archaic hominins.

From Ukraine to South Africa: The End of History (Again)? By Leon Hadar.

From Ukraine to South Africa: The End of History (Again)? By Leon Hadar. The American Conservative, December 19, 2013.

In Kiev, High Stakes for Democracy. By Chrystia Freeland. New York Times, December 6, 2013.


Hadar:

Despite the promises of liberal internationalist elites, religious fundamentalism, ethnic identity, and the old notion of nationalism have proved more resilient than unrelenting global democratic progress, not only in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Libya, but even in the advanced industrialized nations of the European Union.

 

Meanwhile, as the latest Pew Research opinion polls suggested, a majority of Americans have no interest in making the world safe for democracy and would prefer the United States to “mind its own business.” The American people are largely indifferent to the Freedom Agenda, and what they want, to paraphrase what Stalin once said about socialism, is liberal democracy in one country, the United States.

 

But after the death of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and in the throes of continuing political unrest in Ukraine, liberal internationalism seems to be coming back to life. It’s as though we’re back where it all started, at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Empire, followed by the downfall of the apartheid regime in South Africa, with the sense that in spite of many setbacks, universal liberal democracy is once again on the march.

 

“The true surprise—and one that should inspire democrats around the world—is the spontaneous and spirited resistance of Ukrainian civil society” to what Chrystia Freeland described in the New York Times recently as the “thuggish leadership” of Ukraine and “Moscow’s ferocious intervention” in that country’s affairs. A “new, well-educated, well travelled, comprehensively wired generation has matured” in Ukraine, and these “young Ukrainians know the difference between democratic capitalism and state capitalism and they know which one they want,” Freeland concluded.

 

But didn’t we hear the same sort of arguments during the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004? Those who are depicted today as proponents of state capitalism were bashed then as “remnants of the communist elite” or “former communist party bosses” and today’s friendly yuppies, as Freeland portrays them, were hailed as democratic activists. But then the current “thuggish” president Viktor Yanukovych came to power through open and democratic elections.

 

The American media tend to downplay the ethnic and regional strains underlying the political tensions at the core of the color revolutions, not to mention the Arab spring. Recall that President George W. Bush was not even aware of the historical conflict between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq when he set out to establish democracy there, and that it took some time for the press and official Washington to understand that what was happening in Iraq has less to do with the struggle for democracy and more with sectarian fighting.

 

Hence while there is no doubt that the current political tensions in Ukraine give expression to cultural frictions between young urbane professionals and aging conservative politicians, bureaucrats, and their business cronies, it’s also a reflection of historical antagonism and the conflicting sense of national identity among Ukrainian speakers in the Western and Central parts of the country and Russian speakers in Eastern and Southern Ukraine.

 

So it was not surprising that during recent elections voters in the Western and Central Ukrainian provinces voted mostly for political parties (Our Ukraine, Batkivshchyna) and presidential candidates (Viktor Yuschenko, Yulia Tymoshenko) with pro-Western platforms, while voters in the Southern and Eastern areas voted for parties (CPU, Party of Regions) and presidential candidates (Viktor Yanukovych) more oriented toward Russia. And both sides look toward outside powers (the U.S. and EU on one side; Russia on the other side) to support for policies that are rooted to some extent in historical-cultural experiences.

 

One could probably empathize with those Ukrainian nationalists who prefer to be linked to the EU rather than Russia (and Belorussia), and have access to the EU’s economic and cultural milieu while rejecting subservience to Russia which for many years repressed and exploited Ukraine.

 

In the same way, one could also identify with black South Africans who fought to liberate themselves from minority rule by the Afrikaners who had deprived them of political and economic freedoms.

 

The fight against apartheid has been viewed in the liberal internationalist narrative as an extension of the saga of the civil rights in the United States. In fact the struggle against apartheid took place in the confines of the West, and was aimed at the rulers of white controlled South Africa who had resisted pressure to reform a racist political structure.

 

The apartheid system collapsed because at the end of the day, F.W. de Klerk, like the last communist rulers in Eastern Europe (or for that matter Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic) and their people, wanted to remain part of the West and succumbed to the pressure to change.

 

The same kind of pressure operates today on the leaders of Ukraine and Israel. But the Enlightenment Project as it evolved between 1789 and 1989 in the West is mostly irrelevant to the aspirations of the political elites and people in the Rest. Whether the new post-Mandela South Africa remains in the West or joins the Rest remains an open question.


Freeland:

When Soviet communism collapsed, the West’s declarations of triumph were so full of hubris that it was easy to forget what was right about them. The Ukrainians protesting in downtown Kiev are a reminder that there was actually a lot to glow about.

 

But the struggle that seemed to be over in 1989 is still going on, and today’s battleground is the square that protesters have renamed the Euromaidan, or Euro-place. The people there are again insisting on the choice of a regime, a type of government, that they and their Soviet compatriots first tried to make in 1991. They know they want what we have and what we are. As our own self-assurance fades, we need to see what they are showing us.

 

When the Berlin Wall fell, Francis Fukuyama wasn’t the only one who believed history had ended. It was tempting then to imagine that the authoritarian form of government and centrally planned economic system that Moscow had championed and inspired in a lot of the world would inevitably give way to capitalist democracy and the greater freedom and prosperity it delivered.

 

But the new century brought disappointment. The spread of freedom had seemed inexorable in the 1990s: As Eastern Europe was rejoining the rest of the Continent, apartheid was being dismantled in South Africa, and India and China were becoming full participants in the world economy.

 

But in Iraq, Afghanistan and then even in the countries that made a bid for freedom with the Arab Spring, the progress of the Western idea began to seem a lot less inevitable. Russia and the former Central Asian republics developed a new, post-communist form of authoritarianism; China never dropped the original, communist version, though it finally figured out, at least for now, how to combine it with robust economic growth.

 

Meanwhile, back at home, free-market capitalism is feeling tired. Europe is economically sclerotic, politically fragile and flirting with xenophobia. The United States is still struggling to recover from the 2007-9 recession. The neo-authoritarians in Beijing and Moscow are, by contrast, increasingly confident.

 

In the developing world, particularly Africa, China presents state capitalism as a more effective alternative to paralysis-prone democracy. Russia, too, is reasserting itself, and in ways designed to create maximum Western discomfort, ranging from an 11th-hour chemical weapons deal in Syria to offering Edward Snowden safe haven.

 

State capitalism’s latest power play is in Ukraine, whose thuggish leadership backed out of signing a trade and association agreement with Europe at the last minute. It did so under fierce economic and political pressure from the Kremlin. Brussels did not expect Moscow’s ferocious intervention. It should have. Ukraine has always been Russia’s first and essential foreign conquest.

 

The true surprise — and one that should inspire democrats around the world — is the spontaneous and spirited resistance of Ukrainian civil society to this about-face. For more than a week, Ukrainians have been protesting in the Euromaidan, and in front of government buildings throughout the capital and across the country. They have done so in miserable winter weather and in the face of police brutality.

 

What is important about the demonstrators is their certainty that democracy matters, and that it can be made to work. That’s remarkable, because this is 2013, not 1991, or even 2004, when the Ukrainian Orange Revolution prevailed, and then sputtered.

 

Democracy and independence are no longer shiny imports. Ukrainians have enjoyed some version of both for more than two decades; nine years ago, starting with protests in the same square, they succeeded in getting the democracy and the independence-minded president they wanted.

 

None of that worked out very well. The democrats who came to power after the Orange Revolution were such a disappointment that Viktor Yanukovich, who tried and failed to seize the presidency in 2004, was democratically elected in 2010 and is at the center of the current fight. If anyone has a right to be cynical about the power of an engaged civil society to make a real difference, it is Ukrainians. But they aren’t.

 

The people have taken to the streets in support of political values, rather than nationalist ones, or short-term economic interests. More than 20 years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Ukrainian economy remains closely connected to Russia’s, and Vladimir Putin has made it clear that Ukrainians will pay higher prices for energy and face stiffer barriers to Russian markets if they choose Europe.

 

For the protesters, these economic sanctions are direct and personal. I spoke to one Ukrainian executive whose company exports more than half of its products to Russia. (For fear of economic reprisals, he asked that his name not be used.) Since Ukraine strongly signaled a few months ago that it would sign the European deal, exports are down 10 percent. If the agreement goes through, he thinks his sales will fall by 40 percent. But he has spent several evenings in the square, joined by many professional colleagues. His company’s bottom line notwithstanding, he wants Ukraine to make what the protesters call “the European choice.”

 

That’s because, in some ways, history really did end in 1989. Authoritarian societies, even ones that are able to generate strong economic growth, deny their citizens the freedom and the dignity that Western market democracies provide. Over the past two decades, Ukrainians have suffered from inept, corrupt and occasionally brutal government. But under that ugly skin, a new, well-educated, well-traveled, comprehensively wired generation has matured. These young Ukrainians know the difference between democratic capitalism and state capitalism and they know which one they want.

 

One community on the Euromaidan is computer game developers. Ukraine has a lot of them. One of the most successful is Andrew Prokhorov, head of 4A Games. He used his Facebook page to urge fellow gamers to join him in the square. His activism caught the attention of Polygon, an American gaming website.

 

“People want to move toward European values, especially the younger generation,” Mr. Prokhorov told Polygon. “The government aims for the quickest way to fill up their wallets. There is no place for our corruptionists in Europe. I come out to say, ‘Yes to Europe.’??”

 

From Washington to Warsaw, democratic capitalism is demoralized. Our political institutions aren’t up to the challenges of the 21st century, and the economy isn’t delivering for the middle class in the way it did during the postwar era, when the original version of the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, the Cold War, was at its peak.

 

That conflict has become a cool war, and those of us on the democratic side of the barricades aren’t so sure we have all the answers — or that it is a struggle we are all that interested in engaging. Russia has no such qualms. China, where Ukraine’s president traveled this week, knows which side it is on, too.

 

But as in 1989 the most important fault line in the world today runs through a cold, crowded, euphoric public square in Eastern Europe. The Ukrainians there are fighting for themselves, but their battle should also help us to remember where we stand and why it matters.