Is America In a Pre-Revolutionary State This July 4th? By Roger L. Simon.

Is America in a Pre-Revolutionary State this July 4th? By Roger L. Simon. PJ Media, July 2, 2013.

Simon:

As we approach July 4, 2013, is America in a pre-revolutionary state? Are we headed for a Tahrir Square of our own with the attendant mammoth social turmoil, possibly even violence?

 

Could it happen here?

 

We are two-thirds of the way into the most incompetent presidency in our history. People everywhere are fed up. Even many of the so-called liberals who propelled Barack Obama into office have stopped defending him in the face of an unprecedented number of scandals coming at us one after the other like hideous monsters in some non-stop computer game.

 

And now looming is the monster of monsters, ObamaCare, the healthcare reform almost no one wanted and fewer understood.

 

It will be administered by the Internal Revenue Service, an organization that has been revealed to be a kind of post-modern American Gestapo, asking not just to examine our accounting books but the books we read. What could be more totalitarian than that?

 

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal warns the costs of ObamaCare are close to tripling what were promised, and the number of doctors in our country is rapidly diminishing. No more “My son, the doctor!” It doesn’t pay.

 

And young people most of all will not be able to afford escalating health insurance costs and will end up paying the fine to the IRS, simultaneously bankrupting the health system and enhancing the brutal power of the IRS — all this while unemployment numbers remain near historical highs.

 

No one knows how many have given up looking for work while crony capitalist friends of the administration enrich themselves on mythological clean-energy projects.

 

In fact, everywhere we look on this July Fourth sees a great civilization in decline. And much of that decline can be laid at the foot of the incumbent. Especially his own people, African Americans, have suffered.  Their unemployment numbers are catastrophic, their real needs ignored while hustlers like Sharpton, Jackson, and, sadly, even the president fan the flames of non-existent racism.

 

Tahrir Square anyone?

 

Ironically, if our society enters a revolutionary phase, liberals will find themselves in the role of the Islamists, defending a shopworn and reactionary ideology on religious grounds, because it is only their faith that holds their ideas together at this point.

 

The facts of the American decline tell us otherwise. We don’t need the contempt of Vladimir Putin to remind us how bad things are and that the seeming result of the end of the Cold War is that American presidents are now mocked by the second coming of the KGB (not that it was ever gone).

 

We all know the famous Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times!

 

We certainly are, and I am of two minds about it. Like so many Americans, I have lived a comfortable, privileged life, vastly so compared to most of human history.

 

But I am filled with foreboding about what’s to come, indeed about what is already here. When I look at the masses swarming in Tahrir Square, I am at once repelled and attracted, repelled because, to be honest, I find their culture more than a bit crazy, but attracted because I know something is seriously wrong, not just in Egypt but in the USA.

The Beltway Burkeans vs. Heartland Populists. By Ben Domenech.

The Beltway Burkeans vs. Heartland Populists. By Ben Domenech. Real Clear Politics, July 2, 2013.

The Case of the Missing White Voters Revisited. By Sean Trende. Real Clear Politics, June 21, 2013. Demographics and the GOP, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Rand Paul Is a Savvier Politician Than Karl Rove Would Prefer. By Conor Friedersdorf. The Atlantic, June 27, 2013.


Domenech:

Watch Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s video concerning his 2016 agenda, if only for the part where he pauses to take a drink from his union skull chalice. The moderate Midwestern tone here drones a bit – dynamic this isn’t – but look at how he’s marketing his legislative agenda in the frame of the 2016 run he’s almost certain to make: it’s all lower- and middle-income focused. It’s worth considering why Walker won his recall election – it was in not insignificant ways due to these voters, who gave him more support than might be expected given his conservative views (he even got 38% of the overall union vote, though of course that was more from the private sector unions). He touts one of the largest tax cuts in Wisconsin history, with a larger tax rate cut for those making 15-50k; teases his higher ed reforms; follows Bobby Jindal’s lead in pursuing a statewide expansion of school choice; spins the Medicaid expansion refusal handily; and even talks up federal deficit reduction. Walker is still getting slammed by all the usual suspects – for cutting entitlements, passing tax cuts for the rich, and sneaking through what one legislator called “vouchers on steroids” – he’s just savvier at pitching it.

 

Now, set that aside for a moment, and consider Michael Gerson’s recent remarks about Rand Paul in Aspen. “Gerson went on to argue that Paul won’t be able to lead the Republican Party to victory, because he can’t solve the most challenging political problem facing it: addressing the concerns of working class voters. ‘We have an economy that is continually stagnant for them, no matter what the situation is in the broader economy, and with new Americans who are concerned with social mobility,’ he said. ‘One of the most extraordinary facts that came out of the great recession was that in the worst days of the great recession, people with a four-year college degree have a 4.5 percent unemployment rate. People with just a high-school degree had a 24 percent unemployment rate. We’re an economy that’s increasingly segregated by class based on things like skills, education, family structure, a lot of things that have to do with social capital. The question is, are Republicans going to speak to the lived experience of the Americans they need to appeal to on the economy? I don’t think libertarianism speaks to those concerns effectively.’”

 

This seems short-sighted to me. As Sean Trende noted recently, the GOP does have a significant choice to make about the path forward on framing policy for the 2016 cycle. It can abandon its corporatist leanings and adopt the message of a more populist party which aims at the Jacksonian coal country whites, or it can double down on the white suburbanite model, pass immigration reform to appeal to Hispanics, appeal to upscale environmentalists by embracing cuts to emissions and considering carbon taxes, and offer efficiencies and streamlined government as the key to its electoral strategy (as opposed to an agenda afterthought, as they are in Walker’s video).

In their March piece in Commentary, Gerson and Pete Wehner went for all of these points with gusto. Gerson’s criticism of Paul, and libertarian-ish conservatism generally, is that it won’t address his first point from that piece – the economic challenges of working and middle class Americans. But the rest of his prescribed agenda doesn’t go toward that populist aim any more than Gerson’s support for getting involved in even more international conflicts. It seems very unlikely to me that shoving through the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill, expanding environmental and anti-emission regulations, guilt-ridding prison reform, trying to convince Hollywood to promote marriage and family, and making the case for getting involved in Syria is going to be an agenda that matches up with the lived experience of Americans in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. This has little in common with Walker’s more aggressive approach. Instead, it sounds like an agenda designed to appeal to upper class white people.

 

This is a good example of the very real challenges of 2016 agenda formation. The Beltway Burkeans talk a good game about shifting the right’s coalition, but the truth is that their agenda represents a much more modest shift, in large part a reworking of the same ideas they’ve been pitching for years. The most interesting part of that Commentary piece for me remains the criticism Wehner and Gerson level against the rising preference for individualism in place of community. But as Alexander Hamilton reminded us, we must recognize things as they are, not as they ought to be. If you believe that this rise of individualistic fervor is a tide driven by culture and demography, not just politics – that it is much larger than any policy agenda – then the wiser course would be to run with it as opposed to against it. A bolder approach to remaking the coalition would ditch the false promise of technocratic paternalism in favor of a bias toward individual liberty and a rediscovery of the populist agenda which can prevail where Mitt Romney failed. Whether that’s possible depends on the boldness of the 2016 field. It may only take one to pull the others in that direction.


Trende:

4. The GOP faces a tough choice.

Of course, it isn’t that easy. Obama won’t be on the ticket in 2016, and the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, could have a greater appeal to these voters (current polling suggests that she does). But there are always tradeoffs, and Clinton’s greater appeal to blue-collar whites, to the extent it holds through 2016, could be offset by a less visceral attachment with young voters, college-educated whites and to nonwhites than the president enjoys.

But the GOP still has something of a choice to make. One option is to go after these downscale whites. As I’ll show in Part 2, it can probably build a fairly strong coalition this way. Doing so would likely mean nominating a candidate who is more Bush-like in personality, and to some degree on policy. This doesn’t mean embracing “big government” economics or redistribution full bore; suspicion of government is a strain in American populism dating back at least to Andrew Jackson. It means abandoning some of its more pro-corporate stances. This GOP would have to be more “America first” on trade, immigration and foreign policy; less pro-Wall Street and big business in its rhetoric; more Main Street/populist on economics.

For now, the GOP seems to be taking a different route, trying to appeal to Hispanics through immigration reform and to upscale whites by relaxing its stance on some social issues. I think this is a tricky road to travel, and the GOP has rarely been successful at the national level with this approach. It certainly has to do more than Mitt Romney did, who at times seemed to think that he could win the election just by corralling the small business vote. That said, with the right candidate it could be doable. It’s certainly the route that most pundits and journalists are encouraging the GOP to travel, although that might tell us more about the socioeconomic standing and background of pundits and journalists than anything else.

Of course, the most successful Republican politicians have been those who can thread a needle between these stances: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and (to a lesser degree) Bush 43 have all been able to talk about conservative economic stances without horrifying downscale voters. These politicians are rarities, however, and the GOP will most likely have to make a choice the next few cycles about which road it wants to travel.
 

Trayvon Martin and Black Manhood on Trial. By Mychal Denzel Smith.

Trayvon Martin and Black Manhood on Trial. By Mychal Denzel Smith. The Nation, July 2, 2013.

What If Robert E. Lee Accepted Command of the Union Army? By Thomas Fleming.

What If Robert E. Lee Accepted Command of the Union Army? By Thomas Fleming. History News Network, July 1, 2013.

This article is adapted from Thomas Fleming’s new book, A Disease In the Public Mind – A New Understanding of Why We Fought the Civil War. New York: Da Capo Press, 2013, 384 pp.

Fleming:

The United States of America trembled on the brink of her greatest tragedy – a civil war that would kill a million young men. Seven Southern states had seceded after Abraham Lincoln was elected president as an anti-slavery Republican, with scarcely a single Southern vote. They had been unmoved by his inaugural address, in which he warned them that he had taken a solemn oath to preserve the Union – and reminded them of their shared heritage, witnessed by the numberless patriot graves in every state.

 

When Lincoln tried to resupply Fort Sumter, the Federal fort in Charleston, South Carolina’s harbor, the secessionists had responded by bombarding it. The president summoned an army of 75,000 men to suppress an unquestionable rebellion – and asked Colonel Robert E. Lee of Virginia to take command of it. Suddenly Colonel Lee – and the nation – confronted one of the most crucial turning points in American history. What would have happened if he had accepted the president’s offer?

 

Colonel Lee had repeatedly said that he believed secession was treason. It had now been compounded by firing on the American flag. Virginia, the largest state in the Union, had not seceded. Her voters had elected a convention to make this fateful decision. Well over half the delegates publicly opposed secession.

 

North Carolina, long considered Virginia’s political satellite, also had not seceded. Nor had Arkansas, a state with strong ties to Missouri, which had similarly refused to secede. Nor had Tennessee, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware -- all states in which slavery was legal. In many seceded states, such as Georgia, secession had passed by only a handful of votes.

 

In Virginia, many people thought the state’s decision depended not a little on what Colonel Lee would do. Thanks to his exploits in the Mexican War, he was the nation’s most famous soldier. General Winfield Scott, the commander in that war, said Congress ought to insure Lee’s life for 5 million dollars. Now his old commander enthusiastically backed the president’s offer. He said Lee was worth 50,000 men.

 

Many people regarded Lee as George Washington’s heir. He was married to Washington’s great granddaughter Mary Custis. When he was not on duty, he lived at Arlington, a house that was crowded with Washington relics – pictures, furniture, articles of clothing. Lee’s father, Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee had been a famous cavalry leader in the American Revolution and one of General Washington’s favorite soldiers. As president, Washington had chosen Lee to head a 15,000 man army that marched into western Pennsylvania in 1794 to crush the nation’s first attempt at insurrection, the so-called Whiskey Rebellion of the state’s western counties against the government’s tax on spirits.

 

What would General Lee have done, as the head of the Union Army in 1861? We know what General Scott was thinking at the time. Scott had recommended to the president the approach that had worked for President Andrew Jackson in 1833, when South Carolina threatened to secede. Jackson had sternly warned them they were committing treason and promised to have an army of 50,000 men in the state within a matter of weeks.

 

Along with the threat of a direct invasion, General Scott had recommended the creation of satellite armies in the West, which would seize control of the Mississippi and threaten to invade the South from that side of the continent. Impatient critics derided this as “The Anaconda Plan.” But it too was part of the strategy of winning through intimidation.

 

Crucial to this approach would be the retention of Virginia in the Union. No one was better qualified than Robert E. Lee to make a direct appeal to his state’s loyalty. He could, and very probably would, have invoked the spirits of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe – Virginians all. Madison would have been an especially effective name. He had advised President Jackson to crush South Carolina’s 1833 secession without hesitation or mercy. As the “father of the Constitution,” Madison spoke with authority when he declared there was no legal or moral basis for secession. Above all Lee could have cited President Washington’s appeal in his farewell address. He had called on all Americans to treasure and defend their union as the primary achievement of their struggle for independence.

 

Would the wild men of South Carolina, the first state to secede in 1860, have defied General Lee’s appeal? It was possible, even probable. Lee would have confronted a major problem if he was forced to invade the Palmetto State. His army would have had numerous soldiers from New England, who had a violent hatred of southerners and slavery. Many were abolitionists, committed to immediate freedom for the South’s 4 million slaves. They had painted slave owners as sadistic monsters unworthy of mercy. Would General Lee be able to restrain them from abusing and even massacring Southern civilians?

 

Almost as violent as the abolitionists’ hatred of Southerners was the Southerners’ hatred of these fanatics, Fear of a race war throbbed deep in the Southern public mind. Here General Lee would have turned to President Lincoln and let him address these inflamed Northern volunteers. The president would have reminded them that only six percent of the South owned slaves. Even these men were not guilty of a crime. As long as they remained peaceful, they could not be abused or insulted.

 

Simultaneously, Lee almost certainly would have organized his army so that his vanguard regiments were from Virginia and North Carolina. Southerners would have confronted fellow southerners, ready to give their lives for the salvation of the union. It seems a near certainty that if it came to gunfire, the first Virginian to fall would have inflamed the entire state with his sacrifice, making victory a near certainty.

 

Simultaneously, General Lee would have displayed his genius for the oblique attack, the flanking movement that overran the rattled enemy from an unexpected direction. Casualties would have remained low, as the Union Army advanced on Charleston. If the defeated secessionists retreated into that city, and called on the other seceded states for aid, Lee would have ordered one of the satellite western armies to advance to those states’ western borders.

 

Then would have come a pause, and a call for a negotiated surrender. President Lincoln would have offered his plan for a gradual emancipation of the South’s slaves, to be supervised by a federal commission and accompanied by compensation for the value of each man and woman. General Lee might have reminded his fellow Virginians that Thomas Jefferson Randolph, Thomas Jefferson’s grandson, had proposed such a plan to Virginia in 1833.

 

Thomas Jefferson Randolph was still alive. He was an old man, but Lincoln, shrewd politician that he was, would have offered him the chairmanship of the supervisory federal commission. Randolph would have almost certainly been enormously persuasive, from the sheer power of his name.

 

Large issues would of course, have remained to be settled. Where and how the freed slaves would live, for example, and whether they should be given the vote. But the lethal crisis that confronted the nation before Colonel Lee accepted President Lincoln’s offer would have been dispelled, hopefully forever. The spirit of Washington, the man who enlisted thousands of black men in his Continental Army in 1776, and freed all his slaves in his will, with orders that they be educated and trained in various skills, would have been invoked to guarantee a peaceful evolution.

 

The looming civil war would have dwindled to “the uprising of 1861.” General Lee would have remained in command of the Union army, ready to extinguish any and all flickers of revolt. By expertly mingling his troops so that Southern and Northern regiments served in the same brigades, he would have forged a new sense of brotherhood in and around the word Union. At the end of President Lincoln’s second term, it seems more than likely that the American people would have elected Robert E. Lee as his successor.

Robert E. Lee. By Julian Vannerson.

I Don’t Stand with Wendy Davis. By Kirsten Powers.

I Don’t Stand with Wendy Davis. By Kirsten Powers. The Daily Beast, July 2, 2013.

Democrat Kirsten Powers: I’m Tiring of the Wendy’s of the World. By Katie Pavlich. Townhall.com, July 2, 2013.

Wendy Davis: Superhero. By Katha Pollitt. NJBR, June 26, 2013. With related articles.

Abdel Fattah al-Sisi—Memorize That Name. By Adam Garfinkle.

Abdel Fattah al-Sisi—Memorize That Name. By Adam Garfinkle. The American Interest, July 1, 2013.

Reframing Egypt’s Collapse. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 2, 2013.

David Lamb on Cairo in 1987. By Steve Sailer. VDARE.com, February 7, 2011. Also here. Also, David Lamb, The Arabs: Journeys Beyond the Mirage, p. 33. Google Books. Quote on IBM syndrome.

Egypt politics not confusing but a symptom of decades of oppression. By Richard Spencer. The Telegraph, July 1, 2013.

Morsi Faces Ultimatum as Allies Speak of Military “Coup.” By David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim. New York Times, July 1, 2013.

Young Activists Rouse Egypt Protests but Leave Next Steps to Public. By Ben Hubbard. New York Times, July 1, 2013.

Morsi isn’t going anywhere without a fight. By Ariel Ben Solomon. Jerusalem Post, July 1, 2013.

Army Coup in Egypt – History Repeating. By Ariel Ben Solomon. Real Clear World, July 2, 2013. Also at the Jerusalem Post.

Egypt: Ruling But Not Governing. By Steven A. Cook. Council on Foreign Relations, July 1, 2013.

Israel and Its Enemies: Peace Process or War Process? By Daniel Pipes.

Israel and Its Enemies: Peace Process or War Process? By Daniel Pipes. Middle East Quarterly, Fall 2009. Also here and here.

Solving the “Palestinian Problem.” By Daniel Pipes. DanielPipes.org, January 7, 2009.

The doomed Mideast “peace process.” By Jeff Jacoby. Boston Globe, October 14, 2009.

Honor-Shame Jihad (HJP). By Richard Landes. The Augean Stables.

Israel Faces a Culture of Hatred and Violence. By Mortimer B. Zuckerman. U.S. News and World Report, March 21, 2011.

Itamar massacre illustrates the existential threats facing Israel.

Two Examples of the Arab Muslim Descent into Savagery: Aziz Salha (Ramallah, 2000) and Abu Sakkar (Syria, 2013). NJBR, July 14, 2013.

The One-State Solution Would Be a Nightmare. By Carlo Strenger. NJBR, June 30, 2013. With related articles.

Enter the Neo-Canaanites. By Bret Stephens. NJBR, June 20, 2013. With related articles.

Survival of the Fittest. Interview with Benny Morris. By Ari Shavit. Haaretz, January 9, 2004. Also here and here.

Benny Morris Returns to the Fold. by Avi Beker. Haaretz, October 26, 2009.

Benny Morris: “The 1948 War Was an Islamic Holy War.” Interview with Benny Morris. By Amira Lamm. Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2010.

The New Historiography: Israel Confronts Its Past. By Benny Morris. Tikkun, November/December 1988.

Palestine, Peoples and Borders in the New Middle East. By Ahmad Samih Khalidi. NJBR, June 3, 2013. With related articles.

More Peace, Less Process. By Ben Cohen. NJBR, May 30, 2013.

Obama in Israel: Hope over Experience? By Max Boot. NJBR, March 25, 2013.

President Obama Speaks to the People of Israel. NJBR, March 22, 2013.

Like Bibi, Obama May Just Want to Manage Middle East Conflict. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, March 9, 2013.

Taking the High Ground. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, June 13, 2004. Also here.

Friedman:

There is no total victory to be had by Israel over Hezbollah or the Palestinians, without total genocide.


Pipes (Israel and Its Enemies):

Rabin’s mistake was simple and profound: One cannot “make peace with one’s enemy,” as he imagined. Rather, one makes peace with one’s former enemy. Peace nearly always requires one side in a conflict to be defeated and thus give up its goals.

 

Wars end not through goodwill but through victory. “Let your great object [in war] be victory” observed Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese strategist. “War is an act of violence to compel the enemy to fulfill our will,” wrote his nineteenth-century Prussian successor, Karl von Clausewitz in 1832. Douglas MacArthur observed in 1951 that in “war, there is no substitute for victory.”

 

Technological advancement has not altered this insight. Fighting either continues or potentially can resume so long as both sides hope to achieve their war goals. Victory consists of imposing one’s will on the enemy, compelling him to give up his war ambitions. Wars typically end when one side gives up hope, when its will to fight has been crushed.

 

Defeat, one might think, usually follows on devastating battlefield losses, as was the case of the Axis in 1945. But that has rarely occurred during the past sixty years. Battlefield losses by the Arab states to Israel in 1948-82, by North Korea in 1953, by Saddam Hussein in 1991, and by Iraqi Sunnis in 2003 did not translate into despair and surrender. Morale and will matter more these days. Although they out-manned and out-gunned their foes, the French gave up in Algeria, the Americans in Vietnam, and the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Cold War ended, notably, with barely a fatality. Crushing the enemy’s will to fight, then, does not necessarily mean crushing the enemy. 

Arabs and Israelis since 1948 have pursued static and opposite goals: Arabs fought to eliminate Israel; Israelis fought to win their neighbors' acceptance. Details have varied over the decades with multiple ideologies, strategies, and leading actors, but the twin goals have remained in place and unbridgeable. If the conflict is to end, one side must lose and one side win. Either there will be no more Zionist state or it will be accepted by its neighbors. Those are the only two scenarios for ending the conflict. Anything else is unstable and a premise for further warfare.

 

The Arabs have pursued their war aims with patience, determination, and purpose; the exceptions to this pattern (e.g., the Egyptian and Jordanian peace treaties) have been operationally insignificant because they have not tamped hostility to Israel’s existence. In response, Israelis sustained a formidable record of strategic vision and tactical brilliance in the period 1948-93. Over time, however, as Israel developed into a wealthy country, its populace grew impatient with the humiliating, slow, boring, bitter, and expensive task of convincing Arabs to accept their political existence. By now, few in Israel still see victory as the goal; almost no major political figure on the scene today calls for victory in war. Uzi Landau, currently minister of national infrastructure, who argues that “when you’re in a war you want to win the war,” is the rare exception.

. . . .

 

But who does not win, loses. To survive, Israelis eventually must return to their pre-1993 policy of establishing that Israel is strong, tough, and permanent. That is achieved through deterrence — the tedious task of convincing Palestinians and others that the Jewish state will endure and that dreams of elimination must fail.

 

This will not be easy or quick. Due to missteps during the Oslo years and after (especially the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza of 2005 and the Lebanon war of 2006), Palestinians perceive Israel as economically and militarily strong but morally and politically weak. In the pungent words of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Israel is “weaker than a spider's web.” Such scorn will likely require decades of hard work to reverse. Nor will it be pretty: Defeat in war typically entails that the loser experience deprivation, failure, and despair.

 

Israel does enjoy one piece of good fortune: It need only deter the Palestinians, not the whole Arab and Muslim populations. Moroccans, Iranians, Malaysians, and others take their cues from the Palestinians and with time will follow their lead. Israel’s ultimate enemy, the one whose will it needs to crush, is roughly the same demographic size as itself.

 

This process may be seen through a simple prism. Any development that encourages Palestinians to think they can eliminate Israel is negative, any that encourages them to give up that goal is positive.

 

The Palestinians’ defeat will be recognizable when, over a protracted period and with complete consistency, they prove that they have accepted Israel. This does not mean loving Zion, but it does mean permanently accepting it — overhauling the educational system to take out the demonization of Jews and Israel, telling the truth about Jewish ties to Jerusalem, and accepting normal commercial, cultural, and human relations with Israelis.

 

Palestinian démarches and letters to the editor are acceptable but violence is not. The quiet that follows must be consistent and enduring. Symbolically, one can conclude that Palestinians have accepted Israel and the war is over when Jews living in Hebron (on the West Bank) have no more need for security than Arabs living in Nazareth (in Israel).


Jacoby:

In an important article in the current Middle East Quarterly, Daniel Pipes reviews the terrible failure of the 1993 Oslo accords, and homes in on the root fallacy of the diplomatic approach it embodied: the belief that the Arab-Israeli war can “be concluded through good will, conciliation, mediation, flexibility, restraint, generosity, and compromise, topped off with signatures on official documents.’’ For 16 years, Israeli governments, prodded by Washington, have sought to quench Palestinian hostility with concessions and gestures of good will. Yet peace today is more elusive than ever.

 

“Wars end not through good will but through victory,’’ Pipes writes, defining victory as one side compelling the other to give up its war goals. Since 1948, the Arabs’ goal has been the elimination of Israel; the Israelis’, to win their neighbors’ acceptance of a Jewish state in the Middle East. “If the conflict is to end, one side must lose and one side win,’’ argues Pipes.

 

Diplomacy cannot settle the Arab-Israeli conflict until the Palestinians abandon their anti-Israel rejectionism. US policy should therefore be focused on making them abandon it. The Palestinians must be put “on notice that benefits will flow to them only after they prove their acceptance of Israel. Until then – no diplomacy, no discussion of final status, no recognition as a state, and certainly no financial aid or weapons.’’

 

So long as American and Israeli leaders remain committed to a fruitless Arab-Israeli “peace process,’’ Arab-Israeli peace will remain unachievable. Let the newest Nobel peace laureate grasp and act upon that insight, and he will do more to hasten the conflict’s end than any of his well-meaning predecessors.

Is Russia Helping Snowden?

Is Russia helping Snowden? Video with Ralph Peters. The O’Reilly Factor. Fox News, July 1, 2013.

No Horizon in a Perpetually Unstable Palestine. By Nathan J. Brown.

No Horizon in a Perpetually Unstable Palestine. By Nathan J. Brown. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, June 27, 2013.

There is no end in sight to the current impasse in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. An unanticipated shift in the regional environment may be the only force that can spur change.

The Palestinians’ Receding Dream of Statehood. By Nathan J. Brown. Current History, December 2011.

Israel: Athens or Sparta? By Benny Morris.

Athens or Sparta? By Benny Morris. Jewish Review of Books, Summer 2013.

Review of Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country—and Why They Can't Make Peace. By Patrick Tyler. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012, 576 pp.

Same-Sex Marriage Isn’t About Freedom. By Donald Devine.

Same-Sex Marriage Isn’t About Freedom. By Donald Devine. The American Conservative, June 27, 2013.

Not individualism, but the reaction against it, paved the way for marriage equality.

Devine:

Rod Dreher recently set the marriage debate in its broadest possible moral context: “Gay marriage signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because it denies the core concept of Christian anthropology.” “Very near the center” of that Christian culture, he says, citing sociologist Philip Rieff, was its “rejection of sexual individualism,” a rejection that allowed Christianity to displace the “sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture” and substitute its own morality as the operational value system of the West. 

The problem today is that “the myth of individual freedom” has by now torn “away the last vestiges of the old order, convinced that true happiness and harmony will be ours once all limits have been nullified.” Gay marriage is individual freedom’s “decisive blow” because it destroys the last communal restraint: traditional marriage. Since every culture “imposes a series of moral demands on its members for the sake of serving communal purposes,” the lack of these limits in contemporary America portends the end of Western culture and represents its final “deconversion” from Christianity.

 

Dreher’s case that the battle over traditional marriage and family morality has been won by the left, especially among America’s young, is persuasive. But his description of how this happened is almost backwards: freedom and individualism are not to blame. And before retreating to the catacombs, it is well to look more closely at Rieff’s assumptions, which Dreher did warn were those of an unbeliever.

 

To Rieff, “the essence of any and every culture” is “what it forbids.” Modern freedom has “inverted the role of culture” by “releasing [us] from the old prohibitions” and grasping at “sexual expression and assertion,” which is “how the modern American claims his freedom.” Supporting gay marriage is the final logical result. But is Christianity’s role to support a culture, to serve communal rather than individual purposes, to set a culture’s prohibitions, even to support family?

 

Indeed, where did the subversive “myth of individual freedom” come from? It was Jesus himself who separated the individual from Caesar, reinforcing this with a remarkably un-communal statement: “Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No I tell you but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against one another, three against two and two against three” (Luke 12:49-53). When his disciples were confronted by potential converts who would not adopt the broadly Jewish cultural practices of the early Christian community, Peter, Paul, James, and the others freed the pagans from these cultural practices (Acts 15: 1-21). Paul went to the extent of freeing Christians from the restrictions of the Law itself (Gal: 3:23-29) and added “when Christ freed us, he meant us to remain free” (Gal: 5:1).

 

As the conservative thinker Frank Meyer emphasized, by freeing the individual, Christianity created a tension between its high standards—to be perfect as the Father is perfect, to turn the other cheek—and the impossibility of achieving them. This tension is the source of the energy that would make the West the world’s dominant civilization, but it also unleashed the impulse to impose a “human design of perfection upon a world by its nature imperfect.” No culture was safe from the potential excesses of utopianism once Christianity opened Pandora’s Box, unless it was restrained by the faith’s new commandment of love.

 

Ancient civilizations were communal, with sexual institutions that often included polygamy or concubinage. Homosexuality always existed too. These were defended by their supporters as traditional rather than as libertine practices. As Dreher notes, Christianity’s liberation of women and slaves from the “sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture” was one secret of its success. Ancient sexuality was firmly controlled by a rigid patriarchal social order, which was not undermined until Pope Gregory I forbade marriage to close kin in the 6th century AD. Before this, marriage was between families, not individuals. It was Christianity that made marriage more of a free individual choice.

 

Dreher and Rieff are correct in a strange way when they find it “pathetic” to consider Christianity “a therapeutic adjunct to bourgeois individualism.” But Christianity is in fact the source of individualism, which simply did not exist before. Almost everything BC was clan, cult, tribe, and state.

 

If freedom is the problem, Christianity is the culprit for “inverting” the role of culture and freeing the individual to question tradition. Citing Europe’s history of war and unrest, no less a critic than Rousseau concluded that Christianity’s dual forms of loyalty to church and state were “clearly bad” because they “destroy social unity” and civic peace. Rousseau’s solution was that the “sovereign fix the articles” of a new civic religion that would provide for order, welfare, morality, and even freedom properly understood—that is, freedom as defined solely by the state.

 

The whole modern project has been an attempt to control the freedom unleashed by Christianity’s dual loyalty, to re-create the conformity to “traditional” culture that predated the Christian moral liberation. What we see today in the success of gay marriage is not really freedom run amok, but the result of turning the power to define morality over to the state, or to the dominant group representing it.

 

People pretty much absorb the prevailing cultural stereotypes generated by the media, as Walter Lippmann taught us. And what finally persuaded a mass public—by way of constant reinforcement from TV news, sitcoms, and in every classroom—was changing the argument from freedom to “marriage equality.” In fact, the American people were told that allowing equality in marriage was the moral thing to do. This assertion of cultural and political power, not the individual freedom arising from Christianity, is what has truly led to what Dreher calls the “final triumph of the Sexual Revolution.”

Thanks for Nothing, College! By Tim Donovan.

Thanks for nothing, college! By Tim Donovan. Salon, June 30, 2013.

Is Arming Syrian Rebels the Right Answer?

Is arming Syrian rebels the right answer? Video, with General Jack Keane and K.T. McFarland. America Live with Megyn Kelly. Fox News, July 1, 2013.

Learning to Truly Love a Gay Son. By Linda Robertson.

Just Because He Breathes: Learning to Truly Love Our Gay Son. By Linda Robertson. The Huffington Post, July 1, 2013.

Kerry Keeps Leaving the Mideast Empty-Handed. By Raphael Ahren.

Almost there, Mr. Secretary? Really? By Raphael Ahren. The Times of Israel, June 30, 2013.

The top US diplomat leaves the region empty-handed again but vows a breakthrough is imminent. Either he’s not afraid of more humiliating failures, or he knows something we don’t.

Final status negotiations “within reach,” says Kerry. The Times of Israel, June 30, 2013.

Kerry: “Real progress,” but no Israel-Palestinian agreement. By Karen DeYoung and William Booth. Washington Post, June 30, 2013.

Why “a little more work” won’t do it, Mr.Kerry. By David Horovitz. The Times of Israel, July 1, 2013.

Even if talks resumed, they’d lead nowhere, because the Palestinians don’t see genuine peace with Israel as serving their own vital interests. Changing that reality is the diplomats’ true challenge.

Israeli official: Kerry disappointed in Abbas. By Mati Tuchfeld, Daniel Siryoti, and Yoni Hirsch. Israel Hayom, July 1, 2013.

Kerry vs. Palestinian obstinacy. By Eli Hazan. Israel Hayom, July 1, 2013.

Kerry avoiding the blame game. By Dan Margalit. Israel Hayom, July 1, 2013.

Chaos in the Middle East Grows as the U.S. Focuses on Israel. By Mark Landler and Jodi Rudoren. New York Times, July 1, 2013.


Ahren:

Solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a laudable goal, and Kerry might initially have been forgiven a belief that he was somehow uniquely qualified to break the deadlock. But visit after visit should surely have long since underlined a few simple truths: The two sides mistrust each other. Each is more concerned with avoiding blame for failed talks than prepared to take risks in the faint hope of success. Netanyahu and Abbas are also both looking over their shoulders at rivals and bitter opponents poised to capitalize on any missteps. And the unchanging bottom line: The most that Netanyahu might conceivably offer Abbas, were they ever to actually get to the table, is less than Abbas might conceivably accept — less than Ehud Olmert offered in his unrequited bid for an accord in 2008.

 

Those inescapable truths are hard to reconcile with Kerry’s insistent assertions at the airport that a breakthrough is “within reach,” and that all it needs is “a little more work.”

 

Kerry’s boss, president and Nobel peace laureate Barack Obama, also tried to tackle the conflict at the beginning of his first term, but backed away fairly rapidly, and subsequently focused his efforts on other areas.


Horovitz:

Insanity — according to a definition variously attributed to Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Confucius, and most credibly to a 30-year-old book called “Narcotics Anonymous” — is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

 

Five times John Kerry has been to our part of the Middle East since taking office in February. Five times, like some hapless gofer, he has shuttled back and forth between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, ferrying demands and proposals, and rejections. The estimate is that he spent 14 hours in the company of Netanyahu on this latest mission alone, and another seven with Abbas.

 

You’d think he’d have gotten the message by now. But no. In defiance of all his first-hand accumulated evidence of Israeli and Palestinian stubborn immobility, Kerry flew out of Ben Gurion Airport on Sunday afternoon proclaiming that a breakthrough was potentially “within reach.” Just “a little more work” and all that diplomatic failure could yet be translated into success.

 

Yet this willful “cautious optimism,” insistently invoked by the secretary, is not the reason why the definition of insanity comes to mind. Who knows? If only to spare him further humiliation, Abbas and Netanyahu really might eventually capitulate and agree to shake hands, look meaningfully into each other’s eyes, call each other a partner, and sit down across a negotiating table. It’s not as though they haven’t done so in the past.

 

Maybe if Kerry honors his Terminator-style “I’ll be back” pledge a few more times, Abbas will consent to a phased process for the release of pre-Oslo Accords Palestinian murderers, Netanyahu will declare a wider settlement freeze, or some other complex formula of declarations and promises, drafted with lawyerly vagueness and finesse, will enable both leaders to claim sufficient face-saving achievement as to resume direct negotiations.

 

The point is: So what? The point is that Kerry is investing immense personal energy and time, and the United States’ diplomatic prestige, in desperately chivying Netanyahu and Abbas merely to the starting point of a path that has already been walked many times before — a path that, the bitter experience running right through the Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies shows, leads only to a dead end.

 

That’s why the definition of insanity unfortunately resonates when considering the secretary’s indefatigable efforts. He is straining to persuade Netanyahu and Abbas to begin talking when we know that such negotiations can only lead to the same failure they have yielded in the past.

 

The Palestinians would argue — and will try to persuade the world of the validity of this account when the talks, if they do start, inevitably collapse — that a hard-hearted, settlement-loving Israeli government refuses to grant their weak, helpless, occupied people the independent statehood that they deserve. But the root of the unavoidable failure of any resumed talks lies primarily, though not solely, with the Palestinians.

 

Exemplified by Ariel Sharon’s political turnaround, a consensus has gradually emerged in Israel over the past generation that an accommodation with the Palestinians — a separation that frees Israel of responsibility for the millions in the West Bank and Gaza — is a vital Israeli interest. Most of us want a Jewish and a democratic Israel, and we don’t want to be ruling over another people.

 

The Palestinians have reached no parallel, self-interested conclusion. The despicable Yasser Arafat bequeathed his people the toxic narrative that there was no Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and by extension that there is no Jewish sovereign legitimacy in this part of the world, and that Palestinian steadfastness, attachment to the land, and birthrate would ultimately see the unrooted Jewish colonialists sent back to their European homelands. The weak-willed Abbas has allowed that false narrative to fester, including in his schools and his media, rather than energetically disseminating a more accurate picture of competing, legitimate claims to a small, coveted area of land, requiring conciliation and compromise.

 

Last month, the Israeli prime minister who almost five years ago offered Abbas everything the Palestinians ostensibly seek, Ehud Olmert, concluded publicly for the first time, presumably with some reluctance, that Abbas is simply “nota big hero” — he didn’t have the guts to take the deal, because he hadn’t had the guts to lay the groundwork for a deal by telling his people some unpalatable truths about historic Jewish sovereign legitimacy.

 

The path to Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation does not run along the route much traveled by the well-intentioned Secretary Kerry between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Pulling Abbas and Netanyahu back to the table will only presage another failure — and the Second Intifada demonstrated how catastrophic the consequences can be.

 

Where the United States should be placing its energies, and its leverage, and its money, is in encouraging those frameworks that will create a climate in which the Palestinians actually recognize an interest in making true peace on terms that Israel can reasonably live with (terms that do not leave Israel vulnerable to military threat, and do not seek to alter the country’s demographic balance), because the Jews aren’t going anywhere, and Palestinian independence can only be attained in partnership with the Jewish state. The US should be supporting educational programs, and grass-roots interactions, and media channels that offer an honest perspective on the history of our conflict, and that promote a mutually beneficial future of co-existence. It should neither fund, nor encourage others to fund, institutions and organizations that perpetuate false narratives and consequent false grievances.

 

Change the climate. Gradually create an atmosphere of mutual respect, and a shared, fervent desire for an accommodation. Then you won’t have to be cajoling reluctant leaders back to the peace table.

 

Israel, too, has its share of extremists — willfully blind to Palestinian legitimacy, and to the counterproductive nature of the status quo — some of whom sit in government today, encouraging the growth of settlements in areas where Israel will never attain sovereignty, exacerbating hostility, discrediting Israel. Like most Israelis, the US observes this self-defeating process with legitimate bafflement and concern. The hawks in Israeli politics are becoming increasingly intransigent, wishing away the Palestinians by citing less troubling demographic prognoses, or reconciling themselves to the subversion of Israeli democracy. On the ground, “price tag” extremists exemplify a lawlessness and amorality that shames us all.

 

But as the elections in 1992 and 1999 underline, the Israeli middle ground has elected would-be peacemakers when it sensed that hard-line prime ministers were missing genuine opportunities. There is no such sense today, no consensual feeling that Netanyahu — kicked out of office in 1999, remember — is blowing it; that a deal is there to be done if only we had a different prime minister. That’s how successful Arafat, Hamas, Fatah’s military wing, Abbas’s disingenuity, and the chilling Arab Spring have been in shattering Israeli confidence.

 

In a region where instability is now the norm pretty much everywhere bar Israel, and where Iran has thus far outmaneuvered the West as it speeds toward a nuclear weapons capability, this is a pretty discouraging time for a tiny country to be contemplating high-risk territorial compromise — especially when Hamas’s quickfire violent takeover from Fatah of Gaza in 2007 constituted a profoundly worrying precedent for what might occur were Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.

 

Kerry’s unfathomable enthusiasm notwithstanding, there are no short cuts. The only source of potentially justifiable optimism lies in a process of changed atmosphere and changed attitudes — a gradual process — in a Middle East, moreover, where Iran has been successfully faced down and relative moderates consequently emboldened.

 

There is immense merit in working to create a climate in which reconciliation and co-existence are regarded by both sides as serving their national interest. There are no diplomatic quick fixes. Believing otherwise? That’s insanity.


Secretary of State John Kerry, allowing hope to triumph over experience, has plunged into the morass of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process.” Since assuming office in January, Kerry, following in the footsteps of American diplomats before him, has made five trips to the Middle East in a bid to get peace talks restarted. This may prove a bit tricky if, as Khaled Abu Toameh reports, the Palestinian Authority insists on Jews being banned from any and all meetings, a condition that would violate U.S. law. Nonetheless Kerry is determined to keep hope alive. Preparing to depart from Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport, the secretary told a somewhat skeptical media “that with a little more work, the start of final-status negotiations could be within reach.” I fear Secretary Kerry will have to do a flip-flop on this statement as he has done on others in the past.

---------

Kerry’s Top Ten Flip-Flops. By Joel Roberts and David Paul Kuhn. CBS News, February 11, 2009.

Kerry discusses $87 billion comment. CNN, September 30, 2004. Video of comment on YouTube.

Egyptians Increasingly Receptive to Military Rule. By Walter Russell Mead.

Egyptians Increasingly Receptive to Military Rule. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 1, 2013.

A replay of Mubarak’s twilight, this time with Morsi? By Avi Isaacharoff. The Times of Israel, June 30, 2013.

For the Brotherhood, Morsi’s fall would have a domino effect. By Avi Isaacharoff. The Times of Israel, July 1, 2013.