My Mind-Melting Week on the Battlefields of Ukraine. By Julia Ioffe.

The Foggiest of Wars: My Mind-Melting  Week on the Battlefields of Ukraine. By Julia Ioffe. The New Republic, June 16, 2014. Also here. From the June 30, 2014 issue.

Pro-Putin Grannies Chased Away the Ukrainian Army. Then They Turned on Me. By Julia Ioffe. The New Republic, May 22, 2014.

Terror and the Truth About the Middle East. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Terror and the Truth About the Middle East. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, June 16, 2014.

Israelis can try, but they can’t ignore the occupation. By Gideon Levy. Haaretz, June 15, 2014.

Palestinian Leaders Don’t Want an Independent State. By Efraim Karsh.

Palestinian Leaders Don’t Want an Independent State. By Efraim Karsh. Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2014.

Crowning a Winner in the Post-Crimea World. By Lilia Shevtsova.

Crowning a Winner in the Post-Crimea World. By Lilia Shevtsova. The American Interest, June 16, 2014.

How to Win Ukraine and Influence the Future. By Vladimir Inozemtsev. The American Interest, May 25, 2014.

The End of Authority in the Republican Party. By Peter Beinart.

Anarchy in the GOP: The End of Authority in the Republican Party. By Peter Beinart. The Atlantic, June 12, 2014.

Peter Beinart’s Advice for Republicans: Become Democrats or Lose Forever. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, June 16, 2014.

Wider War: The Crisis in Iraq. By Dexter Filkins.

Wider War: The Crisis in Iraq. By Dexter Filkins. The New Yorker, June 23, 2014.

America Wants the Impossible. By David Goldman.

America wants the impossible. By David Goldman (Spengler). Asia Times Online, June 16, 2014.

ISIS Photographs Detail Execution of Iraqi Soldiers. By Bill Roggio.

ISIS photographs detail execution of Iraqi soldiers. By Bill Roggio. Long War Journal, June 15, 2014.

The Fall of Mosul and the False Promise of Modern History. By Juan Cole.

The Fall of Mosul and the False Promise of Modern History. Informed Comment, June 11, 2014. Also at History News Network.

ISIS Rampages, the Middle East Shakes. By Daniel Pipes.

ISIS Rampages, the Middle East Shakes. By Daniel Pipes. History News Network, June 12, 2014. Also at DanielPipes.org, National Review Online.

The Mad Dream of a Dead Empire That Unites Islamic Rebels. By Amir Taheri

The mad dream of a dead empire that unites Islamic rebels. By Amir Taheri. New York Post, June 14, 2014.

No End of a Lesson - Unlearned. By William R. Polk.

No End of a Lesson - Unlearned. By William R. Polk. History News Network, June 15, 2014.

Why Putin Says Russia Is Exceptional. By Leon Aron.

Why Putin Says Russia Is Exceptional. By Leon Aron. Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2014. Also here.

Aron: 

Such claims have often heralded aggression abroad and harsh crackdowns at home.

In the winter of 2012, something surprising happened to Vladimir Putin: He discovered, as he wrote in a government newspaper, that Russia isn’t just an ordinary country but a unique “state civilization,” bound together by the ethnic Russians who form its “cultural nucleus.” This was something new. In his previous 12 years in office, first as Russia’s president and then as prime minister, Mr. Putin had generally stayed away from grand pronouncements on culture and ideology.

And Mr. Putin wasn’t done with this theme. Elected in March 2012 to a third term as president—in the face of massive anti-regime protests, replete with banners and posters scorning him personally—he told the Russian Federal Assembly the following year that it was “absolutely objective and understandable” for the Russian people, with their “great history and culture,” to establish their own “independence and identity.”

What was this identity? For Mr. Putin, it was apparently easier to say what it was not: It was not, he continued, “so-called tolerance, neutered and barren,” in which “ethnic traditions and differences” are eroded and “the equality of good and evil” had to be accepted “without question.”

To Mr. Putin, in short, Russia was exceptional because it was emphatically not like the modern West—or not, in any event, like his caricature of a corrupt, morally benighted Europe and U.S. This was a bad omen, presaging the foreign policy gambits against Ukraine that now have the whole world guessing about Mr. Putin’s intentions.

There is ample precedent for this sort of rhetoric about Russian exceptionalism, which has been a staple of Kremlin propaganda since 2012. In Russian history, the assertion of cultural uniqueness and civilizational mission has often served the cause of political, cultural and social reaction—for war and imperial expansion, as a diversion from economic hardship and as a cover for the venality and incompetence of officials. As the great 19th-century Russian satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote: “They [the powers that be] are talking a lot about patriotism—must have stolen again.”

The pedigree of Russian exceptionalism stretches back to a 16th-century monk, Philotheus of Pskov, a city about 400 miles northwest of Moscow. Constantinople had fallen to the Turks a century earlier and Rome was possessed by the “heresy” of Catholicism, so it fell to the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, Philotheus averred, to preserve, strengthen and expand the only real and pure Christianity: the Russian Orthodox faith.

Muscovy wasn’t just a growing principality but, Philotheus wrote, a “Third Rome,” endowed by God with a sacred mission to redeem humanity. Such ideas were ready-made for the centralizing ambitions of the founders of the modern Russian state, Vasily III and his son, Ivan IV, known as “The Terrible.” This is how Ivan became “czar,” the first Russian sovereign to be so crowned—a title derived from Caesar and, in the new state mythology, a ruler whose authority could be traced back to Augustus himself.

“Two Romes have fallen. The Third [Rome] stands, and there shall be no Fourth,” Philotheus declared with a literary flourish, which has inspired Russian messianism ever since. Ivan the Terrible, for his part, responded during his reign (1547-84) with incessant wars in the West and the East, imperial expansion and sadistic purges.

These are the seeds of Mr. Putin’s newly adopted worldview. But Russians themselves have often rejected this notion of national uniqueness. In particular, a number of Russian leaders have tried time and again to bring their country into the orbit of the “civilized world.”

In the early 18th century, the brutal modernizer Peter the Great forced his nobles to shave off their traditional beards, to swap their Byzantine robes for stockings, breeches and wigs, and to send their sons to Europe to learn navigation, engineering and the modern sciences. Catherine the Great's effort at Westernizing Russia during her own rule (1762-96) was incomparably milder, but she was just as determined. Nor was the “Third Rome” to be found in the discourse of Russia’s three greatest liberalizers: Czar Alexander II, who freed the serfs in 1861, and Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, who brought the Soviet Union to an end and explicitly sought what they called a “road to the European home.”

By contrast, Mr. Putin’s recent rhetoric harks back to Russia’s two most reactionary rulers: the 19th-century czars Nicholas I and his grandson, Alexander III. These are the sovereigns who made Russia’s secret political police a key state institution, with Alexander giving it virtually unlimited powers by declaring, in effect, a perennial state of emergency. At the same time, Russia’s allegedly distinctive identity was crystallized in the official state ideology of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality.” With minor linguistic adjustments, this slogan of Nicholas I and Alexander III seems now to have been adopted by Mr. Putin.

One of the most troubling aspects of this concept of Russian uniqueness is that it is has been defined largely in opposition to an allegedly hostile and predatory West. According to Mr. Putin’s favorite philosopher, the émigré Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), “Western nations don’t understand and don’t tolerate Russian identity . . . They are going to divide the united Russian ‘broom’ into twigs to break those twigs one by one and rekindle with them the fading light of their own civilization.” Mr. Putin often quotes Ilyin and recently assigned his works to regional governors.

One can hear distinct echoes of Ilyin’s views in the fiery speech that Mr. Putin delivered this past March after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The West, Mr. Putin said, “preferred to be guided not by international law in its practical policies but by the rule of the gun” and wished to “drive Russia into the corner.” He traced this hostility as far back as the 18th century and said that, in the post-Soviet era, Russia “has always been deceived, has always been [confronted with] decisions made behind its back.”

In Mr. Putin’s view, it is the West’s intention to interfere with Russia’s historic mission and to thwart the rightful “integration of the Eurasian space.” As for those in Ukraine who resisted this effort, he described them as boeviki (fighters), a term that, until then, had been used only to designate Muslim militants fighting in Russia’s North Caucasus. Mr. Putin’s other innovation was to label the critics of his regime not just as “fifth columnists” but as “national-traitors,” natsional-predateli—a precise Russian equivalent of Nationalverräter, the term used by Hitler in Mein Kampf to refer to the German leaders who signed the treaty of Versailles after Germany was defeated in World War I.

Mr. Putin’s approval ratings, which fell to the low point of his career at the end of 2013, are now sky-high. How could they not be? Russian government propaganda about the Ukraine crisis goes completely unchallenged on state-owned and state-controlled national television networks, where 94% of Russians get their news. In this coverage, Mr. Putin is presented as the defender of the motherland and his ethnic Russian brethren in Ukraine, who are said to suffer assault, torture and butchery at the hands of the “junta of fascists” in Kiev. To Russian ears, “fascist” inevitably recalls the Nazi invaders of World War II.

Russians are hardly the only people in modern history to be intoxicated by the ideological cocktail of national victimhood and triumphalism, by the vision of a heroic nation-on-a-mission, abused by foreigners yet always ultimately victorious. Over the past century, Germans, Italians, Japanese and, more recently, Serbs have embraced such narratives, once their regimes silenced critics through censorship, harassment, forced exile, jail and murder. These and other histories of state-sponsored campaigns of national “uniqueness” suggest that the regimes and leaders that flatter their peoples most shamelessly are precisely the ones that end up decimating them with the greatest indifference and in the largest numbers, whether through war, starvation, concentration camps or firing squads.

It is hard, then, not to be troubled by Mr. Putin’s suddenly opining, at the end of his four-hour call-in television show last month, about the “generous Russian soul” and the “heroism and self-sacrifice” that allegedly sets ethnic Russians apart from “the other peoples.” The last time Russians were praised in similar terms was in Stalin’s famous toast at the May 24, 1945, victory reception in the Kremlin for the commanders of the Red Army. The dictator extolled ethnic Russians as “the leading people,” blessed with “steadfast character” and “patience” and, most of all, an unshakable “trust in the government.”

As he spoke, Stalin was putting hundreds of thousands of those very same Russians through the hell of “filtration camps” and in cattle cars on the way to even greater suffering in the Gulag, where many of them died. The toast also presaged the end of wartime cooperation with the West, still greater repression at home and a campaign of aggressive, exclusionary patriotism, including the hunt for “rootless cosmopolitans” and “Zionists” in the service of American imperialism.

But today’s Russia isn’t the Russia of old. The period of highly imperfect but real democratization under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, as well as the protest and open discussion of recent years, has made Mr. Putin’s assertions of Russian exceptionalism even more transparently self-serving. Leonid Kaganov, one of Russia’s most influential bloggers, recently posted what he labeled the “Ten Commandments of the New Russian State.” It opens, in pitch-perfect parody of the regime’s latest line, with the statement: “Russia is [the country] biggest in size, population, level of development, culture, intelligence, modesty, honesty and justice.” It goes on to lament that “We are completely surrounded by Gayropa and its whores on all sides,” who “falsely worship a notion of liberty deeply alien to us.”

Or maybe not so “alien.”

Asked in a 2012 poll if their country needs to have a political opposition, more Russians agreed than disagreed. In polls over the past six months, a majority also endorsed the propositions that a state should be under society’s control and that power should be distributed among different political institutions, rather than being concentrated under one entity.

Russians also have abiding doubts about Mr. Putin. In a 2013 poll by the Levada Center, Russia’s most credible independent polling firm, Mr. Putin was “admired” by 2% of Russians and “liked” by 18% (the corresponding numbers in 2008 were 9% and 40%), while 23% were either “wary” of him, could say “nothing good” about him or disliked him, and 22% were either “neutral” or “indifferent.”

Asked if they thought that Mr. Putin was guilty of the abuse of power, 52% answered “undoubtedly” or “probably” (13% were convinced that it wasn’t true, while 18% thought that it didn’t matter, even if true). Perhaps most alarmingly for Mr. Putin, more than 50% of Russians in another Levada poll in April 2013 didn’t want him to remain president after 2018. In the words of Lev Gudkov, director of the Levada Center, by January of 2014, “Putin stopped being a ‘Teflon’ [president].”

In today’s Russia, these sentiments have been drowned in a wave of patriotic euphoria and anti-Western paranoia. But Mr. Putin may soon find that the effects of such strong and fast-acting stimulants are only temporary, with a heavy hangover to follow. In the short term, he is likely to continue manufacturing external hostility and “saving” ethnic Russians in Ukraine (and possibly in other regions as well). He will blame the inevitable economic hardship on the machinations and sanctions of the West, thus making it a patriotic duty to bear the deprivation stoically.

But the country’s patriotic rapture will eventually cool as the economy declines even more sharply. After all, as Mr. Putin lamented a few years ago, almost half of Russia’s food is imported (up to 85% in some of the largest cities), most of it from the EU countries. And this year the ruble has hit record lows against the euro.

Terror, censorship and indoctrination have long allowed dictators to maintain power even amid deprivation. Just look at Cuba and Zimbabwe, not to mention North Korea and Stalin’s Soviet Union.

Mr. Putin’s appeals to the unique ways of Russia and Russian civilization may not be enough, however, to force the country back toward dictatorship, especially after the brilliant moral explosion of glasnost and a decade and a half of liberty. Russia’s fate will be determined by how much repression he is prepared to deploy—and by the wishes of the Russian people, who now face a choice between living in a normal country or in one that is aggressively and chauvinistically exceptional.

So, Just What is a “Palestinian,” Anyways? By Michael Lumish.

So, Just What is a “Palestinian,” Anyways? By Michael Lumish. The Times of Israel, May 27, 2014.

Lumish:

The Philistines, of course, were a seafaring people of the Aegean islands. 

They were one of the rivals for regional dominance competing with the ancient Israelites along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea over one thousand years before Jesus of Nazareth walked the land.

They were, needless to say, not a people from the Arabian peninsula and were in no way the forebears of those who conquered the Land of Israel in the seventh century.

This is to say that the ancient enemy of the Jews, the Philistines, are in no way related to the contemporary Arabs who have, for some reason, taken a Latin name that refers to a Greek people.

Furthermore, Palestinian-Arab authorities sometimes claim to be either descendants of the Philistines or descendants of the ancient Canaanites or descendants of the little known ancient Jebusites.

The areas of Judea and Samaria, and all the Land of Israel, was renamed Syria-Palestina by the Roman Emperor Hadrian around the year 135 CE for the explicit purpose of erasing Jewish history on the land of the defeated indigenous Jewish population upon the failure of the Bar Kochba Rebellion.

From that day to this the traditional homeland of the Jewish people was generally referred to as either “Palestine” or the “Holy Land” or “Eretz Israel,” depending upon among who, when, and where the conversation was taking place.

By the time that the Zionist project was well under way in the early part of the twentieth-century the terms “Palestine,” to refer to the region, and “Palestinian,” to refer to the Jews of the region, were commonplace in the west.

Throughout the first half of the twentieth-century a “Palestinian” was generally considered a Jew or, in official British terms during of the period of the mandate, anyone, without regard to race or religion, who resided within the mandate, itself.  This definition, in my opinion, is probably the only one that actually makes sense from a liberal perspective.

As is often remarked, the Jerusalem Post was originally dubbed the “Palestine Post.”  It was not until after the Jews relinquished the designation of “Palestinian” that the local Arabs picked it up. This is why Golda Meir could famously tell the Sunday Times in the summer of 1969:

There were no such thing as Palestinians. When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

This is because “Palestine” was a regional, not a national designation.  The above quote is sometimes employed by the hard-left to suggest that Meir was racist, but the hard-left considers Israel to be a racist country, in any case, and all of its leaders from the past, including Golda, herself, to be fascistic.

The idea of “Palestinian” to refer specifically to the local Arabs only gained significant credence among Arabs, themselves, during the 1960s with the rise of Arafat and the PLO and with it, for the very first time in human history, an allegedly distinct ethnicity emerged for the specific purpose of robbing another people of sovereignty and self-defense on their own land.

For the Jewish people, therefore, the keffiyah resonates in a manner similar to a Klansmen’s hood.

In a certain kind of way, this answers the question of just what is a “Palestinian,” anyway?  You could accurately answer like this:

A “Palestinian” is an Arab residing on Jewish land whose cultural identity is largely dependent upon the effort to eliminate Jewish sovereignty and self-defense in Eretz Israel directly after the Holocaust.

This definition, however, only makes sense if the Palestinian-Arabs do, in fact, represent a distinct national group.  While I understand about Benedict Anderson’s criticisms of nations as “imagined communities,” nonetheless for a distinct national group to be a distinct national group there must be significant cultural distinctions between that group and the larger related communities.

In the case of those whom we call “Palestinian” the distinctions are virtually non-existent. This is not the case between, for example, the Japanese and the Chinese because even non-Asians can readily observe the many cultural distinctions between these neighboring far east Asian peoples.  The “Palestinians,” however, share the same cuisine with other Arabs. They share the same religion with other Arabs. They share the same language with other Arabs. They share similar honor/shame codes. Customs. Culture. Language. Food. Traditions.

All more or less the same.

The reason for this is because Palestinian-Arab nationalism was merely a recent response to the fact that the Jews had finally released ourselves from dhimmitude and we would simply no longer allow ourselves to be forced into second and third-class non-citizenship under Arab-Muslim domination.

Thirteen centuries was more than enough, thank you very much.

So, if “Palestinian” does not represent a distinct nation or ethnicity then just what is a “Palestinian”?

The truth of the matter, of course, is that “Palestine” is simply another name for the Land of Israel, but one foisted upon it by a malicious Roman conqueror.  Just as Jewish people have no moral obligation to recognize a “Palestinian” people who came into existence, as an allegedly distinct people, within recent decades for the specific purpose of doing Jewish people harm, so we have no compelling reason to resurrect the Greco-Roman name “Palestine” to refer to our homeland.

If the Arabs want to take a big bite out of Israel in order to create a criminal-terrorist entity on Jewish land, we’ve certainly given them every opportunity, but as Abba Eban famously said after the Geneva peace talks of 1973, the Palestinian-Arabs “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

“Palestine,” it must furthermore be understood, refers to a region, not a nation.  Just as “Saharan” is not an ethnicity and “Californian” is not an ethnicity, so “Palestinian” is not an ethnicity. Everyone who lives in California is a “Californian.”  If you are resident of the state of California then, whatever else you may be, you are very definitely a Californian.

The same is true for everyone who lives in the Land of Israel.  They are all “Palestinian” in the sense that they all live in what was the British Mandate of Palestine.

A “Palestinian” might be an Arab and he or she might be a Muslim, but there are all sorts of “Palestinians” who are not Arab. The Palestinian Authority is willing to accept the idea of an “Arab Christian” as “Palestinian,” but that is where the door shuts closed. All others, despite residing in the region for perhaps generations, can never be considered “Palestinian” in the hard-right racist manner that the PA determines such things.

At the end of the day, however, everyone who lives in Eretz Israel is a “Palestinian,” if we need to even use such terminology, just as every citizen of the State of Israel is an Israeli, without regard to ethnicity or religion.   There are Arab-Israelis and Jewish-Israelis and Rosicrucian-Israelis and, presumably even, Chinese-Buddhist-Israelis, just as there are Arab-Palestinians and Jewish-Palestinians and Rosicrucian-Palestinians and, presumably even, Chinese-Buddhist-Palestinians.

The Arabs may represent a significant portion of what was once the British Mandate of Palestine, but they obviously never represented all of it.  The Jews were always willing to share, just as the Arabs were always determined to prevail in a zero-sum contest against their formerly persecuted subjects.

But if one is an all-or-nothing kind of person and if you cannot grab it all, you very often get nothing.

This is something that Mahmoud Abbas might well keep in mind.

Killing “Oslo” and Validating Arab Anti-Jewish Racism. By Michael Lumish.

Killing “Oslo” and Validating Arab Anti-Jewish Racism. By Michael Lumish. Elder of Ziyon, May 25, 2014.

Lumish: 

Barack Obama killed the Oslo Accords and validated Arab anti-Jewish racism from the very beginning of his administration.

He did so directly out of the gate in 2009 by demanding a total “freeze” on the building of Jewish homes in Judea thus laying the framework for Palestinian-Arab rejection for any possible conclusion of hostilities. While it is obviously true that previous American administrations opposed “settlement activity” it was only the Obama administration that turned “settlement freeze” into a precondition for ending the ongoing violence against the Jewish people in that part of the world.

The general mood among western progressives toward the Jewish State of Israel, it must be understood, is hateful. This is not universal among western leftists, but it does constitute the overall mood, which is one of generalized and organized contempt.

The ideological backdrop toward the State of Israel, and thus in some measure toward the Jewish people, more generally, within the western progressive-left is negative. Obviously not all western progressives consider the Jewish State of Israel to be some militaristic horror, but the general mood among leftists toward Israel is one of disdain because they see the country as the foremost example of racist, imperialist, colonialist, apartheid, militarist, racist, badness.

Within the western progressive-left Jews are an object of pity when we are being slaughtered in great numbers, but an object of disdain when we dare to stand up for ourselves.

I do not see how anyone could draw a much different conclusion, given the fact that the primary forms of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism in the west today derive from the progressive-left. While there is obviously some lingering old-style, knuckle-dragging anti-Jewish racism among a diminishing and aging minority on the right, there is full-blown hatred coming at the Jewish people from mainstream venues within the western progressive-left. These venues include major media outlets such as the Guardian, the BBC, and the New York Times which regularly portray Israel as an aggressor state, while almost entirely giving a pass to blood-curdling Arab-Muslim expressions of genocidal Jew Hatred coming from the mosques in the Middle East.

Somehow, against all reason, calling for the murder of Jews by Muslims is considered just another day, but if Jews build housing for themselves in Judea that is considered a holy atrocity by westerners.

The fact of the matter – and I intend to beat this drum until I drive it into sufficient skulls – is that my political movement has betrayed women in the Middle East, betrayed Gay people in the Middle East, and betrayed all non-Muslims in that part of the world through failing to speak out against Arab-Muslim Supremacism, which is the movement for political Islam.  Christianity, in fact, is being decimated in the land where that religion originated.

Given the fact that I come out of the left I find it terribly sad that the movement, as a whole, is either too cowardly or too intellectually bankrupt to stand up for persecuted minorities in inconvenient parts of the world.

My essential premise is that the western left is a political and ideological movement torn by its own internal contradictions. On the one hand, the movement champions universal human rights as a matter of conscience. It is a fundamental part of western political thought since the Enlightenment that all people, everywhere, should have essential basic freedoms due to the fact that we have essential basic rights. These include the right to a free exchange of ideas as articulated in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. They also include habeas corpus, the freedom from imprisonment without a fair trial. The freedom to pursue one’s own economic advancement. The freedom to be safe within one’s own domicile from government intrusion without warrant. And the freedom, as such things are interpreted today, to live without government imposed sanctions according to one’s ethnicity or gender or sexual orientation.

I, you should know, am a hard-line left-wing radical, because I actually believe in the concept of universal human rights. I am a partisan for universal human rights. I believe that, in fact, the left is nothing without a firm commitment to universal human rights. The problem is that universal human rights are entirely incompatible with the multicultural ideal which represents the other pillar of western progressivism as a political movement.

It is precisely because of that unspoken, unacknowledged tension between these two pillars of progressive-left thinking that the movement has become torn and incoherent. It is incoherent because it cannot stand up for its own alleged values. The reason that it cannot stand up for its own alleged values is because those values are in ideological conflict with one another.

And it is within this ideological conflict and backdrop that the Obama administration betrayal of the Jewish people needs to be understood. Barack Obama comes out of an ideological tradition, derived from scholars such as Rashid Khalidi and the late Edward Said who are, themselves, indebted to post-colonial and post-structuralist theory, that views Israel as within the nineteenth-century western imperial tradition.

It is because Obama views Israel within this intellectual lens that he considers it to be a western “colonialist” state and therefore opposes additional “settlement construction” on “Palestinian” land.

And it is for that reason that he demanded a freeze on Jewish construction in Judea upon taking office.

The bottom line is that Barak Obama is advancing the cause of Jew Hatred throughout the world by accepting the “Palestinian narrative” of total victim-hood and thereby insisting that Jews are guilty of the persecution of the a subsection of the Arab majority and should, for good measure, be allowed to live in some places, but not others.

Until the Jewish left grasps the fact that its own political movement has betrayed its own people, we cannot move forward to greener political pastures.  I do not know that we need to embrace the political right, but we must understand the betrayal of the Jewish people by the progressive-left and we must understand that the Obama administration played a significant role in that betrayal when it advanced the idea of “total settlement freeze” for the Jews, but not for others, as somehow reasonable.

The general anti-Jewish/anti-Israel backdrop within the western progressive-left provides the ideological space out of which the Obama administration operates viz-a-viz Israel.  It is because well-meaning, but naive, progressive-left Jews support the administration’s view of Israel as the aggressor that the Obama administration can treat the small Jewish minority in the Middle East in a contemptuous fashion.

Until we come to accept that the Jews in the Middle East were decimated not only by the Romans, but also by the Muslims, can we even begin to understand our own history.

Efraim Karsh, in the very first page of the very first chapter of Palestine Betrayed tells us this:

At the time of the Muslim occupation of Palestine in the seventh century, the country’s Jewish population ranged in the hundreds of thousands at the very least; by the 1880s Palestine’s Jewish community had been reduced to about 24,000, or some 5 percent of the total population.

(Efram Karsh, Palestine Betrayed, Yale University Press, 2010, pg. 8.)

Here is a question: How did this happen?

Was it a typhoon that simply swept away 95 percent of the Jewish population of the Middle East or was there, perhaps, other, more human factors, involved?

I am guessing the latter.

Why the Liberal Arts Matter. By Fareed Zakaria.

Why the liberal arts matter. By Fareed Zakaria. Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN, May 24, 2014.





Zakaria:

It’s graduation season in the United States, which means the season of commencements speeches – a time for canned jokes and wise words. This year I was asked to do the honors at Sarah Lawrence in New York, a quintessential liberal arts college. So I thought it was worth talking about the idea of a liberal arts education – which is under serious attack these days.

The governors of Texas, Florida and North Carolina have all announced that they do not intended to spend taxpayer money subsidizing the liberal arts. Florida’s Governor, Rick Scott, asks, “Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.” Even President Obama recently urged students to keep in mind that a technical training could be more valuable than a degree in art history.

I can well understand the concerns about liberal arts because I grew up in India in the 1960s and ’70s. A technical training was seen as the key to a good career. If you were bright, you studied science, so that’s what I did.

But when I got to America for college, I quickly saw the immense power of a liberal education. For me, the most important use of it is that it teaches you how to write. In my first year in college, I took an English composition course. My teacher, an elderly Englishman with a sharp wit and an even sharper red pencil, was tough.

I realized coming from India, I was pretty good at taking tests, at regurgitating stuff I had memorized, but not so good at expressing my own ideas. Now I know I’m supposed to say that a liberal education teaches you to think but thinking and writing are inextricably intertwined. When I begin to write, I realize that my “thoughts” are usually a jumble of half-baked, incoherent impulses strung together with gaping logical holes between them.

Whether you’re a novelist, a businessman, a marketing consultant or a historian, writing forces you to make choices and it brings clarity and order to your ideas. If you think this has no use, ask Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.

Bezos insists that his senior executives write memos – often as long as six printed pages. And he begins senior management meetings with a period of quiet time – sometimes as long as 30 minutes – while everyone reads the memos and makes notes on them.

Whatever you do in life, the ability to write clearly, cleanly and, I would add, quickly, will prove to be an invaluable skill.

The second great advantage of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to speak and speak your mind. One of the other contrasts that struck me between school in India and college in America was that an important part of my grade was talking. My professors were going to judge me on the process of thinking through the subject matter and presenting my analysis and conclusions – out loud. Speaking clearly and concisely is a big advantage in life.

The final strength of a liberal education is that it teaches you how to learn – to read in a variety of subjects, find data, analyze information. Whatever job you take, I guarantee that the specific stuff you will have learned at college, whatever it is, will prove mostly irrelevant or quickly irrelevant. Even if you learned to code but did it a few years ago, before the world of apps, you would have to learn to code anew. And given the pace of change that is transforming industries and professions these days, you will need that skill of learning and retooling all the time.

These are liberal education’s strengths and they will help you as you move through your working life. Of course, if you want professional success, you will have to put in the hours, be focused and disciplined, work well with others, and get lucky. But that would be true for anyone, even engineers.

Anyway, that is a piece of the graduation talk I gave at Sarah Lawrence College on Friday. You can watch the whole thing – which has much more – online here.

George Soros on Russian Ethnic Nationalism.

Soros on Russian ethnic nationalism. Video and transcript. Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN, May 25, 2014.

Religion, Nationalism, and “Ancestral Homelands.” By Shalom Goldman. Sacred Matters, April 16, 2014.

Transcript: 

ZAKARIA: You have been very pessimistic or gloomy about Europe. Um, do you think that in this Ukraine situation, you're seeing another aspect of the tragedy of Europe, the lack of collective action?

SOROS: Unfortunately, Europe is very weak. It’s preoccupied with its internal problems, which are unresolved. The euro crisis is no longer a financial crisis, is turning into a political crisis. And you’re going to see it in the elections.  And Putin . . .

ZAKARIA: Explain what that means.

It’s going to be – you’re going to see it in the elections because you’re going to see the rise of nationalist, anti-European forces?

SOROS: Yes. And interestingly, they are supported by Russia and pro-Russian. So Russia has emerged as an alternative to the European Union. Putin has sort of come out of the closet in Ukraine with an ideology that is Nationalist based on ethnic nationalism. You could call it Russism . . .

ZAKARIA: Right.

SOROS: – that’s a new word to describe it, because I don't want to call it Nazi, because it is very similar to what you had in the interwar period . . . fascism.  You know . . .

ZAKARIA: Protecting your ethnic groups with military force, if necessary . . .

SOROS: Well, it’s more than that. It’s – as an ideology, a new sort of myth of Russian superiority. If you – those who watch Putin’s speeches, he actually has revealed this new myth of Russian genetic superiority. You might have heard that previously from someone else. It’s a – a new ideology based on ethnic Russian superiority.

ZAKARIA: And as you say, a lot of these nationalists who are we – who are doing well in European - these European-wide elections seem very pro-Russian . . .

SOROS: Yes.

ZAKARIA: – whether on the left or the right.

What Dune Tried to Teach Us About Jihad, and Why No One Listened. By Liel Leibovitz.

What Science Fiction Tried to Teach Us About Jihad, and Why No One Listened. By Liel Leibovitz. Tablet, May 1, 2014.

Is Narendra Modi, India’s New Prime Minister, Israel’s New Best Friend? By Jeff Moskowitz.

Is Narendra Modi, India’s New Prime Minister, Israel’s New Best Friend? By Jeff Moskowitz. Tablet, May 23, 2014.

When Bibi Meets Modi: Israel and the Indian Elections. By Shalom Goldman. ISLAMiCommentary, May 21, 2014. Also at Informed Comment.

The Muslim Brotherhood Will Be Back. By Shadi Hamid.

The Brotherhood Will Be Back. By Shadi Hamid. New York Times, May 23, 2014.

Vassar Nazi Cartoon Reflects Campus Dehumanization of Israel. By William A. Jacobson.

Vassar Nazi cartoon reflects campus dehumanization of Israel. By William A. Jacobson. Legal Insurrection, May 19, 2014.

Vassar Profs Challenged on Academic Boycott of Israel. By William A. Jacobson. Video. Legal Insurrection, May 6, 2014. YouTube. 

Ali Abunimah and Max Blumenthal at Vassar. By Philip Weiss. Mondoweiss, May 7, 2014. Video at YouTube.

Russia’s 21st Century Began in 1991. By Richard Lourie.

Russia’s 21st Century Began in 1991. By Richard Lourie. Moscow Times, May 18, 2014.

Lourie:

As the year 2000 approached, two of the main topics of conversation were: Could the world's computers handle the switchover, the so-called Y2K problem, and when did the 21st century actually begin, in 2000 or 2001?

Numerical nitpicking aside, it is clear the 21st century began in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The political, ideological and military confrontation that had defined the second half of the 20th century was done.

What's taking its place is only gradually becoming evident. At first there was a sort end-of-history euphoria in the West, the belief that people would devote themselves to computers and consuming. That giddiness lasted a decade until Sept. 11, 2001, when a new element of the 21st century made itself dramatically known.

History had returned — this time taking the form of anti-modernist Islamic terrorism, the Koran and Kalashnikov versus the laptop and the mall. The resulting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq changed warfare. Massed standing armies and nuclear stockpiles were revealed as antiquated overkill. Drones, intel and special forces were the new hot thing.

The financial debacle of late 2007 was the next stroke in the 21st century's emerging portrait. The crisis highlighted the vast disparity between the superrich and everyone else.

A bank may be too big to fail, but no homeowner is. All countries now have their own version of the 1 percent — whether it is corrupt Chinese officials who have to rent apartments to hold the cash bribes they have received, Russian oligarchs buying Western sports teams like Chelsea or the Nets, or top U.S. hedge fund managers who make a million dollars an hour when the minimum wage cannot make it to $10.

The Russian annexation of Crimea and the subsequent turmoil in Ukraine is another key feature in the portrait. The process that had begun with the real beginning of the 21st century in December 1991 had now come full circle. A Russia humiliated by the Soviet failure and by the triumphalism of the West was now back with a vengeance. With the $50 billion Olympics behind it, the Russia of 2014 was not about to allow a failing Ukraine slip into the Western camp. That would mean Russia would be outflanked by NATO from the Baltic to the Black Sea which itself would become a sort of Lake NATO.

Russia was immediately criticized for not acting in a 21st-century fashion — that is, modern, rational and civilized. But it was the West that was deluded with fantasies of order and decorum when perceived vital interests were being threatened. As Robert D. Kaplan, chief geopolitical analyst for Stratfor, put it with blunt concision: "In geopolitics, the past never dies, and there is no modern world."

The countries of Eastern Europe were less surprised, remembering all too well that it was in Yalta, Crimea that they were sold out by the "Big Three" in 1945.

The most important immediate effect of the Ukrainian crisis is that Russia and the West have called it quits. The West has rejected Russia for rejecting Western ways. Russia is now pivoting east toward Central Asia and China — and north to the riches of the Arctic. Russia has sheared off from the West like one of those glacial ice masses whose melting will no doubt flood coastal cities worldwide as the 21st century ends, completing its portrait.

Before that happens, though, there will be other defining strokes. Some may come soon near specks of islands for which the Japanese have one name and the Chinese quite another.

Geopolitics and the New World Order. By Robert D. Kaplan

Geopolitics and the New World Order. By Robert D. Kaplan. Time, March 20, 2014. From the March 31, 2014 issue. Also at Press Survey EN.

Kaplan: 

Geography increasingly fuels endless chaos and old-school conflicts in the 21st Century.

 

This isn’t what the 21st century was supposed to look like. The visceral reaction of many pundits, academics and Obama Administration officials to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s virtual annexation of Crimea has been disbelief bordering on disorientation. As Secretary of State John Kerry said, “It’s really 19th century behavior in the 21st century.” Well, the “19th century,” as Kerry calls it, lives on and always will. Forget about the world being flat. Forget technology as the great democratizer. Forget the niceties of international law. Territory and the bonds of blood that go with it are central to what makes us human. 

Geography hasn’t gone away. The global elite–leading academics, intellectuals, foreign policy analysts, foundation heads and corporate power brokers, as well as many Western leaders–may largely have forgotten about it. But what we’re witnessing now is geography’s revenge: in the East-West struggle for control of the buffer state of Ukraine, in the post–Arab Spring fracturing of artificial Middle Eastern states into ethnic and sectarian fiefs and in the unprecedented arms race being undertaken by East Asian states as they dispute potentially resource-rich waters. Technology hasn’t negated geography; it has only made it more precious and claustrophobic. 

Whereas the West has come to think about international relations in terms of laws and multinational agreements, most of the rest of the world still thinks in terms of deserts, mountain ranges, all-weather ports and tracts of land and water. The world is back to the maps of elementary school as a starting point for an understanding of history, culture, religion and ethnicity–not to mention power struggles over trade routes and natural resources. 

The post–Cold War era was supposed to be about economics, interdependence and universal values trumping the instincts of nationalism and nationalism’s related obsession with the domination of geographic space. But Putin’s actions betray a singular truth, one that the U.S. should remember as it looks outward and around the globe: international relations are still about who can do what to whom. 

Putin’s Power Play 

So what has Putin done? The Russian leader has used geography to his advantage. He has acted, in other words, according to geopolitics, the battle for space and power played out in a geographical setting–a concept that has not changed since antiquity (and yet one to which many Western diplomats and academics have lately seemed deaf). 

Europe’s modern era is supposed to be about the European Union triumphing over the bonds of blood and ethnicity, building a system of laws from Iberia to the Black Sea–and eventually from Lisbon to Moscow. But the E.U.’s long financial crisis has weakened its political influence in Central and Eastern Europe. And while its democratic ideals have been appealing to many in Ukraine, the dictates of geography make it nearly impossible for that nation to reorient itself entirely toward the West. 

Russia is still big, and Russia is still autocratic–after all, it remains a sprawling and insecure land power that has enjoyed no cartographic impediments to invasion from French, Germans, Swedes, Lithuanians and Poles over the course of its history. The southern Crimean Peninsula is still heavily ethnic Russian, and it is the home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, providing Russia’s only outlet to the Mediterranean. 

Seeing that he could no longer control Ukraine by manipulating its democracy through President Viktor Yanukovych’s neo-czardom, Putin opted for a more direct and mechanical approach. He took de facto control of pro-Russian Crimea, which for all intents and purposes was already within his sphere of influence. Besides, the home of Russia’s warm-water fleet could never be allowed to fall under the sway of a pro-Western government in Kiev. 

Next, Putin ordered military maneuvers in the part of Russia adjoining eastern Ukraine, involving more than 10,000 troops, in order to demonstrate Russia’s geographical supremacy over the half of Ukraine that is pro-Russian as well as the part of Ukraine blessed with large shale-gas reserves. Putin knows–as does the West–that a flat topography along the long border between Russia and Ukraine grants Moscow an overwhelming advantage not only militarily but also in terms of disrupting trade and energy flows to Kiev. While Ukraine has natural gas of its own, it relies on Russia’s far vaster reserves to fuel its domestic economy. 

Putin is not likely to invade eastern Ukraine in a conventional way. In order to exercise dominance, he doesn’t need to. Instead he will send in secessionists, instigate disturbances, probe the frontier with Russian troops and in other ways use the porous border with Ukraine to undermine both eastern Ukraine’s sovereignty and its links to western Ukraine. 

In short, he will use every geographical and linguistic advantage to weaken Ukraine as a state. Ukraine is simply located too far east, and is too spatially exposed to Russia, for it ever to be in the interests of any government in Moscow–democratic or not–to allow Ukraine’s complete alignment with the West. 

Back to a Zero-Sum Middle East 

Another way to describe what is going on around the world now is old-fashioned zero-sum power politics. It is easy to forget that many Western policymakers and thinkers have grown up in conditions of unprecedented security and prosperity, and they have been intellectually formed by the post–Cold War world, in which it was widely believed that a new set of coolly rational rules would drive foreign policy. But leaders beyond America and Europe tend to be highly territorial in their thinking. For them, international relations are a struggle for survival. As a result, Western leaders often think in universal terms, while rulers in places like Russia, the Middle East and East Asia think in narrower terms: those that provide advantage to their nations or their ethnic groups only. 

We can see this disconnect in the Middle East, which is unraveling in ways that would be familiar to a 19th century geographer but less intuitive to a Washington policy wonk. The Arab Spring was hailed for months as the birth pangs of a new kind of regional democracy. It quickly became a crisis in central authority, producing not democracy but religious war in Syria, chaos in Yemen and Libya and renewed dictatorship in Egypt as a popular reaction to incipient chaos and Islamic extremism. Tunisia, seen by some as the lone success story of the Arab Spring, is a mere fledgling democracy with land borders it can no longer adequately control, especially in the southern desert areas where its frontiers meet those of Algeria and Libya–a situation aggravated by Libya’s collapse. 

Meanwhile, Tripoli is no longer the capital of Libya but instead the central dispatch point for negotiations among tribes, militias and gangs for control of territory. Damascus is not the capital of Syria but only that of Syria’s most powerful warlord, Bashar Assad. Baghdad totters on as the capital of a tribalized Shi’ite Mesopotamia dominated by adjacent Iran–with a virtually independent Kurdish entity to its mountainous north and a jihadist Sunnistan to its west, the latter of which has joined a chaotic void populated by literally hundreds of war bands extending deep across a flat desert terrain into Syria as far as the Mediterranean. 

Hovering above this devolution of Middle Eastern states into anarchic warlorddoms is the epic geographic struggle between a great Shi’ite state occupying the Iranian Plateau and a medieval-style Sunni monarchy occupying much of the Arabian Peninsula. The interminable violence and repression in eastern Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Sunnistan (covering both western Iraq and Syria) are fueled by this Saudi-Iranian proxy war. Because Iran is developing the technological and scientific base with which to assemble nuclear weapons, Israel finds itself in a de facto alliance with Saudi Arabia. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can be defined by his zero-sum geographic fears, including that of the tyranny of distance: the difficulty of his relatively small air force to travel a thousand miles eastward, which bedevils his search for an acceptable military option against Iran. This helps make him what he is: an obstinate negotiating partner for both the Palestinians and the Americans. 

Pacific Projection 

Then there is the most important part of the world for the U.S., the part with two of the three largest economies (China and Japan) and the home of critical American treaty allies: the Asia-Pacific region. This region too is undeniably far less stable now than at the start of the 21st century, and for reasons that can best be explained by geography. 

In the early Cold War decades, Asian countries were preoccupied with their internal affairs. China, under Mao Zedong’s depredations and Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, was inwardly focused. Vietnam, the current territory of Malaysia and to a lesser extent the Philippines were overwhelmed by internal wars and rebellions. Singapore was building a viable city-state from scratch. And South Korea and Japan were recovering from major wars. 

Now these states have consolidated their domestic affairs and built strong institutions. They have all, with the exception of the poverty-racked Philippines, benefited from many years of capitalist-style growth. But strong institutions and capitalist prosperity lead to military ambitions, and so all of these states since the 1990s have been enlarging or modernizing their navies and air forces–a staggering military buildup to which the American media have paid relatively scant attention. 

Since the 1990s, Asia’s share of military imports has risen from 15% to 41% of the world total, and its overall military spending has risen from 11% to 20% of all global military expenditures. And what are these countries doing with all of these new submarines, warships, fighter jets, ballistic missiles and cyberwarfare capabilities? They are contesting with one another lines on the map in the blue water of the South China and East China seas: Who controls what island, atoll or other geographical feature above or below water–for reserves of oil and natural gas might lie nearby? Nationalism, especially that based on race and ethnicity, fired up by territorial claims, may be frowned upon in the modern West, but it is alive and well throughout prosperous East Asia. 

Notice that all these disputes are, once again, not about ideas or economics or politics even but rather about territory. The various claims between China and Japan in the East China Sea, and between China and all the other pleaders in the South China Sea (principally Vietnam and the Philippines), are so complex that while theoretically solvable through negotiation, they are more likely to be held in check by a stable balance-of-power system agreed to by the U.S. and Chinese navies and air forces. The 21st century map of the Pacific Basin, clogged as it is with warships, is like a map of conflict-prone Europe from previous centuries. Though war may ultimately be avoided in East Asia, the Pacific will show us a more anxious, complicated world order, explained best by such familiar factors as physical terrain, clashing peoples, natural resources and contested trade routes. 

India and China, because of the high wall of the Himalayas, have developed for most of history as two great world civilizations having relatively little to do with each other. But the collapse of distance in the past 50 years has turned them into strategic competitors in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. (This is how technology abets rather than alleviates conflict.) And if Narendra Modi of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party is elected by a significant majority in elections in April and May, as is expected by many, India will likely pursue a fiercely geopolitical foreign policy, aligning even more strongly with Japan against China. 

China, meanwhile, faces profound economic troubles in the coming years. The upshot will be more regime-stoked nationalism directed at the territorial disputes in the South China and East China seas and more rebellions at home from regionally based ethnic groups such as the Turkic Muslim Uighurs, in the west abutting Central Asia, and the Tibetans, in the southwest close to India. Can the Han Chinese, who inhabit the arable cradle of China and make up 90% of the country’s population, keep the minorities on the upland peripheries under control during a sustained period of economic and social unrest? The great existential question about China’s future is about control of its borderlands, not its currency. 

Practically anywhere you look around the globe, geography confounds. Burma is slowly being liberated from benighted military dictatorship only to see its Muslim minority Rohingyas suffer murder and rape at the hands of Burmese nationalist groups. The decline of authoritarianism in Burma reveals a country undermined by geographically based ethnic groups with their own armies and militias. Similarly, sub-Saharan African economies have been growing dramatically as middle classes emerge across that continent. Yet at the same time, absolute population growth and resource scarcity have aggravated ethnic and religious conflicts over territory, as in the adjoining Central African Republic and South Sudan in the heart of the continent, which have dissolved into religious and tribal war. 

What’s New Is Old Again 

Of course, civil society of the kind Western elites pine for is the only answer for most of these problems. The rule of law, combined with decentralization in the cases of sprawling countries such as Russia and Burma, alone can provide for stability–as it has over the centuries in Europe and the Americas. But working toward that goal requires undiluted realism about the unpleasant facts on the ground. 

To live in a world where geography is respected and not ignored is to understand the constraints under which political leaders labor. Many obstacles simply cannot be overcome. That is why the greatest statesmen work near the edges of what is possible. Geography establishes the broad parameters–only within its bounds does human agency have a chance to succeed.  

Thus, Ukraine can become a prosperous civil society, but because of its location it will always require a strong and stable relationship with Russia. The Arab world can eventually stabilize, but Western militaries cannot set complex and highly populous Islamic societies to rights except at great cost to themselves. East Asia can avoid war but only by working with the forces of ethnic nationalism at play there. 

If there is good news here, it is that most of the borders that are being redrawn–or just reunderlined–exist within states rather than between them. A profound level of upheaval is occurring that, in many cases, precludes military intervention. The vast human cataclysms of the 20th century will not likely repeat themselves. But the worldwide civil society that the elites thought they could engineer is a chimera. The geographical forces at work will not be easily tamed. 

While our foreign policy must be morally based, the analysis behind it must be cold-blooded, with geography as its starting point. In geopolitics, the past never dies and there is no modern world.