Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Letter to President Martin Van Buren Protesting the Removal of the Cherokee, April 23, 1838.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Letter to President Martin Van Buren Protesting the Removal of the Cherokee, April 23, 1838. The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Also here.

SIR: The seat you fill places you in a relation of credit and nearness to every citizen. By right and natural position, every citizen is your friend. Before any acts contrary to his own judgment or interest have repelled the affections of any man, each may look with trust and living anticipation to your government. Each has the highest right to call your attention to such subjects as are of a public nature, and properly belong to the chief magistrate; and the good magistrate will feel a joy in meeting such confidence. I n this belief and at the instance of a few of my friends and neighbors, I crave of your patience a short hearing for their sentiments and my own : and the circumstance that my name will be utterly unknown to you will only give the fairer chance to your equitable construction of what I have to say.

 

Sir, my communication respects the sinister rumors that fill this part of the country concerning the Cherokee people. The interest always felt in the aboriginal population—an interest naturally growing as that decays – has been heightened in regard to this tribe. Even in our distant State some good rumor of their worth and civility has arrived. We have learned with joy their improvement in the social arts. We have read their newspapers. We have seen some of them in our schools and colleges. In common with the great body of the American people, we have witnessed with sympathy the painful labors of these red men to redeem their own race from the doom of eternal inferiority, and to borrow and domesticate in the tribe the arts and customs of the Caucasian race. And notwithstanding the unaccountable apathy with which of late years the Indians have been some-times abandoned to their enemies, it is not to be doubted that it is the good pleasure and the understanding of all humane persons in the Republic, of the men and the matrons sitting in the thriving independent families all over the land, that they shall be duly cared for; that they shall taste justice and love from all to whom we have delegated the office of dealing with them.

 

The newspapers now inform us that, in December, 1835, a treaty contracting for the exchange of all the Cherokee territory was pre-tended to be made by an agent on the part of the United States with some persons appearing on the part of the Cherokees; that the fact afterwards transpired that these deputies did by no means represent the will of the nation; and that, out of eighteen thousand souls composing the nation, fifteen thousand six hundred and sixty-eight have protested against the so-called treaty. It now appears that the government of the United States choose to hold the Cherokees to this sham treaty, and are proceeding to execute the same. Almost the entire Cherokee Nation stand up and say, “This is not our act. Behold us. Here are we. Do not mistake that handful of deserters for us;” and the American President and the Cabinet, the Senate and the House of Representatives, neither hear these men nor see them, and are contracting to put this active nation into carts and boats, and to drag them over mountains and rivers to a wilderness at a vast distance beyond the Mississippi. And a paper purporting to be an army order fixes a month from this day as the hour for this doleful removal.

 

In the name of God, sir, we ask you if this be so. Do the newspapers rightly inform us? Men and women with pale and perplexed faces meet one another in the streets and churches here, and ask if this be so. We have inquired if this be a gross misrepresentation from the party opposed to the government and anxious to blacken it with the people. We have looked in the newspapers of different parties and find a horrid confirmation of the tale. We are slow to believe it. We hoped the Indians were misinformed, and that their remonstrance was pre-mature, and will turn out to be a needless act of terror.

 

The piety, the principle that is left in the United States, if only in its coarsest form, a regard to the speech of men, - forbid us to entertain it as a fact. Such a dereliction of all faith and virtue, such a denial of justice, and such deafness to screams for mercy were never heard of in times of peace and in the dealing of a nation with its own allies and wards, since the earth was made. Sir, does this government think that the people of the United States are become savage and mad? From their mind are the sentiments of love and a good nature wiped clean out? The soul of man, the justice, the mercy that is the heart's heart in all men, from Maine to Georgia, does abhor this business.

 

In speaking thus the sentiments of my neighbors and my own, perhaps I overstep the bounds of decorum. But would it not be a higher indecorum coldly to argue a matter like this? We only state the fact that a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, -a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country? for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country, any more? You, sir, will bring down that renowned chair in which you sit into infamy if your seal is set to this instrument of perfidy; and the name of this nation, hitherto the sweet omen of religion and liberty, will stink to the world.

 

You will not do us the injustice of connecting this remonstrance with any sectional and party feeling. It is in our hearts the simplest commandment of brotherly love. We will not have this great and solemn claim upon national and human justice huddled aside under the flimsy plea of its being a party act. Sir, to us the questions upon which the government and the people have been agitated during the past year, touching the prostration of the currency and of trade, seem but motes in comparison. These hard times, it is true, have brought the discussion home to every farmhouse and poor man's house in this town; but it is the chirping of grasshoppers beside the immortal question whether justice shall be done by the race of civilized to the race of savage man, – whether all the attributes of reason, of civility, of justice, and even of mercy, shall be put off by the American people, and so vast an outrage upon the Cherokee Nation and upon human nature shall be consummated.

 

One circumstance lessens the reluctance with which I intrude at this time on your attention my conviction that the government ought to be admonished of a new historical fact, which the discussion of this question has disclosed, namely, that there exists in a great part of the Northern people a gloomy diffidence in the moral character of the government.

 

On the broaching of this question, a general expression of despondency, of disbelief that any good will accrue from a remonstrance on an act of fraud and robbery, appeared in those men to whom we naturally turn for aid and counsel. Will the American government steal? Will it lie? Will it kill? – We ask triumphantly. Our counsellors and old statesmen here say that ten years ago they would have staked their lives on the affirmation that the proposed Indian measures could not be executed; that the unanimous country would put them down. And now the steps of this crime follow each other so fast, at such fatally quick time, that the millions of virtuous citizens, whose agents the government are, have no place to interpose, and must shut their eyes until the last howl and wailing of these tormented villages and tribes shall afflict the ear of the world.

 

I will not hide from you, as an indication of the alarming distrust, that a letter addressed as mine is, and suggesting to the mind of the Executive the plain obligations of man, has a burlesque character in the apprehensions of some of my friends. I, sir, will not beforehand treat you with the contumely of this distrust. I will at least state to you this fact, and show you how plain and humane people, whose love would be honor, regard the policy of the government, and what injurious inferences they draw as to the minds of the governors. A man with your experience in affairs must have seen cause to appreciate the futility of opposition to the moral sentiment. However feeble the sufferer and however great the oppressor, it is in the nature of things that the blow should recoil upon the aggressor. For God is in the sentiment, and it cannot be withstood. The potentate and the people perish before it; but with it, and as its executor, they are omnipotent.

 

I write thus, sir, to inform you of the state of mind these Indian tidings have awakened here, and to pray with one voice more that you, whose hands are strong with the delegated power of fifteen millions of men, will avert with that might the terrific injury which threatens the Cherokee tribe.

 

With great respect, sir, I am your fellow citizen,

 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

The “Untamed Wildernesses” of Israeli and American Colonialism. By Paul Mutter.

The “untamed wildernesses” of Israeli and American colonialism. By Paul Mutter. Mondoweiss, August 17, 2011.

Legacy of Indian wars stops many guilty Americans from condemning Israel. By Philip Weiss. Mondoweiss, January 5, 2009.

“In the name of God, sir–” Emerson protested ethnic cleansing of Cherokees. By Philip Weiss. Mondoweiss, March 9, 2009.

The Witch Tree. By Philip Weiss. Mondoweiss, December 5, 2010.

The Native American analogy doesn’t work. By Ali Abunimah. Mondoweiss, December 5, 2010.

“Geronimo EKIA”– as Indian wars continue in Palestine. By Matthew Taylor. Mondoweiss, May 7, 2011.

Netanyahu seeks war with Iran so he can ethnically cleanse the West Bank. Interview with Moshe Machover by Philip Weiss. Mondoweiss, July 23, 2012.

How America Lost Vladimir Putin. By David Rhode and Arshad Mohammed.

How America Lost Vladimir Putin. By David Rhode and Arshad Mohammed. The Atlantic, April 19, 2014. Also at Reuters.

Why the Israeli-Palestinian Talks Fail. By Rami G. Khouri.

Why the Israeli-Palestinian talks fail. By Rami G. Khouri. The Daily Star (Lebanon), April 19, 2014.

Khouri:

Patient, serious diplomacy appears to be bearing fruit in many places simultaneously this week, except in the Israel-Palestine talks that have gone on for two decades since the 1993 Oslo peace accords. It is worth exploring why this is so.

 

Two agreements announced Thursday comprised an American-Russian-Ukrainian-European Union understanding on how to diffuse the tensions in Ukraine, and a decision by the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council to end the feud between Qatar and other members. In the ongoing talks between Iran and the P5+1 states (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany) to resolve tensions over Iran’s nuclear capabilities, the parties continue to reach agreements on some of the key issues while some others remain to be hammered out in coming months.

 

Why is it that these three difficult situations suddenly showed progress? I do not have inside information on any of them, but my hunch based on close observation and speaking to some of the participants in the Israeli-Palestinian and Iran-P5+1 talks in recent years is simply that some key recurring Rs had a big role to play in the success of some talks and the failure of others. The Rs I refer to are realism, reciprocity, reasonableness and respect. These are largely absent from the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, and it is no surprise, therefore, that they continue to flounder.

 

The factors of realism and reasonableness refer to the fact that negotiators do not demand the maximum that is likely impossible for one side or the other to go along with, and instead seek what is attainable and meaningful for both sides, in a manner that is mutually politically realistic.

 

The reciprocity and respect factors are more complex, but more important for concluding a meaningful agreement. These refer to the practice of applying the same standard of conduct to both sides in a dispute and requiring them both to make concessions or moves of equal magnitude, and more or less simultaneously. The key here is to avoid any sense of humiliation or capitulation by one side, making it possible for protagonists to preserve their sense of honor and dignity while making the reasonable and realistic moves they agree on.

 

The Ukraine and GCC-Qatar agreements are very broad and couched in vague language, but they have been reached in an important, symbolic first step because they did not humiliate any one party and gave all parties something of value to them.

 

The Iran talks, similarly, have progressed rapidly in recent months because both sides took steps that made reasonable suggestions couched in respectful terms. Specifically, Iran achieved its core goals of an acknowledgment of its continued low-level enrichment of uranium for peaceful purposes and an imminent end to sanctions and American threats of regime change. The P5+1 states achieved their goals of enrichment limits and inspections that make it impossible for Iran to surreptitiously build a nuclear bomb.

 

The real reason why these breakthroughs happened, I suspect, is that both sides started treating the other with more respect and with more reciprocity in the specifics of the measures that both sides would implement in a final agreement. Both sides reached a point where they could agree to the demands of the other, because the same process happened in the other direction.

 

This is precisely why the Palestine-Israel negotiations fail to make any similar progress. The Israeli demands from the Palestinians in areas like security, refugees and recognizing Israel as a Jewish state are so extreme that they cannot be met without totally humiliating the Palestinians. The Palestinians in turn get little respect from the Israelis or the American mediators even, who effectively ignore the core demand that the Palestinian refugee problem of 1947-1948 be acknowledged and redressed in a mutually agreeable manner.

 

Israel and the United States basically want to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict on the basis of territorial adjustments related to what happened in 1967. The Palestinians want to resolve the conflict on the basis of demographic and territorial changes from 1947-1948. Israel refuses to address the Zionists’ role in the events of 1947-1948 that shattered Arab-majority Palestine and exiled half its population, and only wants to discuss Israeli security within the June 1967 borders. Palestinians may look forward to some crumbs, but not much more than that. No wonder then that 20 years of negotiations have not achieved any major agreements.

 

The Americans and Israelis in particular could learn much from analyzing the recent trajectory of the Iran negotiations and why they suddenly achieved progress. The formula for success is very simple and reaffirmed again this week in three different contexts: act with reasonableness, realism, respect and reciprocity and you are likely to achieve the goals of all concerned. Ignore these critical elements, and you will only suffer serial failures, as has happened in the American-mediated Israeli-Palestinian talks.


Khouri’s definition of realism, reasonableness, reciprocity, and respect is really just a one-way street. Khouri is calling on Israel to capitulate to the Palestinian narrative that Zionism is an evil settler-colonial movement and that Israel is a criminal racist state. Khouri is recycling, yet again, the stale Arab talking points that Israel’s very existence as a Jewish state is an unbearable humiliation for the Palestinians, and that Israel must consent to its own destruction by agreeing to the right of return by the descendants of the 1948 refugees.

The Malice of Mondoweiss. By A. Jay Adler.

The Malice of Mondoweiss. By A. Jay Adler. The Sad Red Earth, June 28, 2009.

Mondoweiss Agitprop. By Yaacov Lozowick. Yaacov Lozowick’s Ruminations, June 8, 2009.

Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem on the Eve of Obama’s Cairo Address. By Max Blumenthal. Video. Live Leak, June 5, 2009.

Mondoweiss: Hate as “Progressive” Jewish Politics. By Adam Levick. Elder of Ziyon, June 29, 2010. 

Better Jews. The Moral Vanity of Israel’s Leftist Jewish Critics. By Adam Levick. Adam’s Zionist Journey, December 9, 2011.

Academic Boycotts and Re-Colonization by Theory. By A. Jay Adler. SPME, January 28, 2014.


Adler [Mondoweiss]:

On June 4, Max Blumenthal and Joseph Dana released on the Internet, via Mondoweiss and The Huffington Post, their now infamous video “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem.” The video presented a visual compendium of college-age, drunken Jews, in restaurants and on the street, spewing undeniably and phenomenally ignorant, ugly, and racist comments about Barack Obama. All of the young men and women shown ought now be committed to spending a healthy measure of their coming adulthoods to overcoming the shame of their outing as dimwitted bigots.

The video received mostly negative attention, though it was roundly praised by the Israel-hating commenting community at the Mondoweiss blog. Some people tried to account for the awful behavior by offering the bogus, distracting excuse for the students that they were drunk.  Serious criticisms of the video itself, however, were that the young people in the video could hardly be considered representative, of anything – while the clear intent, later expressly confirmed both by Blumenthal and Mondoweiss’s co-bloggers, Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz , was that it did, indeed, represent something characteristic – and that the video seemed to be intending a criticism of Israel (the raison d’être of Mondoweiss) while the students were all, in fact, not Israelis, but American Jews.

The video’s content is so ugly and pathetic, the rationale for it so wrongheaded and dishonest, that within hours Huffington Post removed it from the site. Reported Blumenthal later about the decision:

“I don’t see that it has any real news value,” the administrator told me. “For me it only proves that one can find drunk people willing to say just about anything.  Especially drunk, moronic people.”

YouTube followed suit.

A couple of days later, Blumenthal justified himself on Mondoweiss, declaring himself to have been “censored” by Huffington. This kind of puerile and disingenuous posturing is typical Blumenthal of all the actors involved. They all do much serious chest puffing about being “journalists,” but still Blumenthal feigns that a publisher’s choice not, in fact, to publish something, or its decision to correct a publishing error, is something other than editorial judgment at work – the kind of judgment by which journalists and other writers are regularly denied publication. No legal authority blocked public access to the video. Blumenthal is free to contract with whoever is willing to show his work. The video is visible in snippets, still, all over the Internet. The rapper 50 Cent posted it on his website, where it reaped the predictable whirlwind of counter racist scatology back. But characterizing Huffington’s decision as “censorship” – like a high school student newspaper editor denied the subversive wish to publish this week’s issue in virtual-cow-shit Smell-O-Vision – is representative of the hysterical vocabulary and devious propagandizing of Blumenthal, Weiss, and Horowitz.

All throughout Blumenthal’s defense of himself, and that offered by Weiss and Horowitz four days later, the low, dishonest confusion of categories continues. Israeli is elided into Zionist, Zionist into American Jew supportive of Israel’s existence, that category into American Jew who attends Yeshiva, into one who makes aliyah to Israel, into one of the dopes in the video. Blumenthal wants to undermine the moral legitimacy of Israel and he attempts it by substituting American Jewish students on drunken holiday. The intellectual rigor is awe inspiring, the journalistic method beyond reproach. Read Israeli blogger Yaacov Lozowick’s description of the area where the video was shot.

Said Blumenthal, “I do not and have never claimed that the characters that appeared in my video were representative of general public opinion in Israel. They reflect only a slice of reality, which is reality nonetheless.”

One can never be sure whether the arguments are consciously deceitful or the product of remarkably unconscious prejudice – or if these guys aren’t, one must say, really, very smart. The whole intent of the video is to stain the Israeli nation, and beyond that the Zionist belief in the need and justness of a Jewish state that is the basis of an Israeli nation. Of course, Blumenthal is claiming representativeness. The video is otherwise purposeless. And he does it by substituting some American Jews for Israel and never understands that the difference matters. The “slice of reality” – which isn’t, anyway, by that virtue alone significant – is deceptive. Blumenthal cannot see this. All of the cultural, sociological, and political distinctions are meaningless. The students are all Zionists. Enough said.

The obvious reality, historically demonstrated far more forcefully than Blumenthal’s petty propagandistic distortions, is that if one sought it out, one could find the same vile bigotry voiced by (non-Jewish) whites against blacks, French and Dutch against Algerians and Muslims, Italians against Albanians – oh, dear, need I go on? And dare I say – Palestinians against Jews? (One small example, via Jeffrey Goldberg, from the late Nizar Rayyan: “I asked him if he believed, as some Hamas theologians do [and certainly as many Hezbollah leaders do] that Jews are the ‘sons of pigs and apes.’”)

What we see in the video are, according to Blumenthal, “the painful consequences of prolonged Zionist indoctrination.” (Indoctrination – that’s a good loaded word. Nothing, I’m sure, that Blumenthal would imagine going on anywhere in Palestinian schools, let’s say. Nothing, theologically, I don’t know, about, say – pigs and apes?) It is all “the disturbing spectacle of young Jews behaving like fascist soccer hooligans in the heart of the capitol of Israel and the spiritual home of the Jewish people,” where “vitriolic levels of racism are able to flow through the streets of Jerusalem like sewage” and “the grandsons of Holocaust survivors feel compelled to offer the Shoah as justification to behave like fascist street thugs.”

Gracious. Where to begin when a journalist uses words so carelessly, so maliciously? The increasingly ubiquitous “fascist” we can take here as merely a synonym for the then redundant “thugs,” which I guess is a little weightier in menace than “hooligans,” though aren’t those “soccer hooligans” usually prone to riot and violence? Don’t believe I saw any behavior like that anywhere in the video. And the racism flows “through the streets of Jerusalem like sewage.” (straight from the United States, actually, but shh!) All this occurring before the delicate, we know, Jewish nationalistic and religious sensibilities of Blumenthal, in the – hear the deflation of the poor man’s will – “heart of the capitol of Israel and the spiritual home of the Jewish people.” 

Oy, what a thespian. And fraud. Think Mary McCarthy on Lillian Hellman.

Blumenthal was not alone in defending his work. On June 10, so, too, did Weiss, in his and Horowitz’s name. Blumenthal’s video is important, Weiss stated, “because it reveals an p-weissessential component of Israeli and Zionist society that has largely been covered up.” Hateful and ignorant racism is “essential” to Israeli society and Zionism. This last element, about Zionism specifically, was the claim of the infamous 1975 U.N. resolution sponsored by the gamut of Arab autocracies and Cuba, and voted for by all of the Communist totalitarian governments, while being opposed by nearly every industrial democracy – the resolution that was rescinded in shame in 1991. Just so we understand the ideological prism and intellectual identifications of Mondoweiss.

Said Weiss:

You can argue about Blumenthal’s method all night long. I won’t be there for that argument. Is the video somewhat sensational? Of course. But the views expressed are shocking, and, while they are obviously cherrypicked, they are representative of a real current in Israeli society; and a journalist who is on to something important should have the freedom to highlight shocking stuff. That’s how journalism works. You don’t show readers your out-takes.

Weiss “won’t be there for that argument,” presumably because he can’t coherently respond to it or he doesn’t care. About the method. Something rather important, intellectually, professionally (they are journalists, after all), ethically. He acknowledges the video is of course “sensational,” as in, according to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language:

Arousing or intended to arouse strong curiosity, interest, or reaction, especially by exaggerated or lurid details: sensational journalism; a sensational television report. (Emphasis added)

The views in the video, he admits, are obviously “cherrypicked,” as in, Wikipedia relays to us:

the act of pointing at individual cases or data that seem to confirm a particular position, while ignoring a significant portion of related cases or data that may contradict that position. . . . Cherry picking can be found in many logical fallacies.

One suspects Weiss did not fully intend to confess all he does here, but then he is no more careful a writer, and thus, thinker, than is Blumenthal. He twice refers to the “murderous” feelings of the idiots on camera, and while I am working from memory – it being so far impossible at this point to find more than snippets of the video for review – and though I recall, of course, obviously, much in the manner of the stupid and self-demeaning, I have no recollection of the “murderous.” But this is the carelessness, the irresponsibility, the hatefulness of Mondoweiss.

As to “how journalism works,” that “you don’t show readers your out-takes” – well, yes, that is generally so, though sometimes reporters are prompted to do just that, when there are questions of credibility. Blumenthal says he “edited an hour of interviews into a 3:30 minute video package.” I wonder if he would be willing to release the other 56:30 minutes to the public. Or does that seem, really, beside the point now?

If it appears that I am being awfully cutting and hard on our trio – that is because they deserve it. They have appointed themselves leaders in an ambition to single out Zionism, among all nationalisms, for censure – to take Israel down. Indeed, according to Weiss “Blumenthal may even be a game-changer.” My, ain’t he anticipatory in his self-regard. But any influence they do have affects the lives of millions, and they have neither the intellectual coherence nor honesty to warrant such a mission.

Let’s consider, as Weiss likes to do, essences. On May 7, Weiss blogged from the 2009 AIPAC policy conference. You know he wasn’t really there to participate honestly, despite the transparent feints in that direction. However, he soon enough shows his hand:

When they are gathered in the hall … it seems like a plenary gathering in the Former Soviet Union. On the stage are the Politburo, 40 or 50 people at tables, most of them old and rich, with name cards in front of them, all revered by the people in the room. The people on the stage establish the new line. The degree of variation from that line will be minimal; the famous Jewish idea that if you have two Jews, you will have three opinions, does not hold here. For the entire conference is psychically built on one issue—Jewish survival—and on questions of Jewish survival, Jews defer to their leaders, as the Torah shows. There is utter orthodoxy. As I came into the hall for the Shimon Peres speech, two Jewish women (Rae Abileah and Medea Benjamin) were being dragged out kicking and screaming. Their opinions on Gaza were not welcome. The next day when two women interrupted Joe Biden’s speech, the whole conference rose as one to applaud and drown them out. Very Brezhnev.

When one considers the thought and writing of Mondoweiss, it is impossible not to keep returning to adjectives like dishonest and disingenuous. The search for synonyms in order to avoid monotonous drone becomes tiresome. Weiss knows full well that the purpose of the AIPAC policy conference is not to admit debate from ideologically antagonistic interlocutors, anymore than it is the purpose of the Democratic or Republican Party conventions to invite their opposites from the floor on such matters as abortion or gay marriage. Anymore than it is the purpose of the NRA annual convention to debate, in ceremonial assembly, with representatives of The Brady Center to Prevent Handgun Violence, or for attendees at a Planned Parenthood conference to be denounced at the dais as baby killers. Or at the AIPAC, again, to enter into discussion with CODEPINK activists hoisting banners that read “No Money for War Crimes.” These are all, Weiss knows, organizations of the generally like-minded, who discuss their differences, usually, amongst themselves and not in public with those who despise them and pretend to be seeking honest dialogue. But Weiss, like Blumenthal, is a merry agitprop prankster, for whom the essence of good political street theater is a story line of engagement sought, culminating in a well-plotted climax of disruptive embarrassment, preferably requiring the use of security personnel for maximum repressive affect. Then Weiss may seek to regale readers with totalitarian comparisons. (Fascist? Communist? Whatever.) How very, may I say, Socialist Worker Party of him. But that would be so unfair of me, shallow and juvenile, like calling the faculty advisor of that high school newspaper – who won’t go for the dungy scentorama – a dictator.

By the end of the AIPAC account we are brought to, actually, something rather real, to which Weiss is, indeed, touchingly prone. It is historically not uncommon for people like Weiss, Horowitz (I’ll get to him), and Blumenthal to be denounced as “self-hating Jews.” I am, I confess, more partial to “fools.” But there is a transparency to Weiss that does introduce the personal “issues” at work in his political agitation:

The torment at the heart of my writing here is that I grew up in tribal ways; and I recognized that woman [a Holocaust survivor] as an older Jew like my parents and my parents’ friends—in fact I even ran into one of my parents’ friends there!–and the basis of my napkin-biting moment is that AIPAC brought me home to this identification. I put aside my assimilationist feelings, my intermarried goyim-loving feelings, and got back to the fact that this is the community I was raised in and love and have grown out of but still love; and I am not going to be deracinated.

Hm. One can fill in the blanks of this story in a multitude of ways, but we recognize an outline. A pressing question, too, is – who is it, exactly, who is deracinating Weiss? Even he treats the matter ambiguously. And in this confusion of identity, the Jew in fear of his own deracination reaches for the fat on the flanken: he reasserts himself as a member of the “tribe.” From goyim-loving assimilation he dives now straight into the schmaltz. Soon he’ll be longing to sit down with the whole mishpucha.

The personal crisis gets worse, however.

Weiss travels to Gaza with CODEPINK. He is moved by what he sees – in strange ways – though he remains no less prejudicially determined in his understanding of the causes of it. He returns to New York, seeming tortured as he mingles with likeminded thinkers, and posts, yesterday as I write, June 25, “feeling the rage in new york” – a post that as of at least 2:30 EST on June 26, just one day later, has now been removed from the Mondoweiss site, though you can find the cache of the page here and here. Weiss’s feelings, a mixture of political outrage, seething passion, and personal confusion are raw, producing an awed tenderness of response from his commenters. What follows are selected quotes from “feeling the rage in new york.” You may find them to provide a potential explanation for second thought and the post’s deletion.

The Hebrew sounds as bad in Miriam’s ear as German did back in the 50s, when people hated the Germans.

Emily and I go out on West End Avenue, and a blonde mother goes by with two kids. I hear her talking Hebrew and I feel anger toward her. The kids are in cute outfits. They must have some money to live in this neighborhood. I think about all the seculars who are leaving Israel, and why they don’t speak out against a basic Zionist principle: the necessity of the Jewish state.

We stop on Broadway for a drink. Emily’s from Pennsylvania. She’s not Jewish. She tells me she’s been having a hard time since she got back, trying to come to terms with the monstrousness of what she saw. It keeps her up at night. Finally she made a date in July to speak about the issue at the local coffee shop, and she has an appointment with the legislative assistant to her congressman. His name sounds Jewish. I feel anger at him, and give her suggestions of what to say to the guy.

I used to get in screaming matches at dinner parties about The Subject. . . . I have alienated myself from my peers over this issue. They don’t want to hear. But I don’t know that I can blame them entirely. I seem to have found this spot, of righteous and critical distance. I suppose I had it in my family, too. I really need to take responsibility for my own anger.

A lot is going through my head. At the meeting, Jane said that one problem with our issue is that, Like it or not, it’s going to draw anti-Semites. They show up at lectures and talks. She’s right. I’ve met anti-Semites cloaked in their righteous criticism. I saw anti-Jewish hatred in Gaza, where they paint dustbins with the Star of David. I’ve felt that hatred of Israel myself. When you see the monstrosities of Gaza, you can’t help but feel hatred.

A friend at the meeting said that Hamas only fires rockets to get attention to the siege, which would never command world attention anyway. I know this is true, but. It isn’t like there hasn’t been violent murderous rage on our side of this struggle for a long time.

The situation is built around an edifice of rage. Ever since I got back, I keep wondering what if the Palestinians accepted. Accepted everything and anything for a state, sought the whole world’s good opinion by acceptance. Now they have 90 percent of the good opinion, but they don’t have Washington or Establishment Jews yet. What if Medea Benjamin of Code Pink, who met with them and talked with them about the west, convinced them to take another step of acceptance so that the students could get out of the territory? And forget about all the Green Lines and 1948, and the old stories. Just accept. And lo, there was a mini-state, or a bantustan, and peace and a civil rights struggle. Then maybe Israel would collapse. The hatred and animosity would disappear and so would the reason to be there. They would all move to West End Avenue.

The threads here are several. The tribal heart-call of the AIPAC post seems clearly overwhelmed by what is emerging as an ethnic animus. Just to hear Hebrew, to hear a Jewish-sounding name, produces anger. There is recognition of the anti-Semitic appeal of his ideas, but rather than allow pause by this fact, Weiss voices understanding of the “hatred,” which he says you can’t help but feel. Then he ponders, in the spirit-tone of so many who become fatigued with hating and fighting and dying in irreconcilability, what if they just accepted? What if the Palestinians just accepted all that they have never been willing to accept in order to gain all that they have never had, a state of their own?

“Then maybe Israel would collapse.”

The unyielding desire. The core passion. Not peace. But Israel’s collapse.

“The hatred and animosity would disappear and so would the reason to be there.”

In how many languages can one utter the word “fool”?

“They would all move to West End Avenue.”

Not “the Jews.” Not “we” – the tribe. “They.”

The driving spirit behind Mondoweiss is an end to the Jewish state – Israel. Even in fantasies of a resigned acceptance to fact that is always an element in peace making between enemies, the goal remains, like a dead man’s arm reaching up from the grave for a neck, Israel’s demise.

This has a familiar ring, too. Here, from an interview with PLO Ambassador to Lebanon Abbas Zaki, which aired on ANB TV on May 7, 2009, transcript by MEMRI:

They talk about a two-state solution, and when that is achieved… Even Ahmadinejad, leader of the rejectionists throughout the region, said he supports a two-state solution. Nobody fools anybody.

With the two-state solution, in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made – just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward.

In “Mr.Horowitz, tell us what you think of the two-state solution,” Adam Horowitz responds, “There is a short answer and a longer answer to this question. The short answer is that I don’t take a position on one state or two states. In the end I’m not invested in one end product, but in ending the conflict.” As is usually so with Mondoweiss, complete honesty is never available. First, for Horowitz – or for me, for that matter – not to take a position on a matter like the two-state solution is meaningless, is to be coy without any corresponding appeal. Neither Horowitz nor I have any say in the matter. We are not players in the decision making, however much Mondoweiss may preen in self-important fantasy, and so the basis for an interlocutor’s refraining from expressing an opinion on a core issue – that he may continue to play the role of honest broker, which, at any rate, Horowitz is not – does not apply. And besides, the longer answer is that the shorter answer is bullshit.

The longer answer gets to the real reason I think people tend to ask this question, especially if they’re confrontational: they are asking if I support a Jewish state. The simple answer is no.

Mondoweiss gained happy-making attention from the Blumenthal video. Its creators and contributors post on one of the most widely read blog sites, The Huffington Post. The influential Talking Points Memo, via it TPMCafe, now syndicates Mondoweiss’s posts. So what we are witnessing is a growing acceptance of its view that bears consideration.

The writing and thinking are shoddy, we see, marked by blind prejudice and the active influence in the political sphere of confusion in personal identity and psychic demons.

What more can we say? That – though I would disagree myself with almost all of the judgments – out of humanistic sympathy for Palestinian aspirations and suffering through all these years of conflict, Mondoweiss advocates for greater Israeli compassion in its ascendency? That it seeks more humane treatment toward Palestinians in administration of road-blocks and check points? That it seeks, even, a unilateral end to all of the partial and periodic “occupations” prior to any other agreement on disputed issues? That it argues for the constructive role that might be played by the complete opening of the Gaza borders? That it believes the recent Gaza conflict (and probably, then, by reasoned extension, every other Israeli military action over the decades that was not an immediate defensive response to a conventional attack by a national army) was misguided and excessive? That it believes the West Bank settlements – just as the Gaza settlements, now unilaterally dismantled – are illegal and immoral and need to be removed as a basis for a just settlement, leading to the willingness of an empowered Palestinian authority to agree, for the first time, to exchange land for peace and to recognize a Jewish state of Israel while gaining a Palestinian state?

Can we say all this of Mondoweiss? No, we cannot. Not really. For while Mondoweiss may at times espouse these positions, none of them are the end it seeks to serve, not even the ultimate end of a just settlement and a lasting peace. In conflict, a just settlement recognizes the legitimate desires of all parties, not the moral claim of only one. But the active agents behind Mondoweiss do not believe that Israel, or the Jewish people in relation to Israel, has just desires. Horowitz does not support the existence of a Jewish state. Blumenthal, like him, believes that Zionism (Jewish nationalism) – in apparent contradistinction to any other nationalism – is inherently racist. Weiss, a deeply anti-Semitic work in progress, in his haziest, most narcotic fantasy of peace, envisions as its ecstatic end not the peace, but the end of Israel.

The cause of Mondoweiss is not a settlement of grievances. It is not peace. The cause Mondoweiss serves, the position it espouses, is that of the most unreconstructed, unrelenting, and agonistic of all Palestinian positions and causes – and end to a Jewish state in its ancient homeland. It is a position, coming from Mondoweiss no less than from any Palestinian – or Israeli in reverse – that will further not the interests of peace, but the continuation of conflict, and of the suffering of all, especially Palestinian suffering, over which Mondoweiss hearts purport to bleed.

This is the malice of Mondoweiss.

Examining Extremism in the Wake of the Kansas JCC Violence. By StopHate@StopHate

Examining Extremism in the Wake of the Kansas JCC Violence. By StopHate@StopHate. Storify.com, April 18, 2014. Excerpt at Elder of Ziyon.

When Anti-Zionism Bleeds into Anti-Semitism – In the Wake of the Deadly Kansas City Shootings.

The Slow Death of Free Speech. By Mark Steyn.

The Slow Death of Free Speech. By Mark Steyn. National Post, April 17, 2014. Excerpt at Legal Insurrection.

BDS Bullies at Galway. By Alan Johnson. NJBR, March 12, 2014.

Indivisible Anti-Semitism. By Caroline Glick. NJBR, March 17, 2014.


Steyn:

The examples above are ever-shrinking Dantean circles of Tolerance: At Galway, the dissenting opinion was silenced by grunting thugs screaming four-letter words.

For Passover and Easter: Celebrate Freedom. By Neo-Neocon.

For Passover and Freedom: Celebrate Freedom. By Neo-Neocon. Legal Insurrection, April 18, 2014.

The Slaughter Bench of History. By Ian Morris.

The Course of Empire: Destruction. Thomas Cole, 1836.

The Slaughter Bench of History. By Ian Morris. The Atlantic, April 11, 2014.

Morris:

I was 23 when I almost died in battle.

 

It was September 26, 1983, around 9:30 in the evening. I was hunched over a manual typewriter in a rented room in Cambridge, England, pounding out the first chapter of my Ph.D. thesis in archaeology. I had just come back from four months of fieldwork in the Greek islands. My work was going well. I was in love. Life was good.

 

I had no idea that 2,000 miles away, Stanislav Petrov was deciding whether to kill me.

 

Petrov was the deputy chief for combat algorithms at Serpukhov-15, the nerve center of the Soviet Union’s early-warning system. He was a methodical man, an engineer, a writer of computer code—and not, fortunately for me, a man given to panic. But when the siren went off a little after midnight (Moscow time), even Petrov leaped out of his chair. A red bulb blinked into life on the giant map of the Northern Hemisphere that filled one wall of the control room. It signaled that a missile had been launched from Montana.

 

Above the map, red letters came to life, spelling out the worst word Petrov knew: “LAUNCH.”

 

Computers checked and double-checked their data. Again the red lights flashed, this time with more certainty: “LAUNCH—HIGH RELIABILITY.”

 

You may not be very interested in war, Trotsky is supposed to have said, but war is very interested in you. Cambridge was—and still is—a sleepy university town, far from the seats of power. In 1983, though, it was ringed by air-force bases high on Moscow’s list of targets. If the Soviet General Staff had believed Petrov’s algorithms, I would have been dead within 15 minutes, vaporized in a fireball hotter than the surface of the sun. King’s College and its choir, the cows grazing as punts drifted by, the scholars in their gowns passing the port at High Table—all would have been blasted into radioactive dust.

 

If the Soviets had launched only the missiles that they were pointing at military targets (what strategists called a counterforce attack), and if the United States had responded in kind, I would have been one of roughly a hundred million people blown apart, burned up, and poisoned on the first day of the war. But that is probably not what would have happened. Just three months before Petrov’s moment of truth, the U.S. Strategic Concepts Development Center had run a war game to see how the opening stages of a nuclear exchange might go. They found that no player managed to draw the line at counterforce attacks. In every case, they escalated to countervalue attacks, firing on cities as well as silos. And when that happened, the first few days’ death toll rose to around half a billion, with fallout, starvation, and further fighting killing another half billion in the weeks and months that followed.

 

Back in the real world, however, Petrov did draw a line. He later admitted to having been so scared that his legs gave way under him, but he still trusted his instincts over his algorithms. Going with his gut, he told the duty officer that this was a false alarm. The missile-attack message was stopped before it worked its way up the chain of command. Twelve thousand Soviet warheads stayed in their silos; a billion of us lived to fight another day.

 

A world like this—in which Armageddon hung on shoddy engineering and the snap judgments of computer programmers—had surely gone mad. People cried out for answers, and on both sides of the Iron Curtain the young turned away from aging, compromised politicians toward louder voices. Speaking for a new post-baby-boom generation, Bruce Springsteen took the greatest of the Vietnam-era protest songs—Edwin Starr’s Motown classic “War”—and sent a supercharged cover version back into the top 10:

War!

Huh, good God.

What is it good for?

Absolutely nothing....

War!

Friend only to the undertaker....

 

***

 

War is mass murder, and yet, in perhaps the greatest paradox in history, war has nevertheless been the undertaker’s worst enemy. Contrary to what the song says, war has been good for something: over the long run, it has made humanity safer and richer.

 

There are four parts to the case I will make. The first is that by fighting wars, people have created larger, more organized societies that have reduced the risk that their members will die violently.

 

This observation rests on one of the major findings of archaeologists and anthropologists over the last century: that Stone Age societies were typically tiny. Chiefly because of the challenges of finding food, people lived in bands of a few dozen, villages of a few hundred, or (very occasionally) towns of a few thousand members. These communities did not need much in the way of internal organization and tended to live on terms of suspicion or even hostility with outsiders.

 

People generally worked out their differences peacefully, but if someone decided to use force, there were far fewer constraints on him—or, occasionally, her—than the citizens of modern states are used to. Most of the killing was on a small scale, in vendettas and incessant raiding, although once in a while violence might disrupt an entire band or village so badly that disease and starvation wiped all its members out. But because populations were also small, the steady drip of low-level violence took an appalling toll. By most estimates, 10 to 20 percent of all the people who lived in Stone Age societies died at the hands of other humans.

 

The twentieth century forms a sharp contrast. It saw two world wars, a string of genocides, and multiple government-induced famines, killing a staggering total of somewhere between 100 million and 200 million people. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more than 150,000 people—probably more people than had lived in the entire world in 50,000 B.C. But in 1945, there were about 2.5 billion people on earth, and over the course of the twentieth century roughly 10 billion lives were lived—meaning that the century’s 100–200 million war-related deaths added up to just 1 to 2 percent of our planet’s population. If you were lucky enough to be born in the industrialized twentieth century, you were on average 10 times less likely to die violently (or from violence’s consequences) than if you were born in a Stone Age society.


Rates of Violent Death, 10,000 BC-2013 AD. Ian Morris.



This may be a surprising statistic, but the explanation for it is more surprising still. What has made the world so much safer is war itself. The way this worked was that beginning about 10,000 years ago in some parts of the world, then spreading across the planet, the winners of wars incorporated the losers into larger societies. The only way to make these larger societies work was for their rulers to develop stronger governments, and one of the first things these governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence within the society.

 

The men who ran these governments hardly ever pursued policies of peacemaking purely out of the goodness of their hearts. They cracked down on killing because well-behaved subjects were easier to govern and tax than angry, murderous ones. The unintended consequence, though, was that rates of violent death fell by 90 percent between Stone Age times and the twentieth century.

 

The process was not pretty. Whether it was the Romans in Britain or the British in India, pacifiers could be just as brutal as the savagery they stamped out. Nor was the process smooth: for short periods in particular places, violent death could spike back up to Stone Age levels. Between 1914 and 1918, for instance, nearly one Serb in six died from violence, disease, or starvation. And, of course, not all governments were equally good at delivering peace. Democracies may be messy, but they rarely devour their children; dictatorships get things done, but they tend to shoot, starve, and gas a lot of people. And yet despite all the variations, qualifications, and exceptions, over the 10,000-year-long run, war made governments, and governments made peace.

 

My second claim is that while war is the worst imaginable way to create larger, more peaceful societies, it is pretty much the only way humans have found. “Lord knows, there’s got to be a better way,” Edwin Starr sang, but apparently there isn’t. If the Roman Empire could have been created without killing millions of Gauls and Greeks, if the United States could have been built without killing millions of Native Americans—in these cases and countless others, if conflicts could have been resolved by discussion instead of force, humanity could have had the benefits of larger societies without paying such a high cost. But that did not happen. It is a depressing thought, but the evidence again seems clear. People hardly ever give up their freedom, including their rights to kill and impoverish each other, unless forced to do so, and virtually the only force strong enough to bring this about has been defeat in war or fear that such a defeat is imminent.

 

My third conclusion is that as well as making people safer, the larger societies created by war have also—again, over the long run—made us richer. Peace created the conditions for economic growth and rising living standards. This process too has been messy and uneven: the winners of wars regularly go on rampages of rape and plunder, selling thousands of survivors into slavery and stealing their land. The losers may be left impoverished for generations. It is a terrible, ugly business. And yet, with the passage of time—maybe decades, maybe centuries—the creation of a bigger society tends to make everyone, the descendants of victors and vanquished alike, better off. The long-term pattern is again unmistakable. By creating larger societies, stronger governments, and greater security, war has enriched the world.

 

When we put these three claims together, only one conclusion is possible. War has produced bigger societies, ruled by stronger governments, which have imposed peace and created the preconditions for prosperity. Ten thousand years ago, there were only about 6 million people on earth. On average they lived about 30 years and supported themselves on the equivalent of less than two modern American dollars per day. Now there are more than a thousand times as many of us (7 billion, in fact), living more than twice as long (the global average is 67 years), and earning more than a dozen times as much (today the global average is $25 per day).

 

War, then, has been good for something—so good, in fact, that my fourth argument is that war is now putting itself out of business. For millennia, war has created peace, and destruction has created wealth, but in our own age humanity has gotten so good at fighting—our weapons so destructive, our organizations so efficient—that war is beginning to make further war of this kind impossible. Had events gone differently that night in 1983—had Petrov panicked, had the general secretary actually pushed the button, and had a billion of us been killed over the next few weeks—the twentieth century’s rate of violent death would have soared back into Stone Age territory, and had the toxic legacy of all those warheads been as terrible as some scientists feared, by now there might have been no humans left at all.

 

***

 

Current trends suggest that robots will begin taking over our fighting in the 2040s—just around the time, the trends also suggest, that the United States, the world’s globocop, will be losing control of the international order. In the 1910s, the combination of a weakening globocop (Britain) and revolutionary new fighting machines (dreadnoughts, machine guns, aircraft, quick-firing artillery, internal combustion engines) ended a century of smaller, less bloody wars and set off a storm of steel. The 2040s promise a similar combination. The next 40 years could be the most dangerous in history.

 

We are already, according to the political scientist Paul Bracken, moving into a Second Nuclear Age. The First Nuclear Age—the Soviet-American confrontation of the 1940s–80s— was scary but simple, because mutual assured destruction produced stability (of a kind). The Second Age, by contrast, is for the moment not quite so scary, because the number of warheads is so much smaller, but it is very far from simple. It has more players than the Cold War, using smaller forces and following few if any agreed-on rules. Mutual assured destruction no longer applies, because India, Pakistan, and Israel (if or when Iran goes nuclear) know that a first strike against their regional rival could conceivably take out its second-strike capability. So far, antimissile defenses and the globocop’s guarantees have kept order. But if the globocop does lose credibility in the 2030s and after, nuclear proliferation, arms races, and even preemptive attacks may start to make sense.

 

If major war comes in the 2040s or ’50s, there is a very good chance that it will begin not with a quarantined, high-tech battle between the great powers’ computers, space stations, and robots but with nuclear wars in South, Southwest, or East Asia that expand to draw in everyone else. A Third World War will probably be as messy and furious as the first two, and much, much bloodier. We should expect massive cyber, space, robotic, chemical, and nuclear onslaughts, hurled against the enemy’s digital and antimissile shields like futuristic broadswords smashing at a suit of armor, and when the armor cracks, as it eventually will, storms of fire, radiation, and disease will pour through onto the defenseless bodies on the other side. Quite possibly, as in so many battles in the past, neither side will really know whether it is winning or losing until disaster suddenly overtakes it or the enemy— or both at once.

 

And yet, long-term history also gives us cause for optimism. We have not managed to wish war out of existence, but that is because it cannot be done. We have, however, been extremely good at responding to changing incentives in the game of death. For most of our time on earth, we have been aggressive, violent animals, because aggression and violence have paid off. But in the 10,000 years since we invented productive war, we have evolved culturally to become less violent—because that pays off even better. And since nuclear weapons came into the world in 1945, the incentives in the game have changed faster than ever before, and our reactions have accelerated along with them. As a result, the average person is now roughly 20 times less likely to die violently than the average person was in the Stone Age.

 

As the returns to violence have declined, we have found ways to solve our problems without bringing on Armageddon.