Prepare for the Israel-Palestine Peace Talks to Fail. By Natan B. Sachs.

Prepare for the Worst. By Natan B. Sachs. Foreign Policy, July 25, 2013.

It’s already time to start planning for what happens if the Middle East peace talks fall apart.

Sachs:

Last month in Jerusalem, I sat in on a small conference organized by the Yesha Council, the central organization of Israeli settlers in the West Bank. A featured speaker was Naftali Bennett, leader of the far-right Jewish Home party and minister of economy, who made a simple point: The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is not solvable.

 

To underline his point, Bennett spoke of a friend from military service who suffered a shrapnel wound close to his spine – “near his backside,” Bennett said, in a line that immediately made headlines. The doctors told his friend that they could operate, but he’d run a serious risk of paralysis to his lower limbs. Alternatively, the friend could learn to live with an unpleasant but manageable problem.

 

The medical choice was clear, Bennett said. And the choice facing Israel was clear as well: Rather than try to solve an unsolvable conflict with the Palestinians and risk catastrophe, Israel should opt for limited and practical measures to manage the reality in the West Bank. The death of the two-state solution may be unpleasant for can-do Westerners to acknowledge, he argued, but the depth of the conflict and the number of settlers now living in the West Bank precludes a peace agreement.

 

It’s a good story, but Bennett’s parallel is, in fact, wrong. And yet Secretary of State John Kerry’s motivation for pushing to revive Middle East peace negotiations was actually similar. Kerry reasoned that if the two-state solution is not achieved soon – perhaps in the coming two years – it might never be possible. Soon, in other words, Bennett and others who make the same point would be right.

 

While hoping for the best, and striving to make it reality, we should also prepare for the worst. While Kerry must lay the groundwork for giving the resumed peace talks the best chance of success, he must also plan for their failure. If the negotiations collapse, there is a danger that people will take the secretary of state at his word and conclude that the door to peace is finally shut. Whatever happens at the negotiating table, Kerry must ensure that he doesn’t help convince people that Bennett, after all, was correct.

 

The risk of failure is real. The Israelis and Palestinians are far apart on the most important issues and, moreover, each of the sides suspects the other has entered the talks with bad intentions. Trust is hard to come by these days in the Holy Land: Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas fears that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is only interested in talks for the sake of talks, in order to ease international pressure on Israel. Netanyahu suspects that Abbas, faced with a Palestinian society where most oppose a return to the negotiating table, has entered the talks just to avoid blame for Kerry's failure, and will continue to play the blame game during the negotiations.

 

The bad news is that they may both be right. Kerry’s creative ambiguity, which was necessary to get the talks off the ground, will apparently entail him enunciating terms of reference – notably referring to the 1967 borders as a starting point for negotiations. This will permit each side to voice its reservations about these parameters before entering into negotiations. The sides have agreed to disagree, in other words, but they have agreed to do so in the same room.

 

To avoid the blame game, Kerry seems to have wisely insisted on the secrecy of the talks. Maintaining the discreet nature of the negotiations throughout their duration – and even if and when they stall – will help prevent the parties from backsliding into blame attribution. In general, the less hype there is around the talks, the less media frenzy is likely to emerge around their conclusion. The less the United States apportions failure or blame, the less credible the sides' accusations will be.

 

If the talks do collapse, will Kerry find the peace process back to where it started – or could the situation be even worse? Many fear that unmet expectations may lead to an outbreak of violence, and point to the outbreak of the Second Intifada in the wake of the much-hyped 2000 Camp David summit as evidence. In the ensuing bloodshed, more than 4,000 people lost their lives over the next four years.

 

But those drawing parallels between today and the Second Intifada risk learning the wrong lessons from history. Much of the events of 2000 had to do with internal dynamics and decisions of both parties before the collapse of peace talks. The Palestinian organizations – including the grassroots militia of Yasir Arafat’s Fatah Movement – were preparing for violence long before the disappointment of Camp David. And the Israelis were already preparing a forceful response to Palestinian violence – a response that may have helped turn the conflict into a full blown and horrifically violent intifada.

 

Today, the circumstances are different. Abbas is not Arafat, and the Palestinian security organizations have been thoroughly reformed under the leadership of former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. At present, military cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank is good, and is supported by an ongoing U.S. effort to maintain security. On the Israeli side, too, responsible and cool-headed generals now command the forces in the West Bank – men who are well aware of the dangers of over-reaction.

 

Yet even if a failure of negotiations does not lead to an outbreak of violence, it could lead to renewed demands on the Palestinian side for dissolving the Palestinian Authority. Palestinians are weary of the peace process, and there is real risk that they will increasingly prefer dangerous (and unrealistic) aspirations for a one state “solution.” There is also the risk of growing demands in Israel to annex less inhabited parts of the West Bank to Israel proper: Naftali Bennett, for example, has called for annexation of "Area C," which includes all the Israeli settlements. Most in the Israeli political system still oppose a move along these lines.

 

Staving off worst-case scenarios is possible, but requires close attention – even as Kerry’s energy is devoted to giving his effort the best chance of success. The secretary of state will also have to lay the groundwork for keeping the possibility of future negotiations alive, even if this round of talks stalls. To do so, Washington should prepare steps that fall short of a final-status agreement. The United States, and even Israel, may, for example, recognize the state of Palestine even before agreement on its borders or its relations to Israel is finalized. This suggestion is less outlandish then it might seem: Several Israeli politicians, including the hawkish former Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, suggested doing just that. Doing so would help protect some degree of Palestinian self-rule from rash steps in the wake of failure.

 

Further interim steps, while undoubtedly difficult, would go a long way for providing the peace process with a safety net. Israel, for example, may return to the idea of limited disengagement in the West Bank. Under such plans, Israel would pull out of most of the West Bank without a final status agreement, shaping its own eastern border. The authority in the vacated area would then presumably fall to the Palestinian Authority, just as it did in the Gaza Strip did when Israel evacuated in 2005. It is important that such steps be coordinated with the Palestinians as much as possible – rather than unilaterally implemented, as they were in 2005 – so that they encourage rather than preclude future negotiation.

 

Skeptics (like me) have been wrong before. This round of peace talks may succeed, and we should wish wholeheartedly for their success. Netanyahu has the political backing – from opposition parties, if necessary – to make bold, historic decisions. Abbas may prove skeptics wrong and demonstrate courageous leadership in the face of difficult circumstances.

 

And yet, even while wishing the parties Godspeed, we should also think seriously about the possibility that the talks may fail. Washington should make sure that the ultimate winners of this peace effort are not those who oppose peace.

Kerry’s Captain Ahab Quest. By David Ignatius.

Kerry’s Captain Ahab Quest. By David Ignatius. Real Clear Politics, July 25, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

Arabs Harm Palestinians, World Yawns. By Walter Russell Mead.

Arabs Harm Palestinians, World Yawns. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 24, 2013.

The EU Shows Its True Colors on Israel. By Peter Martino. Real Clear World, July 24, 2013. Also at Gatestone Institute.


Mead:

Ever since the ouster of Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s military has been wreaking havoc on the lives of Palestinians in Gaza. The 1.7 million residents of the Gaza Strip rely heavily on trade through a network of tunnels on the Egyptian border for their livelihood. But with the Muslim Brotherhood out of power, the Egyptian military has been happy to crack down on the tunnel trade and smother Gaza’s economy, depriving the Palestinians there of jobs and income. The WSJ reports:

In the days after Egypt’s military pushed President Mohammed Morsi from power, the army led what local residents described as an unprecedented assault on the tunnel trade, strangling a lifeline for construction materials and fuel into the blockaded strip. […]

 

“The impact is very clear in Gaza: There is no fuel, there is no cement,” said Omar Shabaan, an economist who directs the Gaza-based economic think tank Pal Think. “Things are getting worse in terms of economic activity, which makes the social situation more difficult.”

Many Palestinians in Gaza make a living by transporting goods like fuel, cement, and steel through the tunnels, a trade the Egyptian military is destroying. The closure of the tunnels has made goods less affordable, halted construction projects worth millions, and deprived the government of tax revenue. In a word, Egypt has the power to make life in Gaza unlivable, and they’re using it.

 

We can’t help but think that if Israel made life miserable for Palestinians—intentionally and without compunction, as in Egypt’s case—the world would be up in arms. But when, as is frequently the case (see here, here, here, and here), Arabs are the direct cause of Palestinian suffering, no one seems to care.

 

One thing some people in Europe might want to think about: If something fills you with rage when Jews do it, but doesn’t bother you at all when others do it, you might consider asking yourself why that is. 

Just a thought.

 

 

Want Peace? Get Rid of Hamas. By Jeffrey Goldberg.

Want Peace? Get Rid of Hamas. By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, July 24, 2013.

The Religious Cold War Dividing the Middle East. By David Blair.

The new Cold War dividing the Middle East. By David Blair. The Telegraph, July 23, 2013.

What Future for Israel? By Nathan Thrall.

What Future for Israel? By Nathan Thrall. The New York Review of Books, August 15, 2013. Also here.

Thrall:

Israel’s new government represents well the rightward shift in mainstream Israeli thought. Like Netanyahu and Lapid, most Israeli Jews say they would accept a two-state solution, but the terms on which they are willing to do so are hardly realistic. Many of those further to their right, by contrast, are rather more clear-eyed—or perhaps simply honest—about what peace would entail. In a veiled attack against Netanyahu and Lapid, Naftali Bennett recently said, “Some say they are against the division of Jerusalem but they are in favor of a Palestinian state. And I ask, where exactly would the Palestinian capital be? In Jericho? In Bethlehem? In Berlin?”

 

The right has strengthened as the arguments of the left and center have been discredited. Promoters of negotiations have failed to convey how high a price a peace agreement would exact. They have told themselves and the public that the outlines of a peace deal are well known and they have asserted that agreement exists where it does not. Ambassador Stuart E. Eizenstat, a veteran of the Carter and Clinton administrations and co-chairman of the board of the Jewish People Policy Institute, writes in The Future of the Jews that it is “commonly understood that the largest settlement blocks would remain under Israeli control in any final peace agreement.” Israelis similarly speak of “consensus” settlements, but the common understanding of which Eizenstat writes is shared only by Israelis and their supporters. Leaked Palestinian transcripts from the Annapolis talks of 2007–2008 record the two sides fighting fiercely over the future status of what Israelis consider one of the most “consensus” settlements of all, Ma’ale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, with some 40,000 residents.

 

Claims of a peace within grasp have been as overstated as warnings that the perpetually closing window for a two-state-solution has nearly shut or that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank will make it an international pariah. In the countries in which the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel (“BDS”) has made the largest gains—South Africa and the United Kingdom—Israeli exports have in fact sharply risen. Israelis are not overly worried that the European Union will go significantly beyond wringing its hands over the way its financial support of the Palestinian Authority effectively underwrites Israel’s occupation.

 

Even if proposals to boycott Israeli companies based in the West Bank were to gain steam, they would not stop Israel’s banks, cable television companies, or supermarkets from operating beyond the 1967 borders; nor would they reduce the number of settlers, most of whom work not at factories adjacent to Ariel but west of the Green Line—at places like Google, Intel, and the prime minister’s office. And while elite attitudes toward Israel in the US are changing, recent polls have cast doubt on widely publicized claims that young, non-Orthodox Jews in the US are growing more distant from Israel.

 

Years of relative quiet in the West Bank—2012 was the first year since 1973 that not a single Israeli was killed in an attack there—have undermined the charge that the now-forty-six-year-old military occupation is unsustainable. Secretary Kerry has warned that Israel “will be left to choose between being a Jewish state or a democratic state.” But limited Palestinian self-governance, including close security cooperation with Israel, continues to protect Israel from having to make any such choice.

 

An inescapable and likely unintended conclusion one draws from Abrams’s behind-the-scenes account of policymaking during the second intifada between 2000 and 2005 is how effective violence was in eliminating Israeli complacency and advancing Palestinian goals. Less than a year into the uprising, pressures from Saudi Crown Prince Abdallah—in the form of tearful pleas for America to restrain Israel and a secret letter that, Abrams writes, “put US-Saudi relations in the balance”—led the US to endorse Palestinian statehood. Ariel Sharon soon followed with his own statement of support for a Palestinian state, becoming Israel’s first prime minister to do so.

 

As the Palestinian ambushes, sniper fire, and suicide bombings continued, Sharon abandoned his decades-long dream of retaining Gaza and all of the West Bank. “The bloodshed was so great,” Abrams writes, “that Sharon lifted his year-old” policy of demanding seven days of quiet before he would negotiate a cease-fire with the Palestinians. Later he used the word “occupation” before a Likud Knesset faction meeting, saying it “cannot go on forever.” As pressure mounted to end the violence, Sharon announced that Israel would withdraw from Gaza.

 

The subsequent rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza did not end the desire for more talks. They did, however, greatly strengthen the right’s argument that the conflict is neither primarily territorial nor based on grievances stemming from Israel’s 1967 conquest. Both Palestinian and Israeli hard-liners have gained supporters by casting doubt on the notion that the conflict could be resolved in an exchange of land for peace. This central axiom of the two-decades-old peace process made sense for Israel’s negotiations with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, but never with the Palestinians, who believe that the core of the conflict is Zionist settlement in Palestine and the expulsion of Palestinians during the 1948 war that established the Israeli state.

 

The belief of American and Israeli negotiators that solving the problems of 1967 will close the door on those of 1948 comes under powerful rebuke in two original books from distant points on the Israeli political spectrum: the historian Asher Susser’s Israel, Jordan,and Palestine: The Two-State Imperative and the sociologist Yehouda Shenhav’s Beyond the Two-State Solution. Susser documents how the gaps between the two sides, or at least some leading spokesmen from the two sides, have narrowed on issues deriving from the 1967 war—borders, settlements, and security arrangements—while “little if any real progress was made in resolving the 1948 question of refugee return.” That issue prominently resurfaced in January, when Abbas said that Israel had refused to allow Palestinian refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict to enter the West Bank and Gaza unless they renounced their right of return to Israel. With the political dominance of the Israeli right, which places greater emphasis on Israel’s own 1948 issue—Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state—the gaps between the two sides are indeed only widening.

 

The intangible elements of the conflict have grown in importance while the Green Line defined by the 1949 armistice has been all but erased. Jewish nationalist attacks against Palestinian communities in the West Bank have crossed into Israel, taking the form of arson, vandalism, and violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel. Jewish activists in the West Bank have expanded their demographic battle to cities in Israel proper, west of the Green Line, buying homes in the Palestinian neighborhoods of Ramla, Akko, and Lod. Dozens of Israel’s municipal chief rabbis signed a ruling forbidding the rental of homes to non-Jews. Many Israelis no longer know where the Green Line lies, mistakenly identifying it with the current West Bank separation barrier and quite unaware that they have crossed it on major roads and highways.

 

Israel’s turn away from the Palestinians has brought an overdue shift in focus from the borders of the state to what lies within them. Jewish identity was a central issue of the 2013 election; indirectly, so too was the place of minorities in the Jewish state. Among Israeli citizens, Jews but not Palestinians have collective rights to land, immigration, symbols such as their own flag, and commemorations, particularly of the Nakba, the catastrophe of Palestinian defeat and expulsion in 1948. Jews and non-Jews cannot legally marry. Current residents of Jerusalem homes that were abandoned during the 1948 war have been evicted to make room for former owners and their descendants—but only when the deed holders are Jews.

 

The inequality of Jews and non-Jews within Israel’s pre-1967 borders—in which Palestinian citizens and residents lived under military rule from 1948 until the end of 1966—prepared the ground for still more unequal arrangements in the West Bank after the 1967 war. Both were created by the Ashkenazi Labor Zionist elite that now criticizes the settlers for dynamics it set in place. On what grounds, Shenhav asks, is the idea of Jewish settlement in ruined Palestinian villages within the pre-1967 borders—formerly inhabited, in many cases, by Palestinian citizens internally displaced by war—considered more moral than Jewish settlement on Palestinian agricultural lands of the West Bank? The former, he argues, involved far more human suffering. Susser, indeed any Zionist, would surely object to comparisons that would cast doubt on Israeli claims to its pre-1967 territory. But he offers strong support for the underlying premise that the root of the conflict is not east of the Green Line but in the more than century-old project of Zionist settlement itself.

 

The fading importance of the pre-1967 borders means a breaking with illusions and a return to the true nature of the conflict: a struggle between two ethnic groups between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The peaceful arrangements they have so far discussed have all fallen short of both the full sovereignty Palestinians desire and the hard ethnic separation the Israeli center and left seek. As Susser writes:

The Palestinian state that the Israelis were willing to endorse was never a fully sovereign and independent member of the family of nations, but an emasculated, demilitarized, and supervised entity, with Israeli control of its airspace and possibly of its borders too, and some element of Israeli and/or foreign military presence.

This was as true for Netanyahu as for Olmert, Barak, Peres, and Yitzhak Rabin, who a month before his assassination told the Knesset that the Palestinians would have “less than a state.”

 

Israel, Susser argues, almost certainly will not achieve an end of conflict, much less recognition of a Jewish state, without meeting Palestinian demands to admit responsibility for the flight and expulsion of refugees of the 1948 war. Israel can point to its acceptance of the UN partition plan that was rejected by Palestinians and Arab nations, which then attacked the new Jewish state. But the forced displacement of a very large number of Palestinians during the war that followed is now a documented reality, one that for most Palestinians supports their claims to return, or to ample compensation for their losses, or to both.

 

Many Israeli leaders believe that any such acknowledgment of responsibility or acceptance of Palestinian claims to return would shake the very foundations of the state, undermining its international legitimacy and upending decades of Zionist teaching by conceding that Israel was responsible for forcibly dispossessing large numbers of Palestinian civilians from their land and homes at its birth. Netanyahu understands the size of this obstacle, or once did, yet is moving with Kerry to renew talks based on the foundering 1967 model.

 

Kerry, like his predecessors, has concentrated on 1967 issues such as borders and security, showing few signs that he has learned from past failures. One hopes that he is not under the mistaken impression that Olmert and Abbas were inches away from a real agreement. Those talks did not come close to resolving even the 1967 issues. What’s more, compared to Olmert, Netanyahu is less desperate, less willing to compromise on 1948 issues, and is making calculations in a region that has become less stable and forgiving of risk.

 

If renewed talks break down, Israelis may begin asking themselves whether the time has come to abandon hopes of a full peace in order to achieve—perhaps through cease-fires or further unilateral withdrawals—a partial separation. They would thereby create something more than one state but less than two, which is, in fact, all that was ever on offer.

Israel and the Dismissal of Morsi. By Hicham Mourad.

Israel and the dismissal of Morsi. By Hicham Mourad. Ahram Online, July 22, 2013.

While Israel argued to keep US aid flowing to Egypt, even under Islamist rule, there is no doubt it is glad to see the back of Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood regime.

My So-Called Celebrity Affair. By January Lang.

My so-called celebrity affair. By January Lang. Salon, July 21, 2013.

He was a married football star, and I was his mistress. I expected a lavish fantasy, but I got reality instead.

FDR’s Jewish Problem. By Lawrence Zuckerman.

FDR’s Jewish Problem. By Lawrence Zuckerman. The Nation, July 17, 2013.

Lawrence Zuckerman: FDR Holocaust revisionism serves right-wing agenda. By David Austin Walsh. History News Network, July 22, 2013.

America’s Star System: The Monetization of Prestige. By George Packer.

America’s Star System. By George Packer. The New Yorker, July 23, 2013.

Packer:

Last year, Bill Clinton earned seventeen million dollars giving speeches, including one before a company in Lagos that paid him seven hundred thousand dollars. Hillary Clinton will be paid two hundred thousand dollars for each speech that she gives to the likes of the American Society of Travel Agents and the National Association of Realtors. David Petraeus, the retired Army general and ex-C.I.A. director, was offered two hundred thousand dollars by the City University of New York to teach one course each semester and to give a couple of public lectures, until a small outcry from faculty and students embarrassed the university into reducing his salary to one dollar. CUNY’s swift retreat suggested that there’s something wrong with public figures commanding and getting spectacular fees for minimal work. But is there?

 

The best argument for overcompensating V.I.P.s is that the market wants to. I’ve never understood exactly what the Global Business Travel Association gets out of paying the nation’s former top diplomat six figures to tell its members that the only stupid question is the one you didn’t ask and that honey catches more flies than vinegar, but no doubt the G.B.T.A. has figured out Hillary Clinton’s publicity and marketing worth down to the third decimal place (this is the Global Business Travel Association), so why shouldn’t it spend its money as it sees fit? Similarly, CUNY’s chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, and its dean, Ann Kirschner, must have calculated and recalculated General Petraeus’s tangible and intangible benefits to the city’s public university system many times before arriving at a taxpayer-funded salary roughly eight times that of an adjunct professor teaching a full course load.

 

Moreover, the Clintons and Petraeus spent their careers in government service, which is to say, they were underpaid for decades. Bill Clinton made just two hundred thousand dollars during his last year in the White House. (In George W. Bush’s first year, Congress doubled the amount to four hundred thousand dollars, where it has remained ever since.) Hillary Clinton’s highest annual salary as a U.S. senator was $169,300; as Secretary of State she made just $186,600 a year. Petraeus actually made more at the end of his military service—two hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars is the basic pay for someone in his position as the head of U.S. Central Command—but for a quarter century he was a badly paid junior officer and field-grade officer who once nearly died from an accidental rifle wound. Why should anyone begrudge these public servants their chance to finally cash in like everyone else? Are they expected to refuse the money? Was Clinton supposed to tell the publishing company in Lagos, “I could never lend myself to any transaction, however respectable, that would commercialize on the prestige and dignity of the office of the Presidency”?

 

Those were Harry Truman’s words after he became an ex-President. On principle, Truman refused all corporate positions and commercial endorsements, and for a few years he barely survived on an Army pension of $112.56 per month, until his memoirs sold well. (There were no Presidential pensions until 1958, when word of Truman’s near-poverty spurred Congress to pass the Former Presidents Act.) Truman’s gesture now seems exceedingly old-fashioned. Today, no one refuses the money.

 

Al Gore didn’t refuse the money when, in January, Al Jazeera, the pro-Muslim Brotherhood satellite network—which is owned by Qatar, a repressive sheikhdom that spends its wealth from oil exports to support Sunni political extremism across the Middle East—offered to buy his failing Current TV network for five hundred million dollars. The ex-Vice-President cleared seventy million dollars for himself. (When Jon Stewart pressed him about this inconvenient truth, Gore repeated his talking points, whatever they meant: “It was an easy choice after doing the diligence on the network itself.”) Also in January, Gore cleared thirty million dollars from the sale of his shares of Apple Computer, which he’d received as compensation for serving on its board of directors after leaving government. A hundred mil in a month—these days the Vice-Presidency is worth a little more than a bucket of warm piss.

 

The revolving door out of the White House hasn’t reached the speed of the one on Capitol Hill, where the traffic between Congress and K Street is so crowded that some elected officials and aides plot their government careers with an eye to maximizing their earning potential once they get out. (Trent Lott left his Senate seat and his position as Minority Leader before the end of his term in order to get into the lobbying business ahead of a new law requiring a two-year hiatus.) But it’s possible to imagine a future where potential candidates study Bill Clinton’s impressive post-Presidency income (more than a hundred million dollars in speaking fees alone) and add that to the calculus as they contemplate whether to run for the highest office in the land. Similarly, Petraeus’s private-sector windfall since leaving government in a sex scandal gives a new, greener glow to the aura of the military hero.

 

There’s no doubt that these and other ex-public servants are “commercializing” their former offices. Petraeus, who spent his career living by an honor code before violating it at the end, might have felt the sting of criticism more than some of his civilian counterparts. In accepting a dollar a year from CUNY, he was harking back to a time when, during the Second World War, businessmen made the opposite move and went to work in government as “dollar-a-year men.” Perhaps his backpedalling under public opprobrium will start a trend toward self-restraint and Trumanesque gestures of refusal on the part of our leaders. Probably not.

 

The top of American life has become a very cozy and lucrative place, where the social capital of who you are and who you know brings unimaginable returns. If you’re an international rock star, you can get a piece of the deal when Facebook has its I.P.O. If you’re a global columnist, you can monetize your influence across the speaker’s circuit and through paid TV gigs. If you’re the chairman of a tech giant, you can get Bill Clinton and Tony Blair to blurb the book you sort of wrote. At the highest altitude, the distinction between entertainers, inventors, business moguls, athletes, academics, and government officials breaks down, making it all the harder to object when an ex-President simply acts like everyone else at his level of fame and influence. After all, the star system, with wildly unequal rewards for relatively small differences in talent, holds in virtually every area of American society. If a bright light from these worlds acted like Truman today, he’d be considered a sucker.

 

If it isn’t fair to ask stars to refuse the money, it is fair to ask exactly what they do to earn it. One problem with the star system (aside from its appearance of corruption and conflict of interest, and its demoralizing effect on adjunct professors, journeymen power forwards, mid-level executives, freelance journalists, and career bureaucrats) is the pervasive mediocrity and corner-cutting that it encourages: the utter banality of corporate speeches written by staff, the abuse of researchers and ghostwriters by big-name authors, the ease with which a star athlete transitions into a business franchise or a commentary gig, the lack of face time with the prof that awaits CUNY students who register for “Are We on the Threshold of the North American Decade?,” a course whose instructor needed three Harvard grad students just to help him put together the syllabus. Nothing spells the end of real achievement like becoming a brand.

 

Yes, these are very busy people. They have a charity gala to co-chair, a speech in Hong Kong to give, a deal in Dubai to finalize, a board meeting in New York to attend by conference call, a memoir to check in on. No one any longer expects them to spend the rest of their lives upholding the prestige and dignity of their offices. It would almost be enough just to see them sweat a little for the big payday that’s headed their way.

Why America Swoons Over the Royals. By Peter Foster.

Royal baby: Why America, proud republic, swoons over our royals. By Peter Foster. The Telegraph, July 23, 2013.

The Doctrine of Samantha Power. By Paula Broadwell.

The doctrine of Power. By Paula Broadwell. Prospect, July 17, 2013.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back for Kerry’s Peace Talks. By Walter Russell Mead.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back for Kerry’s Peace Talks. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 23, 2013.

Mead:

It wasn’t long before the Israelis and Palestinians rained all over the State Department’s parade. Following the weekend’s welcome news that peace talks may resume, the two sides spent yesterday “play[ing] down . . . the prospects of their envoys meeting in Washington any time soon”, says Reuters:

Palestinians said negotiations could not begin unless it was clear in advance that they would be about a future state based on pre-1967 borders, while an Israeli official said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would seek the approval of his cabinet before going ahead. […]

 

The talks would be aimed at resuming negotiations stalled since 2010 in a dispute over Jewish settlement building on land Palestinians seek for a state.

 

But an Israeli official said “it looks like negotiations will begin only next week, not this week.

As we’ve said, the impulse among many is to scoff at Secretary Kerry’s accomplishments as paltry and his setbacks as predictable. But the Secretary is not engaged in an entirely vain endeavor: concessions and consensus, however small, can contribute to improvement for both peoples, if only at the margins. In any case, with Egypt and Syria ablaze, the last thing the US needs is a Palestinian government feeling neglected, frustrated and forgotten.

 

From the outside, at least, it seems that Secretary Kerry has demonstrated skill in rebuilding some trust in the US from both sides, and that he has made it clear that even as the world tugs at America from myriad directions, the hopes and concerns of Israelis and Palestinians still matter to this country. His has been rhetoric backed by serious effort, and we applaud him for it.

 

That said, we remain about as far from a final peace now as we’ve ever been. As long as the administration sees the conflict as a tertiary issue in the Middle East, from which we can hope to extract minor albeit important progress, we’ll be ok. If it remains the focus of US diplomacy to the exclusion of other, more important concerns, US policy in the region will wind up looking worse than it already does.

Egypt’s Three Revolutions. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Egypt’s Three Revolutions. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, July 23, 2013.

Friedman:

If you’re looking for any silver lining in what is happening in Egypt today, I suggest you go up 30,000 feet and look down. From that distance, the events in Egypt over the past two-and-a-half years almost make sense.  Egypt has actually had three revolutions since early 2011, and when you add them all up, you can discern a message about what a majority of Egyptians are seeking.

 

The first revolution was the Egyptian people and the Egyptian military toppling President Hosni Mubarak and installing the former defense minister, the aging Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, as the de facto head of state. Tantawi and his colleagues proved utterly incompetent in running the nation and were replaced, via a revolutionary election, by the Muslim Brotherhood’s party, led by President Mohamed Morsi. He quickly tried to consolidate power by decapitating the military and installing Brotherhood sympathizers in important positions. His autocratic, noninclusive style and failed economic leadership frightened the Egyptian center, which teamed up last month with a new generation of military officers for a third revolution to oust Morsi and the Brotherhood.

 

To put it all in simpler terms: Egypt’s first revolution was to get rid of the dead hand, the second revolution was to get rid of the deadheads and the third revolution was to escape from the dead end.

 

The first revolution happened because a large number of mostly non-Islamist Egyptian youths grew fed up with the suffocating dead hand of the Mubarak era — a hand so dead that way too many young Egyptians felt they were living in a rigged system, where they had no chance of realizing their full potential, under a leader with no vision. After some 30 years of Mubarak’s rule and some $30 billion in American aid, roughly one-third of Egyptians still could not read or write.

 

The generals who replaced Mubarak, though, were deadheads not up to governing — so dead that many liberal Egyptians were ready to vote for the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi over a former Mubarak-era general in the June 2012 election. But Morsi proved more interested in consolidating the Brotherhood’s grip on government rather than governing himself, and he drove Egypt into a dead end — so dead that Egyptians took to the streets on June 30 and virtually begged the military to oust Morsi.

 

Add it all up and there is a message from the Egyptian majority: No more dead hands; we want a government that aspires to make Egypt the vanguard of the Arab world again. No more deadheads; we want a government that is run by competent people who can restore order and jobs. And no more dead ends; we want a government that will be inclusive and respect the fact that two-thirds of Egyptians are not Islamists and, though many are pious Muslims, they don’t want to live in anything close to a theocracy.

 

It is difficult to exaggerate how much the economy and law and order had deteriorated under President Morsi. So many Egyptians were feeling insecure that there was a run on police dogs! So many tour guides were out of work that tourists were warned to avoid the Pyramids because desperate camel drivers and postcard-sellers would swarm them. A poll this week by the Egyptian Center for Public Opinion Research found that 71 percent of Egyptians were “unsympathetic with pro-Morsi protests.”

 

Yes, it would have been much better had Morsi been voted out of office. But what is done is done. We need to make the best of it. The right thing for President Obama to be doing now is not only to ignore calls for cutting off economic aid to Egypt — on grounds that the last revolution amounted to a military coup. We should be trying to get everyone in the world to help this new Egyptian government succeed.

 

Not surprisingly, people are worried that Egypt’s military could stay in power indefinitely. It’s a danger, but I am less worried about that. The Egyptian people have been empowered. A majority of Egyptians have — three times now since 2011 — called a halt to their government’s going down the wrong path.

 

I am worried about something else: Egyptians defining the right path and getting a majority to follow that path. That is an entirely different kind of challenge, and I am not sure Egypt can ever get to that level of consensus. But this government offers the best hope for that. It has good people in important positions, like Finance and Foreign Affairs. It is rightly focused on a fair constitution and sustainable economic reform. Its job will be much easier if the Muslim Brotherhood can be re-integrated into politics, and its war with the military halted. But the Brotherhood also needs to accept that it messed up — badly — and that it needs to re-earn the trust of the people.

 

This is no time for America to be punishing Egyptians or demanding quick elections. Our job is to help the new government maximize the number of good economic decisions it makes, while steadily pressuring it to become more inclusive and making it possible for multiple political parties to form. If that happens, Egypt will have a proper foundation to hold democratic elections again. If it doesn’t happen, no number of elections will save it.

Stand Your Ground, Be a Man. By Stanley Fish.

Stand Your Ground, Be a Man. By Stanley Fish. New York Times, July 22, 2013.

Fish:

The Florida Stand Your Ground law is often characterized as an expansion of the venerable “castle doctrine” — because a man’s home is his castle, he is justified in repelling intruders with force if necessary — but, as many have observed, it may be more accurate to see it as the return to the contemporary American landscape of the “shoot first” ethic of the old west, at least as it has been portrayed in dozens of movies.

 

The opposite of standing your ground is to retreat, and in many states the rule still is that if you are confronted outside your home and violent conflict seems imminent you have a duty to retreat (provided that an avenue of retreat is available) before resorting to deadly force. Stand Your Ground laws remove that duty; your home is now any place you happen to be as long as you are there lawfully. Wherever you are, you have the right to be there and no one has the right to push you around.

 

In fact, “stand your ground” is more than a declaration of a right; it is an injunction — stand your ground, be a man. Retreating in order to avoid violence is not the commendable act of a prudent man, but the act of a coward, of someone who runs away. It is this aspect of the Stand Your Ground laws — their implicit affirmation of a code of manliness — that links them to the novelistic and filmic representations of the old west.

 

Recall two iconic moments in the tradition. Early in Owen Wister’s 1902 novel “The Virginian,” the hero is playing cards and one of the other players, Trampas by name, says to him, “Your bet, you son of a ____.” The response is immediate — “The Virginian’s pistol came out” — and the act is followed by words: “When you call me that, smile.” That is, if you smile, I’ll know you don’t mean it, and if I know that I’ll put my gun away. An observer explains to the narrator what’s going on. “He has handed Trampas the choice to back down or draw his steel,” or in other words to back down or stand his ground.

 

Trampas backs down and is thereby the loser in the encounter. A loss more final is suffered by “Stonewall Torrey,” a character in George Stevens’s “Shane” (1953) played by Elisha Cook Jr. Torrey is making his way to a saloon on a muddy street. Looming above him on the wooden porch is Jack Wilson (Jack Palance), a professional gunfighter who menacingly follows — we might say stalks — the nervous homesteader (“Where do you think you’re going?”) while serially insulting his Southern heritage. Provoked, Torrey lashes out verbally: “You’re a low-down lyin’ Yankee! ” “Prove it,” says Wilson, and when Torrey, in obedience to the code of the west, draws, he kills him. Later, Shane takes over Torrey’s role and when Wilson says “prove it,” Shane does, with fatal results. Standing your ground is a good idea if you’re the fastest.

 

In “Shane,” as in many westerns, the plot pits the forces of civilization, represented by the agricultural activities of the homesteaders, against the forces of, well, force, represented by the rancher Ryker, who is a law unto himself. The conflict is emblematized, both physically and metonymically, by the gun on one hand and women on the other. Marian, the wife of Joe Starrett (played, respectively, by Jean Arthur and Van Heflin) exclaims that “we’d all be better off if there wasn’t a single gun in this valley.” Of course if there were no guns, there could be no shootings, no showdowns and no opportunity to stand your ground. Manhood would have to be demonstrated in other ways, by tilling the ground, raising a family, running a general store.

 

Just what it is that constitutes manhood is debated endlessly in the genre that (at least rhetorically) wants to be on the side of civilization and peace, but can’t quite ever make it, even in its revisionist period, a period that seems to begin at the beginning. Again and again, women like Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly) in “High Noon” ask their men to back away, retreat, give ground rather than stand their ground; and again and again men respond by saying, “This is a hard land” or “If we run now we’ll be running forever” or “Someone has to stand up to them.”

 

As civilization advances, and the law book replaces the gun, these rationales for violence sound increasingly hollow, and more and more westerns are self-consciously elegiac — “High Noon,” “The Gunfighter,” “Ride the High Country,” “The Magnificent Seven,” “Lonely Are the Brave,” “The Wild Bunch,” “Monte Walsh,” “The Big Country,” “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” — caressing the lonely figures at their center even as they say farewell to the values they embody. Outright satirical comedies like “Cat Ballou” (1965) and “Blazing Saddles” (1974) announce loudly and without nuance what the genre as a whole had already implicitly proclaimed: the reign of what Bosley Crowther (in a review of “Shane”) called “legal killers under the frontier code” was over.

 

Stand Your Ground laws bring it all back. That is what President Obama meant when he said on Friday that such laws seem “designed in such a way that they encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations … that we saw in the Florida case rather than defuse potential altercations.” Do Stand Your Ground laws, he asked, really contribute to “the kind of peace and security and order that we’d like to see?” The answer is that not everyone wants to see them. There are some who imagine themselves as the modern-day Wyatt Earp or Will Kane or Shane — bravely seeking out malefactors, confronting them in the main street, and shooting them down to the applause and gratitude of less heroic citizens. Stand Your Ground laws are for them.


Stand Your Ground laws, as Fish describes them, are an acknowledgement of Jacksonian manhood and its continuing importance in American life.

Qatar’s Sheikha al Mayassa: Art, Globalization, and Arab Identity.

Sheikha al Mayassa: Globalizing the local, localizing the global. Video. TED. Filmed December 2010, posted February 2012. YouTube.

Qatari Riches Are Buying Art World Influence. By Robin Pogrebin. New York Times, July 22, 2013.

Building Museums, and a Fresh Arab Identity. By Nicolai Ouroussoff. New York Times, November 26, 2010.

Obamanomics: A Rising Tide Does Not Lift All Boats. By Rush Limbaugh.

Obamanomics: A Rising Tide Does Not Lift All Boats. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, July 23, 2013.

President Adopts Catchphrase to Describe Proposed Recipe for Economic Revival. By Annie Lowrey. New York Times, July 22, 2013.

Weiner: Lewd Behavior Continued After Resignation. By Scott Conroy.

Weiner: Lewd Behavior Continued After Resignation. By Scott Conroy. Real Clear Politics, July 23, 2013,

Huma Abedin On Anthony Weiner’s Latest Sex Scandal: “I Strongly Believe This Is Between Us.” The Huffington Post, July 23, 2013.

Weiner Admits Recent Sexting, “Hopes” New Yorkers Still “Willing To Give Him Second Chance” In Press Conference. By Matt Wilstein. Mediaite, July 23, 2013.

Huma Speaks: “I Believe in Him.” By Eliana Johnson. National Review Online, July 23, 2013.

Will Weiner Finally Go Away Now? By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, July 23, 2013.

The Most Carlos Dangerous Game. By Jim Geraghty. National Review Online, July 24, 2013.

When Ambition Trumps Shame. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, July 23, 2013.

The Cure for Anthony Weiner, If He Wants One. By Walter Russell Mead. Via Meadia, July 24, 2013.

Anthony Weiner’s woes – does New York City really need an addict for mayor? By Dr. Keith Ablow. FoxNews.com, July 24, 2013.

In Defense of Carlos Danger. By Richard Kim. The Nation, July 24, 2013.

The Anthony Weiner Spectacle. By Peter Wehner. Commentary, July 24, 2013.

Anthony Weiner’s Alleged Sexting Partner Revealed — Sydney Leathers. By Eleanore Hutch. Hollywood Life, July 24, 2013.

Tweetheart: Meet Sydney Leathers, Anthony’s sexty online honey. By Lorena Mongelli and Laura Italiano. New York Post, July 25, 2013.

Sydney Leathers’ mom Laura blasts Anthony Weiner as he downplays latest sexting scandal, pressure to quit mayoral race. By Rich Shapiro, Annie Karni, and Jennifer Fermino. New York Daily News, July 24, 2013.

Putting on a brazen face: Anthony Weiner hits the campaign trail and ignores calls for him to quit “for the sake of his wife” after he’s plunged into new sex message scandal with Obama campaigner, 23. By David Martosko, Meghan Keneally, Louise Boyle, and Hayley Peterson. Daily Mail, July 23, 2013.

Huma Abedin’s Red Lipstick Takes Her Through Tough Times (PHOTOS). By Rebecca Adams. The Huffington Post, July 24, 2013.

Huma Abedin pens essay defending decision to stand by Anthony Weiner: “I know in my heart that I made the right one.” By Leslie Larson. New York Daily News, July 24, 2013.

Huma Abedin steps into high-profile role as Anthony Weiner’s chief defender. By Karen Tumulty and Jason Horowitz. Washington Post, July 24, 2013.

NY Post Cover Attacks Huma Abedin: “What’s Wrong With You?” (PHOTO). By Rebecca Shapiro. The Huffington Post, July 25, 2013.

Señora Danger . . . what’s wrong with you? The good wife? Oh, give us a break! By Maureen Callahan. New York Post, July 25, 2013.

She’s even worse: Why we’re mad at Huma. By Karol Markowicz. New York Post, July 25, 2013.

Huma Abedin, What We Know We Don’t Know And Why It’s Time To Back Off. By Kia Makarechi. The Huffington Post, July 25, 2013.

The Huma Craze. By Kay Hymowitz. National Review Online, July 25, 2013.

If Huma and Hillary Were Emailing . . . By Bari Weiss. Wall Street Journal, July 26, 2013.

The Desperate Life of Carlos Danger. By Heather Wilhelm. Real Clear Politics, July 26, 2013.

Don’t Leave the Mayor’s Race Yet, Anthony Weiner. By Peter Beinart. The Daily Beast, July 26, 2013.

Hillary’s Self-Serving “Stand by Your Man” Advice. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, July 25, 2013.

Limbaugh: “Muslim Women” Like Huma “Don’t Have Any Power,” So Weiner Can Get Away With Anything. By Noah Rothman. Mediaite, July 25, 2013. Audio at Daily Rushbo and YouTube.

Rush Limbaugh Says Huma Abedin Is Muslim, Powerless, So Anthony Weiner Can “Get Away With Anything.” By Meredith Bennett-Smith. The Huffington Post, July 27, 2013.

Rush Limbaugh Offers His Huma Abedin Theory, and It’s Pretty Awful. By Doug Barry. Jezebel, July 28, 2013.

Rush Limbaugh: “Muslim Women” Like Huma Abedin “Don’t Have Any Power.” By Fatimah. Carbonated.TV, July 28, 2013.



Huma Abedin’s Muslim Brotherhood Ties. By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, July 25, 2012.

The Huma Unmentionables. By Andrew C. McCarthy. National Review Online, July 24, 2013.

Huma Abedin: Muslim Brotherhood Princess. By Diana West. WND, July 25, 2013.

The Explosive Secret Huma Is Hiding. By Aaron Klein. Klein Online, July 26, 2013.

Huma and Anthony: Washington Horror Couple. By Robert W. Merry. The National Interest, July 26, 2013.

Time to Hard-Delete Carlos Danger. By Maureen Dowd. New York Times, July 27, 2013.

Huma and Anthony: The Post-Scandal Playbook. By Jonathan Van Meter. New York Times Magazine, April 14, 2013. Also here.

Anthony Weiner Addresses Re-Emerging Sexting Scandal. Video. ABCNews, July 23, 2013. YouTube.

Weiner’s Sexting Partner Sydney Leathers Speaks: “I Am Proof” He Did Not “Learn From His Mistakes.” By Matt Wilstein. Mediaite, July 25, 2013. YouTube.

Brooke Goldstein on Fox News: Weiner “un-attracted” to Huma Abedin “because she is connected with Islamists.” By David Edwards. The Raw Story, July 29, 2013.

Oy! Latest Conspiracy Theory on Huma Abedin. By Elisha Strauss. The Jewish Daily Forward, July 30, 2013.

Fox Panelist: Anthony Weiner “Un-attracted”to Huma Abedin Because She’s An Islamist Who Wants to Destroy America. By Brian Tashman. Right Wing Watch, July 29, 2013. Video at YouTube.

Huma Abedin’s Ties to Muslim Brotherhood Comes Up on Hannity Panel. By Fatimah. Carbonated.TV, July 29, 2013. Video at YouTube.

Is Huma Abedin blaming herself? By Kelly Wallace. CNN, August 2, 2013.

Huma Abedin’s Problem: Nice Jewish Boy Derangement Syndrome. By Rachel Shukert. Tablet, August 2, 2013.

Kerry’s Mideast Fool’s Errand Ignores Reality. By Jeffrey Goldberg.

Kerry’s Mideast Fool’s Errand Ignores Reality. By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, July 22, 2013.

Goldberg:

Veteran Middle East peace processors are arguing that naysayers are in bad odor this week, now that John Kerry, the U.S. secretary of state, has seemingly defied the skeptics.

 

Kerry has actually achieved what so many American officials have achieved before – which is to say, getting the Israelis and Palestinians to agree, provisionally, to sit down and yell at each other before retreating to their respective corners, thus providing the next secretary of state a chance to score yet another “Groundhog Day” Middle East breakthrough.

 

I’m not discounting Kerry’s achievement, by the way (though I wish he’d spend more time focused on the Syrian civil war and the tragic, slow-motion collapse of Egypt). It isn’t easy to bring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas together to talk about anything, and Kerry’s indefatigability and sincerity are impressive.

 

His reported choice for Middle East peace envoy, Martin Indyk, is also impressive. Indyk (a friend, though a friend who is often peeved at me for my opinions) is a former ambassador to Israel and feels the need for such a two-state solution in his bones. Although he is well versed on this issue, he was sidelined, as were other former Middle East peace negotiators, during the reign of Kerry’s predecessor, Hillary Clinton (who famously sidelined the entire issue of Middle East peacemaking). It’s a welcome sign that he might be back.

 

But as I’ve written before, I think Kerry is on a fool’s errand, and I think the collapse of these talks, which is almost inevitable, could have dangerous consequences. Remember what followed the collapse of the Camp David peace process in 2000: years of violence, including horrific bus-bombing campaigns.

 

To believe in this process, as Kerry envisions it, you have to blind yourself to at least two realities.

 

The first is that Hamas exists and is in control of the Gaza Strip, whether we like it or not. Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, which will be bargaining with Israel, will represent at best half of Palestine. How do you negotiate a state into existence that is divided between two warring factions? It isn’t even clear if the Palestinian Authority is fully in control of those parts of the West Bank that Israel deigns to let it control. (I will save for another time the deeper discussion of whether the maximum an Israeli government could offer the Palestinians represents the minimum the Palestinians could plausibly accept.)

 

You also have to blind yourself to the reality that the Jewish settlement movement on the West Bank is now the most powerful political force in Israel. This is a movement whose leaders and Knesset representatives and cabinet ministers will subvert any peace process that would lead to the dismantling of even a single settlement, including any of the dozens of well-populated ones far beyond Israel’s West Bank security barrier.

 

Oh, and by the way, to believe in this process you have to believe that the parties are ready to divide Jerusalem.

 

Instead of pursuing direct talks between the two sides, Kerry would be better off first negotiating with them separately.

 

With the Israelis, Kerry (and his boss) should talk about the demographic, security and moral challenges of governing a population that doesn’t want to be governed by Israel. He would be pushing on a bit of an open door – the increasingly centrist Netanyahu (who is becoming more and more alienated from his robustly right-wing Likud party), seems to understand now that continued occupation (an occupation that exists at this point mainly to support the settlers) is undermining Israel’s international legitimacy and its future as a Jewish-majority democracy.

 

Kerry is understood in Israel as a true friend; his lobbying could be effective. If the Israelis would take small, unilateral steps on settlements, they could change the Palestinian calculus and improve Israel’s reputation (which has become a genuine national-security concern).

 

On the other side, Kerry might want to try a bit more aggressively to help the Palestinian Authority become a viable governing body with a functioning economy and a bureaucracy that is reasonably free of corruption. Strengthening the Palestinian Authority (and working to weaken Hamas) while cajoling the Israelis to wean themselves from their addiction to settlements are two steps Kerry could take to advance negotiations.

 

It’s true that Kerry has gotten the Israelis to agree to release some Palestinian prisoners. And he may convince the Palestinians to cease, for a while, their campaign to delegitimize Israel in the international arena. But these developments, by themselves, won’t advance the larger cause.

 

I’d like to be proved wrong, but given my doubts about the viability of a two-state solution – even a solution negotiated by the most visionary and large-hearted of Palestinian and Israeli leaders – I’m not imagining great success for Kerry in the coming months.