Sex’s Feel-Good Evolution: Charles Darwin’s Erotic Shocker. By David A. Rosenbaum.

Sex’s feel-good evolution: Charles Darwin’s erotic shocker. By David A. Rosenbaum. Salon, March 9, 2014.

Time to Put and End to the Fantasy of a Palestinian People. By Mordechai Kedar.

Time to put an end to the fantasy of a Palestinian people. By Mordechai Kedar. i24 News, March 8, 2014.

Small Homogeneous States Only Solution for Middle East. By Mordechai Kedar. IMRA, April 1. 2011.

Imagining a Remapped Middle East. By Robin Wright. NJBR, September 29, 2013.

The Arab Collapse. By Ralph Peters. NJBR, May 20, 2013.


Kedar [fantasy]: 

Despite the benefits of this ambiguous situation, Israel should adopt a clearer policy: Since the PLO has not abandoned its plan to destroy Israel, it must end the dream of establishing a state under the rule of this organization. The Hamas movement began the process in Gaza, and Israel must continue it in Judea and Samaria in order to establish seven city-states and to leave the rural areas under Israeli control.

The seven city-states will free most of the Arab population in Judea and Samaria from Israeli control and Israel can offer citizenship to residents of the rural space. These city-states based on local clans will be real entities and not the fantasies of some Palestinian intellectuals and tired Israeli souls regarding the existence of a single united Palestinian people in Gaza and in Judea and Samaria.

The Palestinian people exist just as the Syrian people do, the Iraqi, Libyan or Sudanese people. The social reality in the Middle East is rooted in the culture of the tribe, the ethnic group (Arabs, Kurds, etc.), the religious group (Muslims, Druze, Alawites, Christians, etc.) and sectarian group (Sunni, Shia, etc.). Only countries based on one homogeneous group can survive in this area, and provide their citizens with a reasonable life.

Israel must base its policy on reality, not on dreams and fantasies of a new Middle East.

Naftali Bennett: Palestinians Need to Recognize Israel as a Jewish State.

Israeli minister: Palestinians need to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Naftali Bennett interviewed by Fareed Zakaria. Fareed Zakaria GPS, March 8, 2014. Additional transcript here.

Russia Has Already Lost the War. By Chrystia Freeland.

Russia Has Already Lost the War. By Chrystia Freeland. New York Times, March 7, 2014.

Cut Off the Russian Oligarchs and They’ll Dump Putin. By Garry Kasparov.

Cut Off the Russian Oligarchs and They’ll Dump Putin. By Garry Kasparov. The Wall Street Journal, March 6, 2014.

Vikings, Season 2 Episode 1: Brother’s War.

Vikings, Season 2 Episode 1: Brother’s War. Video. Daryl Dixon, March 7, 2014. YouTube. History Channel.

Were the Vikings Really So Bloodthirsty? By Tom de Castella.

Were the Vikings really so bloodthirsty? By Tom de Castella. BBC News Magazine, March 5, 2014.

Decapitated bodies found in Dorset burial pit were executed Vikings. Mirror, March 11, 2010.

Archaeologists uncover headless corpses of 51 Vikings executed by Saxons in Dorset killing field. By David Derbyshire. Mail Online, March 12, 2010.

The Viking death squads who got a taste of their own medicine: Mass grave shows how the Anglo-Saxons hit back at invaders. By Tamara Cohen. Mail Online, January 25, 2012.

Mass grave belonged to Viking mercenaries. Nick Collins. The Telegraph, January 25, 2012.

Viking mass grave linked to elite killers of the medieval world. University of Cambridge, January 25, 2012.

“Given to the Ground”: A Viking Age Mass Grave on Ridgeway Hill, Weymouth. Oxford Archaeology.

Mass Grave of Beheaded Vikings Discovered. Video. BBC News, March 16, 2010. YouTube.




BBC Blood of the Vikings. Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Video. YouTube.

A Baleful Peace Process. By Reuel Marc Gerecht.

A Baleful Peace Process. By Reuel Marc Gerecht. The Weekly Standard, March 17, 2014. Also here.

Israel Today: A Society Without a Center. By Carlo Strenger.

Israel today: a society without a center. By Carlo Strenger. Haaretz, March 7, 2014.

The struggle for Israel’s soul: Human rights vs. rampant nationalism. By Carlo Strenger. Haaretz, January 22, 2014.

If I were an American Jew, I’d worry about Israel’s racist cancer. By Daniel Blatman. Haaretz, March 7, 2014.

Strenger (The struggle):

The conflict between the center-left and the ultranationalist right isn’t about risk management.


Economy Minister Naftali Bennett recently claimed that Israel shouldn’t worry about the implications of the occupation on its economy. Israel, he said, survived earlier boycotts and would survive future ones.

 

His view on the creation of a Palestinian state was different. Israel’s economy wouldn’t survive the constant shelling of Tel Aviv and Herzliya from a Palestinian state, or the shooting down of airliners flying into Ben-Gurion Airport by a terrorist waiting in the Judean Hills, Bennnett said.

 

His concern about what would happen if radical jihadist terror groups infiltrated the Palestinian state isn’t to be taken lightly, and these concerns play an important role in the negotiations with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Given the chaos in Syria and Al-Qaida’s role there – often literally at the Israeli border – it would be preposterous to dismiss Bennett’s scenario out of hand.

 

Then again, I see no reason to take Bennett’s assessment of the future as authoritative. Consider, for example, the six former chiefs of the Shin Bet security service interviewed in the documentary “The Gatekeepers.” They’re likely to be at least as informed as Bennett about the risks in establishing a Palestinian state, yet they’re all convinced that Israel’s only way to survive is to end the occupation.

 

There was some hope that Bennett, a successful startup entrepreneur, would put a modicum of sanity into the national-religious way of thinking. Alas, we were wrong. After all, a few months ago, he suggested that Israel rupture ties with the European Union, Israel’s largest trading partner, over the EU’s guidelines prohibiting any EU grants, loans or prizes from going to activities of Israeli entities in the West Bank, Golan Heights or East Jerusalem. That was an unbecoming statement for a government minister.

 

Bennett’s propensity for populist hyperbole may make him popular in his ultranationalist constituency, but very few others are likely to take him seriously when he talks about the impact of a boycott by the free world on Israel’s economy. Instead of Bennett’s tirades, I prefer the judgment of the many leading businesspeople who are warning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the consequences of continuing the occupation.

 

But let’s face it. In a place as volatile as the Middle East, the certainties are even fewer than in calmer regions – and even in the United States and Europe almost nobody foresaw the economic meltdown of 2007/8. In the end, the conflict between Bennett and the Israeli ultranationalist right on the one hand, and the center-left on the other, isn’t about risk management. It’s a struggle for Israel’s soul.

 

Bennett is enamored with a mythical Israel that relies on itself and God’s guidance alone. He dreams of reestablishing the Kingdom of David and Solomon, which he imagines as mighty and impressive. And he disdains the virtues of prudence and diplomacy as well as consideration of the rights of non-Jews.

 

The story of Masada is an inspiration for him. Bar Kochba, the leader of the revolt against Rome that led to the death of 600,000 Jews in the second century C.E., is a story of heroism for him. Hence we can slap Uncle Sam in the face and tell the EU to leave us alone; Jews no longer need to listen to anybody.

 

Jewish liberals in Israel and in the Diaspora look at this war-mongering mythology with surprise and sometimes shock. They know that the Kingdom of David and Solomon was nothing but an extended tribal chiefdom, and that there is very little to be learned about modern statecraft from Israel’s kings.

 

They know that Bar Kochba was a fool who brought nothing but suffering to the Jewish people. If anything, they want to connect to the humanist-ethical element in the Jewish tradition, not to the stories of misguided pseudo-heroism.

 

In addition, they know that the idea of an Israel that doesn’t depend on anybody is an adolescent fantasy. They know that Israel’s alliance with the West is a vital strategic asset, and that Israel couldn’t survive long without the backing of the United States.

 

But the alliance with the West isn’t just a matter of prudence and economic interest, it’s an expression of core values. Jewish liberals care about Israel’s soul. We recoil from Bennett’s vision of a brutal country that cares about nothing but itself. We feel morally bound by the story of Jewish suffering to a simple conclusion: We have known what it’s like to be devoid of rights, trampled on, disowned and displaced.

 

And Jewish liberals ranging from René Cassin, who was instrumental in crafting the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to the founders of the Anti-Defamation League, have been involved in the causes of liberty, equality and human rights around the globe. As Jews we want to fight injustice, not perpetrate it.

 

We care about Israel’s security as much as Bennett does. But when we look at the sheer brutishness of the behavior of many settlers, the callousness of their disregard for Palestinians, we simply say: This is not Jewishness as we understand it. This is not the dream of Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha’am, nor does it correspond to the values of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which explicitly disavows discrimination based on religion and ethnicity.

 

This is why we are willing to take certain risks for the sake of salvaging Israel’s soul. We are not naïve. Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, Amram Mitzna, Meir Dagan, Ami Ayalon and Yuval Diskin served Israel’s security for most of their lives, and they all have thought the occupation is a greater danger to Israel’s survival than the dangers in retreating from the West Bank.

 

I trust their judgment on matters of security. But even more I’m filled with pride that despite their keen awareness of the dangers, their concern for Israel’s soul determines their vision for Israel’s future. For without a soul, Israel will lose the strength to continue renewing and reinventing itself and make good on the promise of being the democratic homeland of the Jews.


Strenger (Israel today):

The clash of three sacred values − liberal Zionism, ultra-Orthodox continuity and romantic nationalism − is more dangerous for Israel’s survival than any external enemy.

 

Much ink has been spilled about who has benefitted from the showdown between Yesh Atid and the ultra-Orthodox Haredim. I think that beyond this issue it is important to reflect dispassionately on what recent events teach us about Israeli society.

 

Research in political psychology has shown that many groups rally around sacred values that are non-negotiable: No compromise is possible about these values without the group’s feeling that its very existence is threatened. This is why people are often willing to die for these values, and why pragmatic arguments do not motivate them to compromise but generally increase their intransigence, because their core identity is at stake.

 

Israel today has three basic forms of sacred values that have almost no common denominator.

 

Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, Labor, Hatnuah and Meretz represent liberal Zionism. In their view Jewish history shows that Jews need and are entitled to a nation-state of their own. But they also think that this state must be a liberal democracy, which means that there must be strict equality before the law independent of religion, ethnicity or gender. Many commentators have questioned the wisdom of Lapid’s insistence on the Haredim’s serving in the IDF on pragmatic grounds. They have not realized that for him equality before the law is a sacred value and that without it the Zionist project is doomed.

 

For the Haredim the one sacred value is the Jewish people’s eternity (Netzah Yisrael), and for them the State of Israel is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for Jewish survival. Judaism, in their view, has survived because of only one reason: that there have always been Jews who have obeyed the laws of Judaism in the strictest manner. From their point of view Israel might disappear, but without them, the Haredim, Judaism will perish.

 

It is crucial for Haredim that young men and women be educated in a way that will make sure that they remain embedded in Haredi society and not be exposed to external influences before they have spent a long time in the Yeshiva world, are married, have children and are basically incapable of leaving Haredi society. Many secular Jews see the Haredim as nothing but parasites and do not realize that many Haredim see army service at an early age together with secular Jews as an existential threat to their sacred values.

 

Then there are the romantic nationalists for whom the State of Israel is not just the homeland of the Jews, but realizes the sacred bond between the Jewish people and the Greater Land of Israel. This idea derives from the extreme European right since the late 19th century, and is fused with messianic orthodoxy in national-religious Zionism. Democracy is secondary for romantic nationalists: If the sacred bond of people and land is endangered by the principles of liberal democracy, they are willing to sacrifice them, for example by curtailing freedom of speech for left-wingers or leaving Arab citizens with limited or no political rights.

 

The bitterness and the violent rhetoric of Israel’s political culture are largely due to this clash of three sacred values, with sometimes extreme consequences. The settler movement has already shown that it is capable of extreme violence when the two-state solution is about to be implemented. Haredim have proven that they are willing to go to prison to avoid what they see as fatal infringements on their way of life.

 

Liberal Zionism is at a disadvantage because it refrains from violence and abides with the law. Many believe that liberal Zionism’s majority in Israel balances this disadvantage – but this is an illusion. Likud is no longer liberal-Zionist but has adopted romantic nationalism. Only 48 MKs, i.e. 40 percent of the Knesset, represent liberal Zionism.

 

As a result of this clash of sacred values, growing numbers of Israelis feel they might no longer have a place in Israel without abandoning their identity. The Belzer Hasidim have declared that they will emigrate to the U.S. if forced to serve in the IDF. Ever-growing numbers of liberal-leaning Israelis leave for Berlin, New York or Los Angeles because they feel alienated by the rule of right-wing nationalism – a development encouraged by Im Tirtzu leader Ronen Shoval’s call for left-wingers to leave the country if they can’t stand the nationalist right.

 

None of these developments are to be taken lightly: At this point in history the clash of sacred values is more dangerous for Israel’s survival than any external enemy.

Bashing Netanyahu Won’t Bring Peace Any Closer. By Jeff Jacoby.

Bashing Netanyahu won’t bring peace any closer. By Jeff Jacoby. Boston Globe, March 5, 2014. Also here.

Jacoby:

The delusion at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process is that the lack of Palestinian sovereignty is what keeps the conflict alive, and that the tension and violence would end if only the Arabs of Palestine could have a state of their own.

That has never been true. What drives the conflict is not a hunger for Palestinian statehood, but a deep-rooted rejection of Jewish statehood. Arab leaders vehemently rejected the “two-state solution” that the United Nations recommended in 1947. Nearly 70 years later, the Palestinians are still unwilling to acknowledge Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people — to recognize that Jews are entitled to a sovereign state in their national homeland, just as the Irish are entitled to Ireland, the Italians to Italy, and the Japanese to Japan.

Yet Palestinian leaders heatedly insist that they will never agree to any such thing. “This is out of the question,” Abbas said last month. Palestinian Authority negotiator Saeb Erekat complains: “When you say, ‘Accept Israel as a Jewish state,’ you are asking me to change my narrative.”

Just so. That narrative — that Jews are aliens in the Middle East, and Jewish sovereignty over any territory is intolerable — is precisely what must change if this conflict is to be resolved. Bashing Netanyahu may please the anti-Israel set, but it brings a just and lasting peace not one hour closer.

Rick Perry at CPAC: It’s Time for a Little Rebellion on the Battlefield of Ideas.

Rick Perry at CPAC: It’s Time for a Little Rebellion on the Battlefield of Ideas. Video. The ACU, March 7, 2014. YouTube. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Rick Perry: “Time for a Little Rebellion.” By Jerome Corsi and Garth Kant. WND, March 7, 2014.

Rick Perry wows crowd with #CPAC2014 speech. By Mandy Nagy. Legal Insurrection, March 7, 2014.

The Lure of Nationalism. By Robert Kaplan.

The Lure of Nationalism. By Robert Kaplan. Real Clear World, March 6, 2014.

Kaplan:

Nationalism is in the air. The scholars may talk about universal values and the need to combat all forms of determinism and essentialism. The media may see the world through the prism of universal human rights. The global elite may meet at Davos and proclaim the ability to engineer a liberal order that can defeat what it sees as primordial divisions. And yet nationalism – as well as other exclusivist tendencies such as tribalism and sectarianism – manages to survive and prosper.

 

Nationalism is alive and well throughout East Asia, where modern states united by race and ethnicity, such as China, Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines, contest not lofty ideas but zero-sum geography – that is, lines on the blue water map of the Pacific Basin. The advance of military technology (fighter jets, ballistic missiles, surveillance satellites, warships) has created a new geography of strategic competition between two great world civilizations, those of China and India. The Middle East has experienced less a democratic revolution than a crisis of central authority, in which ethnic, tribal, religious and sectarian identities have become more important than ever in modern times. In Europe, the steady decline of the European Union, originating in a half-decade-long economic crisis, has led gradually to the resurgence of national identities and right-wing, anti-immigrant movements. In the heart of Africa we see fighting and the fear of ethnic cleansing based on religious and tribal identities in the Central African Republic and South Sudan. Clearly, the scholarly, journalistic and business elites are speaking a different language than large elements of the masses worldwide.

 

The elite vision of a world in which a universal identity would vanquish narrower ones was a product of the end of the Cold War and the onset of the communications revolution. The Cold War's conclusion fostered the hope that a democratic universalism would make increasing headway, now that ideological battles were a thing of the past. The communications revolution that followed – that is, the dynamic development of the Internet, smartphones, social media and more frequent and cheaper air transport links – was believed to be an additional force for global unity.

 

But technology is value-neutral. It can be a force for division as well as for integration. The more that people of different origins and values come in contact with one another, the more they become aware of not just how similar they are, but of how different they are. Proximity, whether real or virtual, can ignite the deepest animosities.

 

And so can freedom.

 

“Freedom” is a sacred cow in the American political lexicon. But freedom can unleash not just the power of the individual, but also the power of the group. For as people become liberated from oppression they become aware not just of a prideful self-identity, but also of a prideful ethnic or sectarian identity. Americans assume that other people’s experience of freedom will necessarily mirror their own, but that is a conceit more than an analysis.

 

In this vein, the immediate post-Cold War era constituted an interlude of naïve assumptions. Perhaps the most obscure but telling of those naïve assumptions was the easy conventional wisdom in the early 1990s that what the Middle East required was commercial mass media – a media relatively free of government constraints, which would dilute the region’s anti-Western attitudes and its political, ethnic and religious divides, especially those between Arabs and Israelis. If only the dictatorial regimes controlled less of what people thought, then the Middle East would be more peaceful. More freedom, in other words. Well, such mass media did come into being. By the standards of the region’s past, Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya were independent networks modeled in style and sophistication after American ones. But their points of view – in their Arabic language broadcasts, at least – turned out to be extremely hostile to Western and Israeli interests, perhaps more so than the government channels they replaced. For the new networks reflected the narrow attitudes of their culture just as American networks do.

 

There is another element to the communications revolution to which elites are blind. Elites, by definition, are often brilliant and attractive-looking people who, because of their own sophistication and social confidence, welcome cosmopolitanism in all its aspects. For they are never insecure in the midst of exotic environments. But most people in this world are not brilliant, not terribly attractive and therefore not confident. Their lives are full of struggle. So they naturally take refuge in family, community, religion or some form of solidarity group. And in an era when mass communication technologies foster a vulgarized assault on traditional values – whether directly or indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly – the sense of alienation among the masses intensifies, leading them deeper into such exclusivist beliefs.

 

So it is not an accident that there is now a resurgence of Orthodox Judaism and evangelical Christianity in the United States, just as there is a resurgence of ideological Islam across the Greater Middle East. Whether it is trashy mass culture in America or relentless Westernization in the Muslim world, people require an ethical and a spiritual anchor against the forces of technological alienation. In Asia, perhaps the most technologically modernized region on the globe, nationalism helps to fill this void. For nationalism is modernism writ large. As people who do not retreat back into religion lose their literal faith in God and thus their belief in individual immortality, they take refuge in what the late Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz called a “collective immortality.”

 

Europe is, after a fashion, a more severe example of this phenomenon because in Europe, we have a cosmopolitan global elite that actually runs an empire-of-sorts: the European Union. And so the rise of anti-EU, right-wing tendencies demonstrates not only a cultural, but also a direct political hostility to such elite rule. The EU leaders and bureaucracy long ago made the calculation that nationalism was dead and that the European masses, after two world wars, wanted nothing so much as a respite from divisive forces. But the masses may increasingly require an anchor in history, nationalism and religious identity that protects them against the bland universalism and increasing (albeit exaggerated) Islamization of the continent that the EU has thus far delivered.

 

Though, while globalization may have sparked a certain alienation that leads to a return of nationalism, that does not mean this new nationalism will be as intense and intoxicating as the kind that ravished Europe in previous centuries. Nationalism may return, but in a far more nuanced state – a result of the very globalization that caused it in the first place. Indeed, there may currently be a rebalancing taking place in terms of personal and communal identities, for we are all not simply indistinguishable individuals bumping into each other in a global meeting hall. We have linguistic, cultural, ethnic and religious attributes that are very much a part of who we are, and which set us apart from others.

 

So the tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, and between universalism and exclusivism, must continue. Soon after the Berlin Wall collapsed, anticipating a degree of global unity, Milosz observed, “our bond of being born in the same time, thus being contemporaries, is already stronger than that of being born in the same country.” Will, in fact, the bond of time overcome the bond of blood or narrow belief? It is this question that towers above us all.

Rachel Canning Rails Against Spoiled “Suburban Baby Boomer Types” in Facebook Rant. By Irving DeJohn.

Rachel Canning rails against spoiled “Suburban baby boomer types” in Facebook rant. By Irving DeJohn. New York Daily News, March 7, 2014.

Judge Rules Against Rachel Canning Who Sued Parents for Tuition. Video. CBS New York, March 4, 2014. YouTube.

Rachel Canning

Rachel Canning

At the Heart of the Jewish State Issue. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

At the Heart of the Jewish State Issue. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, March 6, 2014.

Liberals Outraged by Cadillac Ad. By Rush Limbaugh.

Liberals Outraged by Cadillac Ad. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, March 6, 2014.

Cadillac Made a Commercial About theAmerican Dream, and It’s a Nightmare. By Carolyn Gregoire. The Huffington Post, February 26, 2014.

The First Ever 2014 Cadillac ELR: Poolside. Video. Cadillac, February 7, 2014. YouTube.

Do Palestinians Really Want a State of Their Own? By Oren Kessler.

Do Palestinians Really Want a State of Their Own? By Oren Kessler. Foreign Policy, March 6, 2014. Also here.

Kessler:

The Palestinians have all the leverage, a former top State Department specialist on the Mideast peace process recently told me over red wine in Tel Aviv. “I’m not sure they’ll ever sign on the dotted line.” In that moment of candor – lubricated no doubt by the Golan Heights cabernet – the ex-bureaucrat admitted something U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration would never concede publicly: The Palestinians are under little to no pressure to sign a final peace agreement with Israel.

 

The consensus among right-thinking people, of course, is that self-determination is the incentive par excellence for Palestinian leaders to strike a deal. That was the view Obama articulated on Feb. 27, four days before he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, when he told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg that more than anything else, the Palestinians seek “the dignity of a state.” Secretary of State John Kerry repeated the “dignity” talking point on March 3 at the pro-Israel policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

 

But if the Palestinians are desperately seeking a negotiated settlement that grants them a state of their own, they’re certainly hiding it well. In July, Kerry announced an ill-advised nine-month deadline for delivering Middle East peace. That gestation period is nearly complete, but there doesn’t seem to be a bun in Washington’s oven. Undeterred, the administration is making a final push: Netanyahu visited the Oval Office on March 3, with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas set to follow on March 17. If, however, Kerry and Obama are to succeed where their predecessors have all failed, they will have to fundamentally reassess their policy toward the Palestinians.

 

It’s actually the Israelis, not the Palestinians, who are under pressure from all corners to reach a peace deal. Obama often reminds the Israelis that time is working against them, as high Palestinian birthrates could mean that the land between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River will have an Arab majority before long. For his part, Kerry warns Israel that the threat of boycotts and delegitimization is growing. The European Union, meanwhile, has set new guidelines against its funds going to Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and it is considering labeling goods that originate there. The United Nations has declared 2014 the “International Year of Solidarity With the Palestinian People.”

 

The Palestinians, meanwhile, are watching from the sidelines with glee. As one Palestinian negotiator told an Israeli official during a spate of terrorist attacks a decade ago, “Victory for us is to see you suffer.” Viewers of the Palestinian Authority’s official television station are unceasingly reminded that the Arab-Israeli conflict is an existential, zero-sum dispute. The channel assures its audience that cities in Israel will ultimately return to Arab rule, that the murder of Israeli civilians is a heroic deed, and that Jews are “barbaric monkeys, wretched pigs” – or in the words of putatively peace-minded Palestinian Authority official Jibril Rajoub, “Satans” and “Zionist sons of bitches.” And that’s not to speak of the fire-eyed theocrats of Hamas, who run the show in the Gaza Strip.

 

It’s inconceivable that Palestinian leaders, watching Israel squirm under unprecedented international pressure, would allow the Jewish state to rehabilitate its image as peace-seeker. Instead, they recognize that after the peace talks’ inevitable failure, the Jewish state will be faced with only bad options. If Israel maintains the status quo, international pressure upon it can only grow. If it unilaterally withdraws from all or part of the West Bank, it will almost certainly face the same rocket attacks that followed its last two withdrawals – from Gaza in 2005 and from south Lebanon in 2000. This time, however, the rockets will be aimed at Tel Aviv and its international airport. The Palestinian Authority will then argue that it can’t be blamed for the security breakdown, because it was not consulted in carrying out the withdrawal.

 

The Obama administration seems determined not to contemplate the idea that the Palestinians habitually choose Israeli occupation over independence. But we’ve seen this show before: In 2000, Israel offered to dismantle more than 60 settlements, withdraw from 92 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza, share the prickliest areas of Jerusalem’s Old City, and grant the Palestinians a capital in the city's eastern areas. Some 100,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants would be allowed to move within Israel’s borders. Yasser Arafat, then the Palestinians’ leader, turned down the offer without making one of his own and then gave tacit or explicit sanction to the Second Intifada, an outburst of bombings and shootings that killed more than 1,000 Israelis over several years.

 

Between 2006 and 2008, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with Abbas 36 times, giving even more concessions – offering some 95 percent of the West Bank, with swaps of land in Israel to bring the exchange to 100 percent, and a fund for Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Abbas walked away. As Olmert lamented in 2013, “I am still waiting for a phone call.”

 

Is Abbas as toxic as Arafat, the unreformed terrorist? No. Is he Palestine’s version of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, ready to turn his sword into a ploughshare and lock hands on the White House lawn? Not a chance.

 

Abbas may have realized that Israel, to use Obama’s words, “is not going anywhere.” Sadly, he has obdurately refused to pass on the memo to his people – in Arabic, he continues to feed them the fantasy of a wholesale “right of return” of millions of Arabs to Israel that no Israeli leader will ever allow. In 2012, he conceded to an Israeli journalist that he would return to his Galilee hometown of Safed only as a tourist – but quickly walked back his comments after the resulting uproar. Having thus primed his people, Abbas predictably finds that there is virtually no Palestinian constituency for a realistic peace deal.

 

That’s why Shlomo Avineri, an octogenarian Israeli peacenik and former director-general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, can write in the dovish daily Haaretz: “Don’t expect Abbas to sign anything.” That’s why, this week, Abbas’s underlings reacted to Netanyahu’s AIPAC speech – a veritable olive branch, by his standards – with canned outrage. Netanyahu’s demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, thundered Fatah Central Committee member Nabil Shaath, is “totally rejected” and “contravene[s] all the rules of the peace negotiations.”

 

None of this is to suggest that Israel is blameless. Israel could have avoided many, though not all, of its current predicaments by not having embarked on the West Bank settlement enterprise in the first place – at least not in areas distant from Israel proper and heavily inhabited by Palestinians. The enterprise has been damaging to Israel because it obscures the fact that Palestinians still overwhelmingly reject the Jewish state to begin with and because it gives the Palestinians a plausible pretext for endlessly deferring difficult decisions. In other words, it gives them nearly limitless leverage.

 

So what is to be done? The good news is that the United States does have ways to influence the Palestinians to negotiate seriously – if only it is willing to use them. Washington is the single biggest donor to the Palestinian Authority, and thus Congress could condition U.S. aid on stopping all that monkeys-and-devils incitement (two such initiatives are currently in the first stages of legislation). The United States could also offer significant aid boosts to the Palestinians if they make tangible steps toward peace, and threaten corresponding cutbacks if they fail to do so.

 

Such a policy will ultimately benefit the Palestinians more than anyone. Washington, as well as the world, does them no favors in forever excusing their failure to better their lot and in painting them as a people always acted upon but never acting. The Palestinian leadership currently has no incentive to make a deal – but in the interest of peace, that can and must change.

Why Putin Doesn’t Respect Us. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Why Putin Doesn’t Respect Us. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, March 4, 2014.

John Legend: All of Me.

John Legend: All of Me. Video. johnlegendVEVO, October 2, 2013. YouTube.

Aimee Mann: That’s Just What You Are.

Aimee Mann: That’s Just What You Are. Video. AimeeMannVEVO, June 16, 2009. YouTube.




’Til Tuesday: Voices Carry. Video. TilTuesdayVEVO, October 25, 2009. YouTube.

Ralph Peters: Putin Believes in Russia’s Destiny; Obama Does Not Believe in American Exceptionalism.

Ralph Peters: Putin Believes in Russia’s Destiny; Obama Does Not Believe in American Exceptionalism. Video. Real Clear Politics, March 4, 2014. Also at Mediaite, YouTube, YouTube.

Kerry to Putin: Lurch Into the 21st Century; Seminar Caller Reads Leftist Talking Points; WaPo OMG: Obama Lives in Fantasy World. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, March 4, 2014.

Obama Wasn’t Alone Misreading Putin. By Michael Rubin. Commentary, March 5, 2014.








LT. COL. RALPH PETERS: Look, the bottom line on this is Russia has a real leader. You may not like him, and I don’t, but he is brilliant and ruthless, he has clear goals and he moves straight toward those goals. The West lacks a leader. Like it or not, the president of the United States is the de facto leader of the West, and our president just is – he’s incapable and unwilling to lead.

 

The weakness is phenomenal. Now, you know, we are not weaker than we were in the Carter years. I was in that military, it was pathetic. Our military today is the best in the world, best in our history, although Obama wants to dismantle it. We’re also immensely wealthier than the Carter years. The problem is, that as a president Obama is far weaker than Carter, and he’s probably the worst president we've ever had.

 

He is a man who's incapable of making a hard decision. And by the way, one other key point, Vladimir Putin believes in Russia. He believes in Russia’s destiny, its mission. Obama does not believe in American exceptionalism. He does not believe in this country.

Israel’s Big Mistake. By Yoav Sorek.

Israel’s Big Mistake. By Yoav Sorek. Mosaic, March 2014.

How my countrymen gave up the hope for real peace, and how they can get it back.

An Alternative to the Two-State Solution. By Tom Wilson. Commentary, March 5, 2014.

An Optimist’s Case for the Kerry Peace Process. By Michael Omer-Man.

An optimist’s case for the Kerry peace process. By Michael Omer-Man. +972, March 4, 2014.

Is a Settlement Boycott Best for Israel? Daniel Gordis vs. Lara Friedman.

Is a Settlement Boycott Best for Israel? Debate between Daniel Gordis and Lara Friedman. New York Times, March 3, 2014.

America’s Misguided Gender Missionaries. By Martha Bayles.

America’s Misguided Gender Missionaries. By Martha Bayles. The American Interest, March 3, 2014.

Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? By Susan Moller Okin. Boston Review, October/November 1997. Also here.

Putin Invades Crimea: Obama Hardest Hit? By Walter Russell Mead.

Putin Invades Crimea: Obama Hardest Hit? By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, March 3, 2014.