The Mideast Is America’s New Wild West. By Ira Chernus.

The Mideast Is America’s New Wild West. By Ira Chernus. History News Network, December 4, 2013.

Exodus as a Zionist Melodrama. By Rachel Weissbrod. Israel Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 1999).

Canaanites in a Promised Land: The American Indian and the Providential Theory of Empire. By Alfred A. Cave. American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Autumn, 1988).

The Right to Expel: The Bible and Ethnic Cleansing. By Michael Prior. Chapter 1 of Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return. Edited by Naseer Aruri. London: Pluto Press, 2001.

Demystifying the Quest for Canaan: Observations on Mimesis in the New World and the Holy Land. By Steven Salaita. Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Fall 2002).

Frontier Myths and Their Applications in America and Israel: A Transnational Perspective. By S. Ilan Troen. Israel Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 2000).


Chernus:

The “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel rests on an old myth of “civilization” versus “savages.”

Why the enduring “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel? Cultural historians, who look at symbols and stories more than politics and policies, say a big part of it goes back to the late 1950s, when Leon Uris’ novel Exodus reached the top of the bestseller list and was then turned into a blockbuster film, with an all-star cast headed by Paul Newman.

 

Scholar Rachel Weissbrod called it a “Zionist melodrama.” M.M. Silver devoted a whole book to the phenomenon: Our Exodus, with the subtitle, The Americanization of Israel’s Founding Story.

 

A preeminent historian of American Judaism, Jonathan Sarna, came closest to the truth in his blurb for Silver’s book: Exodus “consciously linked brawny Zionist pioneers with the heroes of traditional American westerns.” The protagonist, Ari ben Canaan (“lion, son of Canaan”), is the Jewish Shane, the cowboy of impeccable virtue who kills only because he must to save decent people – especially the gentile woman he loves – and civilize a savage land.

 

Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (in his first outing after years of being blacklisted) did add a penultimate scene missing from the novel: Ari swears that someday Jews and Arabs will live together and share the land in peace. But then he heads off to fight those very Arabs. Who could resist rooting for Paul Newman, no matter how bad guys he was forced to wipe out?

 

Just a year later the Israelis kidnapped, tried, and executed Nazi bureaucrat Adolph Eichmann. Who could resist seeing fiction come to life, with the increasingly common equation, Arabs = Nazis? 

Thus cultural myth combined with historical event to set the stage for widespread support of the Johnson and Nixon administration's sharp pro-Israel tilt, when Israel went to war with its neighbors in 1967 and 1973.

 

I’m writing about this history now because it still lives, today (December 4), in our flagship newspaper, the New York Times.

 

The influential columnist Thomas Friedman tells us that the Middle East is a “merciless, hard-bitten region” where everyone is out to get everyone, and “it is vital to never let the other side think they can ‘outcrazy’ you” – because the craziest people will be the most violent and thus the winners, one assumes. Apparently those Middle Easterners don’t settle their differences politely and rationally, as we do here in “civilized” America.

 

Are you beginning to see the melodrama of old-fashioned Westerns yet? Wait, there's plenty more:

The Jews and the Kurds are among the few minorities that have managed to carve out autonomous spaces in the Arab-Muslim world because, at the end of the day, they would never let any of their foes outcrazy them; they did whatever they had to in order to survive, and sometimes it was really ugly, but they survived to tell the tale. 

Today, just as in the days of Exodus, Israelis must be threatened, Friedman assumes, and they must be willing to be crazy killers to survive. In fact, it’s this old mythic narrative that must survive.

 

Now the plot has been updated to make the Iranian part of  “the Arab-Muslim world” the peril to Israel’s very existence. (Friedman must have missed the episode of Homeland where Dana Brody informs her high-school classmates that Iranians are not Arabs, so there is no monolithic “Arab-Muslim world.”)

 

Friedman is sure that all the reports of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei supporting the moderate president Hassani (even in the Times itself) are not to be trusted. As evidence, he cites three acts of mass killing attributed to “Iran and Hezbollah” two or three decades ago. For him, this is proof enough that “the Iranians will go all the way” in irrational slaughter and that “the dark core of this Iranian regime has not gone away. It’s just out of sight, and it does need to believe that all options really are on the table for negotiations to succeed.”

 

How to show with “the dark core” at the heart of the “Arab-Muslim world” that we can be violently crazy too? Friedman nominates Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu to do the job, to continue being “crazy” with “his Dr. Strangelove stuff and the occasional missile test.” How else can we tame the savagery in the Wild West that we call the Middle East?

 

Well, that’s the view from the authoritative moderate voice not only of our flagship newspaper but of the liberal foreign policy establishment here in the U.S.

 

What about the moderate view in Israel? The Times’ website is now giving us that view from Shmuel Rosner, a veteran centrist Israel journalist who specializes in “the special relationship” between his nation and the U.S.

 

In his Dec. 4 column, Rosner writes about the controversy between the Israeli government and the “thousands of Israeli Bedouins and Arabs [who] staged demonstrations, some of them violent, against a government plan to resettle the Bedouins of the Negev desert.” By the third paragraph of the column, you can’t help feeling you are back in America’s Wild West – this time with the decent folk facing not crazy gunslingers but primitive “Injuns.”

 

Rosner hastens to tell us of the dreadful poverty of the Bedouins and shows his sympathy by asserting that their “community needs help to advance” – help that can come, apparently, only from the civilized Israeli government. Bedouin communities are “more clusters of huts than real villages.” Theirs is

a historically nomadic society[,] and its relationship to land clashes with the state’s notion of ownership and its need for planned development. . . . They claim the land as their own, based on a long history as its residents. They have no legal documents proving ownership, and the country has been reluctant to formalize their claims. 

Why that reminds me of the early Puritan minister who opined that the natives’ “land is spacious and void, and they are few and do but run over the grass, as do also the foxes and wild beasts.” And the Jamestown settler who described the natives as “only an idle, improvident, scattered people, ignorant of the knowledge of gold, or silver, or any commodities.”

 

John Winthrop, head of the Puritans’ Massachusetts Bay Colony, explained that since the natives “inclose noe Land, neither have any settled habitation, nor any tame Cattle to improve the Land,” the whites could take pretty much as much land as they wanted, leaving the natives just what his government deemed “sufficient for their use” – which wasn’t much at all, of course. No doubt he agreed with another Jamestown settler who said, “Our intrusion into their possession shall tend to their great good, and no way to their hurt, unlesse as unbridled beastes, they procure it to themselves.”

 

Yes, America's Wild West myth started way back when all the whites lived in towns hugging the East coast, wanting only to do “great good” for all those native “beasts.”

 

In today’s Israel, under the so-called Prawer Plan, “the government is ready to give the Bedouins title to some land.” Their “clusters of huts” will be replaced with houses with running water and electricity and officially recognized as settlements.

 

There’s just one catch: “Between 30,000 and 40,000 Bedouins will have to relocate to existing or new towns in the same area.” That’s why Bedouins and their supporters are protesting.

 

But, hey, Rosner urges us to believe, that will be in no way to their hurt (unless as unbridled beasts, they procure it to themselves, I suppose). And “Israel will also have to pay a high price.” Not only will it give Bedouins land. “It will also spend considerable taxpayer money — about $2 billion for the entire effort, including over $330 million on economic development — to improve their living conditions . . . bringing much-needed help to one of the country’s most disfavored groups.”

 

The link will take you to the Israeli government's website, describing its “comprehensive policy aimed at improving [Bedouins’] economic, social and living conditions, as well as resolving long-standing land issues. . . .  a major step forward towards integrating the Bedouin more fully into Israel’s multicultural society, while still preserving their unique culture and heritage.”

 

You might hear Ulysses S. Grant murmuring approval from the grave – Grant being the president who did more than any other to promote the idea of putting native Americans on reservations to “improve their conditions.” Maybe “The Great White Father” is now Jewish.

 

To be fair, the parallel is far from complete. The Israelis are not talking about “reservations” in the sense that Americans know them. And not even the most Orthodox Jews in Israel are talking about converting the Bedouins to Judaism. They don’t have anyone like the Puritan missionary John Eliot, who created “praying towns” to bring Christian civilization to the indigenous people – who were doomed, he said, if they continued to live “so unfixed, confused, and ungoverned a life, uncivilized and unsubdued to labor and order.”

 

In fact many Orthodox Israelis reject the Prawer Plan as a giveaway to the indigenous people. One of their icons, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, called the situation simply “a battle for the land. . . .We are fighting for the national lands of the Jewish people.” You might hear Andrew Jackson murmuring approval from the grave; after all, his USA was still “the New Israel.”

 

Of course Jackson got huge resistance from whites for his Indian removal program. So does Liberman. Just as Americans long debated, sometimes fiercely, about “the Indian problem,” Israelis now debate fiercely about “the Arab problem.” Yet in the U.S. that debate gets little media attention. The media are more likely to oversimplify the issue, casting it through the lens of a centuries-old American mythology.

 

That’s why I’ve gone into such detail about these two Times columns – not because there’s anything extraordinary about them, but precisely because that they are so ordinary. It’s just another typical day in American journalism’s coverage of “our friend Israel versus the Arab-Muslim world.” From the Times, the pinnacle of our journalism, these old Wild West stereotypes trickle down to all the rest of the media and thus to the public at large.

 

The particulars of Israeli policy toward Arabs are quite different from the specific ways the U.S. has dealt with its indigenous peoples. But the myths that shaped U.S. whites’ attitudes toward native Americans for four centuries or more (and to some extent still do) are strikingly similar to the myths that shape American public attitudes toward Israel and “the Arab-Muslim” world.

 

Especially the conservative public. The old idea that “the Jews” are responsible for the U.S. government’s pro-Israel tilt has been put to rest by recent polling data from CNN, the Huffington Post, and Pew. All show that, in the U.S., the strongest support for Israel’s right-wing policies now comes not from Jews but from Republicans.

 

That’s especially true for white evangelical Christians. In one recent poll, 46% of those evangelicals said the U.S. is not supportive enough of Israel, while only 31% of Jews held that view. Half of the evangelicals said Israel could never coexist with an independent Palestinian state while only a third of Jews doubted it.

 

But the conservative pressure on any U.S. president to tilt toward Israel – a pressure Barack Obama feels every day – is not primarily a matter of religion. It’s much more about a cultural affinity Americans have long felt for the story of Israel that they learned so long ago – especially conservatives, who are most likely to love that story of the innocent good guys, who just want to civilize the wilderness, constantly threatened by "the dark core" of savage evildoers.

 

That’s the story at the heart of the myth of insecurity so fundamental to political culture in both Israel and America. But in America the media rarely cast the native people as savages any more, at least not explicitly.

 

So perhaps many Americans are clinging to their old familiar myth vicariously by projecting it onto what Friedman calls the “merciless, hard-bitten” Middle East, where most everyone seems crazy – if you accept the mass media’s story as the truth. As I’m finishing this piece, the Times’ website is featuring yet another in the endless string of frightening headlines, which all sound so much the same: “Jihadist Groups Gain in Turmoil Across Middle East.” Meet the new news, same as the old news.

 

The only good news is that myths do change. For years the best historians have been describing a native American culture, going back to pre-contact days, that was fully as rational and advanced a civilization as the whites’, and deserves to be understood on its own terms.

 

Indeed there’s a persuasive theory that the British colonies of North America created pejorative myths about the native peoples to negate the lure of native ways, since so many immigrants found the natives’ life more civilized – and comfortable – than the European life they’d brought across the sea.

 

That more accurate story of the American past is beginning to filter into history textbooks that millions of students will read in the coming years. Some of them will become journalists who will eventually control and revise the story line in the mass media. So there’s hope that, some day, a more accurate story of Arabs and other Muslim peoples will also find its way into our mass media, too.

 

Meanwhile, let’s be aware of the old story that still prevails about “the Arab-Muslim world” and recognize how it appeals to many Americans, letting them hold on to a new version of an old narrative that they kind of hate to give up. And let’s be aware that the appeal of this narrative plays a huge role in the public demand for a pro-Israel tilt from Washington. At a time when the Obama administration is immersed in potentially world-changing negotiations, both with Iran and at the Israel-Palestine table, the role of myth in political life is too important to ignore.

John Kerry Is Israel’s Best Friend. By Jeffrey Goldberg.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivers a keynote address on December 7, 2013 (Photo by Ralph Alswang).

John Kerry Is Israel’s Best Friend. By Jeffrey Goldberg. Bloomberg, December 11, 2013.

Israel’s real fear is BDS and “delegitimization,” says Goldberg. By Philip Weiss. Mondoweiss, December 14, 2013.

Obama and Kerry drop talk of Palestinian state for “state institutions” and “transition.” By Allison Deger. Mondoweiss, December 9, 2013.

Kerry Tips the Scales Against Israel. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, November 7, 2013.


Goldberg:

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry gave a passionately pro-Israel speech this past weekend at the Saban Forum in Washington. On matters concerning Israel’s security, its international legitimacy and its demographic future, he showed himself to be a true friend. There are people in Israel – there were people at the Willard Hotel, where Kerry gave the speech, in fact – who did not consider this speech pro-Israel, but they are deluding themselves.

 

Kerry proved a couple of things. First, while he is more than capable of loose-cannoning his way across the Middle East, and while he is on occasion alarmingly optimistic about a range of issues that don’t warrant optimism, he is also committed, in a bone-deep way, to Israel’s well-being. He is an exemplar of a slowly vanishing type of Democratic Party leader, someone with great, and uncomplicated, affection for the promise of Zionism.

 

Second, while it may be true that Kerry is seeking a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on Israel-Palestine conciliation, he’s also working for something that most Jews, in Israel and around the world, desperately want – a secure Israel with internationally recognized borders that becomes an honored member of the family of nations, rather than a target of never-ending opprobrium.

 

The setting for this speech, the forum’s keynote address, was extraordinary, and not only because President Barack Obama had appeared at the forum earlier in the day as a kind of inadvertent warm-up act. (In the interest of disclosure, I moderated a panel on the Iranian nuclear controversy, not for pay, but because I was looking to give myself a headache.) Five Israeli cabinet ministers were in Kerry’s audience – including the foreign minister, the dyspeptic revanchist Avigdor Lieberman (who tried to win over the audience the previous night, without much success) – along with many senior figures in the Israeli security establishment. Also in attendance were a number of Israel’s most prominent overseas supporters, first and foremost Haim Saban himself. Saban is the Israeli-American billionaire behind the Saban Center (which is part of the Brookings Institution), who has become perhaps the central figure trying to bridge the various divides between Israel and the U.S.

 

Much of Kerry’s speech was taken up with a by-now traditional, and not overly persuasive, defense of the Obama administration’s approach to Iran. I’ll deal with that later (not that I haven’t dealt with it over and over again). But I was struck by his remarks on the peace process. Kerry appeared confident about the chance for at least preliminary success in the ongoing talks. (Speculation at the conference was that he had some sort of agreement in his pocket already that he couldn’t share.) He also pulled back the curtain a bit on a brilliant jiu-jitsu move of his devising.

 

Right-wing Israeli politicians consistently argue that pulling out of the West Bank will endanger Israel’s security (just as pulling out of Gaza hurt its security in some important ways). Kerry is confronting this fear head on by overseeing an assessment led by retired Marine Corps General John Allen – the former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan – of Israeli security requirements; the hope is to devise a system that will make the West Bank’s border with Jordan “as strong as any in the world.” If Kerry manages to neutralize the Israeli government’s arguments against a West Bank pullback by building, with Israel, an impregnable security system, he’ll make real inroads with pro-compromise, but skeptical, Israelis.

 

Kerry was at his most emotional – and yes, pro-Israel – when he described the benefits of peace and when he warned of what would happen to Israel if it continued to settle land that needs to become part of the new state of Palestine for that state to be viable. “Just think of how much more secure Israel would be if it were integrated into a regional security architecture and surrounded by newfound partners,” Kerry said. “Think of an end to the unjust but also inexorable campaign to delegitimize Israel in the international community.”

 

The word “inexorable” is key. Much of the Saban meeting was off-the-record, so I am limited in what I can say, but many of the Israeli participants I spoke to seemed worried, in ways I hadn’t noticed before, about the international delegitimization campaign targeting their country – economic boycotts in Europe, the beginnings of an academic boycott in the U.S. The leaders of the movement to delegitimize Israel are committed to the country’s destruction; no West Bank compromise will spur advocates of an anti-Israel boycott to stop hating the idea of a Jewish national home. But this anti-Israel movement gains strength and support by focusing not on its real complaint – Israel’s existence itself – but on Israel’s behavior on the West Bank. End the occupation, and the delegitimization movement loses much of its energy.

 

Kerry also spoke strongly about a related issue: The demographic challenge to Israel’s existence as a haven for the Jewish people and as a democracy if it holds onto the West Bank and its Palestinians indefinitely. This demographic dynamic, he said, “makes it impossible for Israel to preserve its future as a democratic, Jewish state without resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a two-state solution.”

 

Kerry went on, “Force cannot defeat or defuse the demographic time bomb. Israel’s current state of relative security and prosperity does not change the fact that today’s status quo will not be tomorrow’s or the future’s. The only way to secure Israel’s long-term future and security will be achieved through direct negotiations that separate Palestinians and Israelis, resolve the refugee situation, end all claims, and establish an independent, viable Palestinian state, and achieve recognition of Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.”

 

Kerry had appropriately tough words for Israeli politicians – including those seated in the front row – who argue that Palestinians can trust Israel, but Israel cannot trust the Palestinians. “President Abbas has made tough choices and he has stayed the course, despite people in his team saying, ‘You ought to get out of here, look at those settlements. They’re making a fool of you.’ Believe me, that battle’s been going on, because I deal with it every week.”

 

The conclusion that I drew from this, and other passages, is that Kerry is so anti-settlement precisely because he is so pro-Israel. I ran this conclusion, and others, by one of Israel’s most influential journalists, Ari Shavit (the author of the current best-seller, “My Promised Land”) who was also in the room for Kerry’s talk. “All my doubts have not melted away, but I was moved by the commitment, dedication and compassion the secretary presented,” Shavit said.

 

Kerry’s speech was neither overly cerebral nor cold, even in its moments of criticism. Some of his Middle East policy ideas may be flawed (I’ve avoided discussing Syria here, in case you haven’t noticed), but he has an acute understanding of the existential challenges facing Israel, and he gave the speech of a man who would consider Israel’s disappearance a tragedy.


Saban Forum 2013: Keynote Address by Secretary of State John Kerry. Video. Brookings Institution, December 11, 2013. YouTube. Also here.




Liberman: Israel not “occupying” West Bank, peace talks won’t work. By Ilan Ben Zion. The Times of Israel, December 7, 2013.

Saban Forum 2013: A Conversation with Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Video. Brookings Institution, December 6, 2013. YouTube. C-Span.

America in the Midst of a Great Plunge. By Rush Limbaugh.

America in the Midst of a Great Plunge. By Rush Limbaugh. RushLimbaugh.com, December 10, 2013.

The Anti-Jacksonians. By Sean Wilentz.

The Anti-Jacksonians. By Sean Wilentz. Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, No. 31 (Winter 2014).

The Opposition to BDS. By Jonathan Marks.

The Opposition to BDS. By Jonathan Marks. Commentary, December 10, 2013.

Talks Will Go Nowhere. By Benny Morris.

Talks Will Go Nowhere. By Benny Morris. The Daily Beast, April 10, 2012.

Morris:

Western observers have suggested that this prospective exchange is equivalent to a diplomatic cul-de-sac, and have long pointed to Israeli recalcitrance over the settlements as the chief obstacle to progress toward peace. Recent Israeli government announcements of moves to beef up settlements on Jerusalem’s peripheries—most notably in Har Homa, a new neighborhood just east of the Jerusalem-Bethlehem road—have done nothing to help Israel’s image abroad.

And without doubt, the whole settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria—the Biblical term Israel uses to define the West Bank—has posed an obstacle to peace, intensifying Israeli acquisitive drives and expansionist ambitions as well as underlining Palestinian fears—or certainties—that Israel has no real intention of ever relinquishing the territories.

But in deep and broad historical terms, all of this is a giant red herring. The Palestinian political elite—both of the secular Fatah persuasion, which controls the PA, and Hamas, the Islamist party that has ruled the Gaza Strip since 2007 (and won the Palestinian general elections in 2006)—has no intention of ever accepting Israel’s legitimacy or a two-state settlement based on the partition of Palestine into two states, one for the Palestinian Arabs and one for the Jewish people.

Hamas has always been clear about this; its 1988 charter states simply that, through jihad, it will uproot Zionism and that no Arab leader has the right to concede even one inch of Palestine’s sacred land to the Jews.

Fatah has played a more cagey game, but its historical record is no less clear to those willing to look at the facts. The successive leaders of the Palestinian Arab national movement have consistently rejected a two-state solution. Haj Amin al-Husseini, its first leader, did so twice, in 1937 (when he rejected the Peel Commission partition proposals) and in 1947-1948 (when he rejected the UN General Assembly partition plan, Resolution 181).  His successor, Yasser Arafat who founded the Fatah in the late 1950s and led it—and the PA—until his death in 2004, similarly decisively rejected the idea twice (while occasionally making vague positive noises to appease Washington and Western Europe): In 1978, when he turned down the Sadat-Begin Camp David Agreement that provided for the establishment of a Palestinian “Autonomy”—which would have devolved into statehood—in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; and in 2000, when he rejected the two-state proposals that ultimately offered the Palestinians 95% of the West Bank, 100% of the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem (Ehud Barak’s peace offer in July 2000 and the Clinton “Parameters” of December 2000, which the Barak government, albeit grudgingly, endorsed).

Neither in 1978 nor in 2000 did Abbas publicly dissent from Arafat’s rejectionist position—and, in 2008, after a protracted negotiation with then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Abbas himself in effect said “no” to Olmert’s peace plan, which had somewhat upgraded (from the Palestinian perspective) the Clinton “Parameters.” (Actually he never uttered a full-throated “no”—he simply refused to respond to the plan, despite American and Israeli prodding, and a few months later Olmert was out of office, replaced by Netanyahu and his right-wing coalition, and the plan was off the table).

To this one needs to add that Abbas has repeatedly, publicly, over the past decade rejected the Clinton formula of “two states for two peoples”—while endorsing what he calls a “two-state solution”—and has inflexibly affirmed the “right” of the Palestinian refugees to return to pre-1967 Israel proper. As there are in the world some 5-6 million Palestinian “refugees” (meaning those still left of the original 1948 refugees and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren) and as Israel has about 1.5 million Arab citizens and less than 6 million Jewish citizens, a mass refugee return would create an Arab majority in Israel and nullify the state’s Jewish character.

This would seem to indicate that Abbas’s hoped-for “two-state solution” means one state for the Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza, and another state for the Palestinians (with a Jewish minority) where pre-1967 Israel used to be. This doesn’t really give the Jews very much, when it comes to their two-thousand year quest for a resumption of political sovereignty.

And this is the real, protracted, historical deal-breaker which will stymie the prospective “peace” meetings. Settlements can be finessed and uprooted (as Israel’s uprooting of all the Gaza Strip settlements in 2005 demonstrated). But uprooting deep, basic Palestinian rejectionism is a far more difficult task.


Of Herrings and Elephants: Benny Morris and “Palestinian Rejectionism.” By Daniel Levy. The Daily Beast, April 16, 2012.

A Response to Daniel Levy. By Benny Morris. The Daily Beast, April 17, 2012.

A Second Response to Benny Morris. By Daniel Levy. The Daily Beast, April 24, 2012.

Israel Under Siege. By Benny Morris. The Daily Beast, July 31, 2012.

Palestinians Dupe West. By Benny Morris. The National Interest, April 25, 2011.

Ilan Pappe: The Liar as Hero. By Benny Morris. The New Republic, March 17, 2011. From the April 7, 2011 issue. Also here.

Bleak House: The Grim Prospects for a Palestinian State. By Benny Morris. Tablet, December 2, 2010.

Morris:

Which brings us to the current Israeli-Palestinian negotiating impasse. I am not talking about the tactical problem posed by continued or discontinued Israeli construction in West Bank settlements, which will probably be resolved, after some bumps and hesitations. I am speaking of a basic, strategic impasse which, unfortunately, is far more cogent and telling than the ongoing “negotiations,” which are unlikely to lead to a peace treaty or even a “framework” agreement for a future peace accord. This unlikelihood stems from a set of obstacles that I see as insurmountable, given current political-ideological mindsets.

The first, the one that American and European officials never express and—if impolitely mentioned in their presence—turn away from in distaste, is that Palestinian political elites, of both the so-called “secular” and Islamist varieties, are dead set against partitioning the Land of Israel/Palestine with the Jews. They regard all of Palestine as their patrimony and believe that it will eventually be theirs. History, because of demography and the steady empowerment of the Arab and Islamic worlds and the West’s growing alienation from Israel, and because of Allah’s wishes, is, they believe, on their side. They do not want a permanent two-state solution, with a Palestinian Arab state co-existing alongside a (larger) Jewish state; they will not compromise on this core belief and do not believe, on moral or practical grounds, that they should.

This basic Palestinian rejectionism, amounting to a Weltanschauung, is routinely ignored or denied by most Western commentators and officials. To grant it means to admit that the Israeli-Arab conflict has no resolution apart from the complete victory of one side or the other (with the corollary of expulsion, or annihilation, by one side of the other)—which leaves leaders like President Barack Obama with nowhere realistic to go with regard to the conflict. Philosophically, acceptance of the rock-like unpliability of this reality is extremely problematic, given the ongoing military and philosophical clash between the West and various forces in the Islamic world. Perhaps the fight between America and its allies and its enemies in the Middle East and South Asia and North Africa and the banlieues of Western Europe will go on and on, until one side is vanquished?

In this connection, our age, it may turn out, resembles the classic age of appeasement, the 1930s, when the Western democracies (and the Soviet Union) were ranged against, but preferred not to confront, Nazi Germany and its allies, Fascist Italy, and expansionist Japan. During that decade, Hitler’s inexorable martial, racist, and uncompromising mindset was misread by Western leaders, officials, and intellectuals—and for much the same reasons. Living in unideological societies, they could not fathom the minds and politics of their ideologically driven antagonists. The leaders and intellectuals of the Western democracies, educated and suffused with liberal and relativist values, by and large were unable to comprehend the essential “otherness” of Hitler and ended up fighting him, to the finish, after negotiation and compromise had proved useless.

***

Another problem for Westerners is that the Palestinians, by design or no, speak to them in several voices. Hamas, which may represent the majority of the Palestinian people and certainly has the unflinching support of some 40 percent of them, speaks clearly. It openly repudiates a two-state solution. Hamas leaders, to bamboozle naïve (or wicked) Westerners like Henry Siegman, occasionally express a tactical readiness for a long-term truce under terms that they know are unacceptable to any Jewish Israelis (complete Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders and acceptance of the refugees’ “Right of Return”), but their strategic message is clear, echoing the Roman statesman Cato the Elder: “Israel must be destroyed.”

The secular Palestinian leadership looks to a similar historical denouement but is more flexible on the tactics and pacing. They express a readiness for a two-state solution but envision such an outcome as intermediate and temporary. They speak of two states, a Palestinian Arab West Bank-Gaza-East Jerusalem state and another state whose population is Jewish and Arab and which they believe will eventually become majority-Arab within a generation or two through Arab procreation (Palestinian Arab birth-rates are roughly twice those of Israeli Jews) and the “return” of Palestinians with refugee status. This is why Fatah’s leaders, led by Palestine National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, flatly reject the Clintonian formula of “two states for two peoples” and refuse to recognize the “other” state, Israel, as a “Jewish state.” They hope that this “other” state will also, in time, be “Arabized,” thus setting the stage for the eventual merger of the two temporary states into one Palestinian Arab-majority state between the River and the Sea.


Review Article: Benny Morris, Islamophobia, and the Case for the One-State Solution. By Oren Ben-Dor. Holy Land Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (November 2010).

One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict. By Benny Morris. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009.

Review of Benny Morris, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict. By Peter Gubser. Middle East Policy, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Winter 2009). Also here.

The Zero-Sum Question. By Elliot Jager. Commentary, July 1, 2009. Review of One State, Two States. By Benny Morris. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009.

Review of Benny Morris, One State, Two States. By Ami Isseroff. MidEastWeb.

Christopher Hitchens has no love for Muslims unless they’re Palestinian. By Benny Morris. Haaretz, September 29, 2010.

Benny Morris on a “secular, democratic Palestine.” Elder of Ziyon, May 13, 2009. Also here, here, and The Augean Stables. [Excerpted from One State, Two States, pp 167-171.]

Morris:

The Palestinian national movement started life with a vision and goal of a Palestinian Muslim Arab-majority state in all of Palestine — a one-state “solution” — and continues to espouse and aim to establish such a state down to the present day. Moreover, and as a corollary, al-Husseini, the Palestinian national leader during the 1930s and 1940s; the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which led the national movement from the 1960s to Yasser Arafat’s death in November, 2004; and Hamas today — all sought and seek to vastly reduce the number of Jewish inhabitants in the country, in other words, to ethnically cleanse Palestine. Al-Husseini and the PLO explicitly declared the aim of limiting Palestinian citizenship to those Jews who had lived in Palestine permanently before 1917 (or, in another version, to limit it to those 50,000-odd Jews and their descendants). This goal was spelled out clearly in the Palestinian National Charter and in other documents. Hamas has been publicly more reserved on this issue, but its intentions are clear.

The Palestinian vision was never — as described by various Palestinian spokesmen in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s to Western journalists — of a “secular, democratic Palestine” (though it certainly sounded more palatable than, say, the “destruction of Israel,” which was the goal it was meant to paper over or camouflage). Indeed, “a secular democratic Palestine” had never been the goal of Fatah or the so-called moderate groups that dominated the PLO between the 1960s and the 2006 elections that brought Hamas to power.

Middle East historian Rashid Khalidi has written that “in 1969 [the PLO] amended [its previous goal and henceforward advocated] the establishment of a secular democratic state in Palestine for Muslims, Christians and Jews, replacing Israel.” And Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah has written, in his recent book, One Country: “The PLO did ultimately adopt [in the late 1960s or 1970s] the goal of a secular, democratic state in all Palestine as its official stance.”

This is hogwash. The Palestine National Council (PNC) never amended the Palestine National Charter to the effect that the goal of the PLO was “a secular democratic state in Palestine.” The words and notion never figured in the charter or in any PNC or PLO Central Committee or Fatah Executive Committee resolutions, at any time. It is a spin invented for gullible Westerners and was never part of Palestinian mainstream ideology. The Palestinian leadership has never, at any time, endorsed a “secular, democratic Palestine.”

The PNC did amend the charter, in 1968 (not 1969). But the thrust of the emendation was to limit non-Arab citizenship in a future Arab-liberated Palestine to “Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion” — that is, 1917.

True, the amended charter also guaranteed, in the future State of Palestine, “freedom of worship and of visit” to holy sites to all, “without discrimination of race, colour, language or religion.” And, no doubt, this was music to liberal Western ears. But it had no connection to the reality or history of contemporary Muslim Arab societies. What Muslim Arab society in the modern age has treated Christians, Jews, pagans, Buddhists and Hindus with tolerance and as equals? Why should anyone believe that Palestinian Muslim Arabs would behave any differently?

Western liberals like, or pretend, to view Palestinian Arabs, indeed all Arabs, as Scandinavians, and refuse to recognize that peoples, for good historical, cultural and social reasons, are different and behave differently in similar or identical sets of circumstances.

So where did the slogan of “a secular, democratic Palestine” originate? That goal was first explicitly proposed in 1969 by the small Marxist splinter group the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP). According to Khalidi, “It was [then] discreetly but effectively backed by the leaders of the mainstream, dominant Fatah movement . . . The democratic secular state model eventually became the official position of the PLO.” As I have said, this is pure invention. The PNC, PLO and Fatah turned down the DFLP proposal, and it was never adopted or enunciated by any important Palestinian leader or body – though the Western media during the 1970s were forever attributing it to the Palestinians. As a result, however, the myth has taken hold that this was the PLO’s official goal through the late 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

And today, again, and for the same reasons – the phrase retains its good, multicultural, liberal ring – “a secular, democratic Palestine” is bandied about by Palestinian one-state supporters. And a few one-statists, indeed, may sincerely believe in and desire such a denouement. But given the realities of Palestinian politics and behaviour, the phrase objectively serves merely as camouflage for the goal of a Muslim Arab-dominated polity to replace Israel. And, as in the past, the goal of “a secular democratic Palestine” is not the platform or policy of any major Palestinian political institution or party.

Indeed, the idea of a “secular democratic Palestine” is as much a nonstarter today as it was three decades ago. It is a nonstarter primarily because the Palestinian Arabs, like the world’s other Muslim Arab communities, are deeply religious and have no respect for democratic values and no tradition of democratic governance.

And matters have only gotten worse since the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. For anyone who has missed the significance of Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006 and the violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in 2007, a mere glance at the West Bank and Gaza today (and, indeed, at Israel’s Arab minority villages and towns) reveals a landscape dominated by rapidly multiplying mosque minarets, the air filled with the calls to prayer of the muezzins and alleyways filled with hijab-ed women. Only fools and children were persuaded in 2006-07 that Hamas beat Fatah merely because they had an uncorrupt image or dispensed aid to the poor. The main reasons for the Hamas victory were religious and political: the growing religiosity of the Palestinian masses and their “recognition” that Hamas embodies the “truth” and, with Allah’s help, will lead them to final victory over the infidels, much as Hamas achieved, through armed struggle, the withdrawal of the infidels from the Gaza Strip in 2005.


And Now For Some Facts. By Benny Morris. The New Republic, May 8, 2006. Also here. Review of Mearsheimer and Walt.

Morris:

From Mearsheimer and Walt, you would never suspect that the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1948 occurred against the backdrop, and as the result, of a war—a war that for the Jews was a matter of survival, and which those same Palestinians and their Arab brothers had launched. To omit this historical background is bad history—and stark dishonesty. It is quite true, and quite understandable, that the Israeli government during the war decided to bar a return of the refugees to their homes—to bar the return of those who, before becoming refugees, had attempted to destroy the Jewish state and whose continued loyalty to the Jewish state, if they were readmitted, would have been more than questionable. There was nothing “innocent,” as Mearsheimer and Walt put it, about the Palestinians and their behavior before their eviction-evacuation in 1947-1948 (as there was nothing innocent about Haj Amin al Husseini’s work for the Nazis in Berlin from 1941 to 1945, broadcasting anti-Allied propaganda and recruiting Muslim troops for the Wehrmacht). And what befell the Palestinians was not “a moral crime,” whatever that might mean; it was something the Palestinians brought down upon themselves, with their own decisions and actions, their own historical agency. But they like to deny their historical agency, and many “sympathetic” outsiders like to abet them in this illusion, which is significantly responsible for their continued statelessness.

A new exodus for the Middle East? By Benny Morris. The Guardian, October 2, 2002.

No chance for peace in Israel. By Benny Morris. The Guardian, February 20, 2002.

Survival of the Fittest. Interview with Benny Morris by Ari Shavit. Haaretz, January 9, 2004. Also here, here, here. Part 1 here, here. Part 2 here, here. Part 1 at Haaretz. Part 2 at Haaretz.

Benny Morris: Moral Bankruptcy of a Zionist Historian. By Richard Silverstein. Tikkun Olam, February 25, 2004.

Diagnosing Benny Morris: The mind of a European settler. By Gabriel Ash. The Electronic Intifada, January 27, 2004.

Moral decay and Benny Morris. By Ali Abunimah. The Electronic Intifada, January 24, 2004.

Benny Morris’s Shocking Interview. By Baruch Kimmerling. History News Network, January 26, 2004. Also at The Electronic Intifada.

Relative Humanity: The Fundamental Obstacle to a One-State Solution in Historic Palestine. By Omar Barghouti. The Electronic Intifada, January 6, 2004. Part 1. Part 2.

The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited. By Benny Morris. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Also here.

Eyeless in Zion: When Palestine First Exploded. By Anita Shapira. The New Republic, December 11, 2000. Review of Tom Segev, One Palestine Complete.

The Past Is Not a Foreign Country: The Failure of Israel’s “New Historians” to Explain War and Peace. By Anita Shapira. The New Republic, November 29, 1999.

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

The Causes and Character of the Arab Exodus from Palestine: The Israel Defence Forces Intelligence Branch Analysis of June 1948. By Benny Morris. Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1 (January 1986).

Operation Dani and the Palestinian Exodus from Lydda and Ramle in 1948. By Benny Morris. The Middle East Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Winter 1986).

Myths and Historiography of the 1948 Palestine War Revisited: The Case of Lydda. By Alon Kadish and Avraham Sela. The Middle East Journal, Vol. 59 No. 4 (Autumn 2005).

Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. By Benny Morris. New York: Vintage Books, 2001. Part 1. Part 2. Also here.

1948 as Jihad. By Benny Morris. NJBR, July 14, 2013. With related articles.

The Arab World Needs Its Own Nelson Mandela – and Its Own FW de Klerk.

The Arab world needs its own Nelson Mandela – and its own FW de Klerk. By Richard Spencer. The Telegraph, December 10, 2013.

U.S. Plan for Israel’s Safety. By Ron Ben-Yishai.

U.S. plan for Israel’s safety. By Ron Ben-Yishai. Ynet News, December 5, 2013.

Imbalance in Israel. By Richard Cohen.

Imbalance in Israel. By Richard Cohen. Real Clear Politics, December 10, 2013. Also at the Washington Post.

Cohen:

In “My Promised Land,” Ari Shavit’s anguished book about Israel, there is plenty about the mistreatment of Palestinians — today, yesterday and always. Some of it is just plain sickening, reminiscent of the ethnic cleansing attempted in the Balkans. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, a passage pierces the gloom like the sun breaking through the fog. Shavit is walking in the Galillee with Palestinian-Israeli attorney Mohammed Dahla when the lawyer’s phone rings. The family of an accused terrorist is asking Dahla to represent him. From a hilltop, the lawyer calls the Jerusalem police to find his client and declare his interest in the case. Then he and Shavit resume their walk. Justice was served.

 

Does the alacrity, the efficiency, the very existence of the Israeli justice system outweigh or negate the occupation of the West Bank? No. Does it matter that in the nearby Arab states, justice is the word for the outcome the government wants? No. Does any of that compensate for what the Palestinians have suffered? No. The answer is always no.

 

But the immense virtue of Shavit’s book is its insistent use of the concept of “and.” It is not so much said as implied, and it is actually the theme of the book. Much of Israel’s history is about parallelism. Things happen and at the same time other things happen. Palestinians are oppressed and they are given legal representation. Israel conquers the Gaza Strip and then withdraws. The blogger’s handy word “but” is of no use here. Nothing balances. Everything exists at the same time.

 

Take the ethnic cleansing of Lydda during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. “Lydda is our black box,” Shavit writes. “In it lies the dark secret of Zionism. The truth is that Zionism could not bear Lydda.”

 

And yet the truth is also that the emerging state needed to control the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv road. A civil war was underway, and victory required atrocity. Some 50,000 to 70,000 Palestinians were evicted from the area. The innocent were murdered. Terrible things happened. Shavit provides first-person accounts, but Israeli historians, particularly Benny Morris in his book “1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War,” have not ignored the ethnic cleansing that produced what the Arabs call “the Nakba,” the catastrophe. Israel is more than an open society. It is an open wound.

 

Israel today is 20 percent Arab. This is because the country was not ethnically cleansed. Israel did not follow what in 1945 through 1948 was standard behavior — the population transfers approved by the victors of World War II. Europe was ethnically reorganized — no Germans in Poland; no Germans in Czechoslovakia, either. And, lest we forget, the British approved the plan to swap Muslims and Hindus in the creation of Pakistan. All over the world, millions died — at least 500,000 ethnic Germans alone.

 

Shavit is an Israeli aristocrat, if such a thing exists. He is fourth-generation Israeli, a columnist for the robustly left-of-center newspaper Haaretz, and so he knows many of the people who run the country. Unfortunately, it is precisely people like him who could be affected by various academic organizations that want to boycott Israel. One of them, the National Council of the American Studies Association, just passed such a resolution, but from the evidence it could sorely benefit from listening to Israeli academics. The Americans know so much, yet understand so little.

 

A virtue of Shavit’s virtuous book is that it exhumes the dream of Zionism — and also its success. This was a movement that saved countless lives, that was fueled by the ovens of Auschwitz, that became imbued with the appealing dreaminess of socialism and whose leaders often espoused tolerance and respect for the Palestinians. (“I am certain that the world will judge the Jewish state by what it will do with the Arabs,” Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, wrote before taking office.) These Zionists never lost sight of the right thing. Sometimes, though, they just couldn’t do it.

 

Shavit has nothing in common with the religiously zealous West Bank settlers. He wants them all — religious, nationalist, secular, whatever — gone. This is what I want, too. But when Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip, it got a daily barrage of rockets by way of thanks. What if the West Bank becomes, like Gaza, a Hamas state?

 

In Israel, nothing is easy, which is why the subtitle of Shavit’s book is “The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel.” One does not balance the other — and both are true.

Egypt’s Trouble with Women. By Alaa al Aswany.

Egypt’s Trouble with Women. By Alaa al Aswany. New York Times, December 8, 2013. Translated from the Arabic by Russell Harris.

Aswany:

CAIRO — In December 1933, an air race from Cairo to Alexandria was held. The first plane to cross the finish line was piloted by a 26-year-old woman named Lotfia El Nadi, Egypt’s first female aviator.

 

To have a flying career was not easy for Lotfia. Her father had rejected the idea, but she did not despair. She persuaded the director of the Institute of Aviation to let her work, free of charge, as his secretary — in exchange for flying lessons. As she later explained, “I learned to fly because I love to be free.”

 

Lotfia became a hero and a national treasure in the eyes of Egyptians. Women saw her as an inspiration in their struggle for equal rights, and many young women followed her example by applying for flying lessons. Egyptian women made advances in equality throughout the period of the monarchy, which ended in 1953. After the republic of Egypt was established, under Gamal Abdel Nasser, women continued to advance, achieving positions in universities, Parliament and the senior judiciary.

 

The historical advancement of Egyptian women contrasts sharply with the results of a new Thomson Reuters Foundation survey that found Egypt ranked overall worst among 22 Arab countries for discrimination in law, sexual harassment and the paucity of female political representation. Why do Lotfia’s granddaughters suffer from problems today that she managed to overcome 80 years ago?

 

After the 1973 war in the Middle East, the price of oil shot up. This gave Gulf states unprecedented power, while the economic shock forced millions of Egyptians to emigrate to work there. Many of these Egyptians came home having absorbed radical Wahhabi values.

 

Egypt’s tradition of moderate Islam recognized women’s rights and encouraged women to study and work. By contrast, for Wahhabis, a woman’s job is to please her husband and provide offspring. Wahhabi preachers promote female genital mutilation, to control women’s sexuality. A woman must cover her body completely and may not study, work or travel. She cannot even leave the house without her husband’s permission.

 

Wahhabism has influenced all Islamic societies and movements, including Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. As it spread in Egypt, more women started to wear the hijab, or head scarf. But this did not create a virtuous society; it led to the reverse.

 

Until the end of the 1970s, many Egyptian women still went without head scarves, wearing modern Western-style dress, yet incidents of sexual harassment were rare. Now, with the spread of the hijab, harassment has taken on epidemic proportions. A 2008 study from the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights revealed that 83 percent of women interviewed had been subjected to sexual harassment at least once, and that 50 percent experienced it on a daily basis.

 

Why is it that men did not harass Egyptian women when they wore short skirts but that sexual harassment has increased against women in head scarves? When ultraconservative doctrine dehumanizes women, reducing them to objects, it legitimizes acts of sexual aggression against them.

 

The Mubarak regime had various differences with the followers of political Islam, but the two camps converged in their contempt toward women. In spite of some formal reforms instigated by Suzanne Mubarak, who wanted to appear as an enlightened first lady, the Mubarak era witnessed a deterioration in women’s rights.

 

Even so, it was not until 2005 that sexual harassment became an organized form of retribution against Egyptian women who took part in anti-Mubarak demonstrations. The security apparatus paid thugs, known as “beltagiya,” to gang up on a woman attending a demonstration, tear off her clothes and molest her. This sexualized form of punishment continued through the period of the military regime and into the Brotherhood’s rule.

 

On Dec. 17, 2011, during a demonstration against the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces near Tahrir Square in Cairo, soldiers pulled a female protester’s clothes off and dragged her along the ground, stomping on her with their boots. A video of the attack went viral, eliciting the sympathy of millions. Solidarity committees were formed, and the victim of the attack became an icon for Egyptian women. But the Islamists, at that time allied with the council, mocked the victim, blaming her for not staying in the home — as was seemly for a respectable woman.

 

During the revolution, millions of Egyptian women went out and bravely faced snipers’ bullets, but those who gained power played down their bravery and attempted to sideline them. After the 2012 election that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power, there were only 10 female members of Parliament out of a total of 508. President Mohamed Morsi’s later attempt to rewrite the Egyptian Constitution would also have removed the only female judge on the Supreme Constitutional Court.

 

In short, the Islamists strove to eradicate the gains Egyptian women had made. They tried to overturn the law punishing doctors who carried out female genital mutilation, and refused to consider the marriage of minors as a form of human trafficking by claiming that Islam permitted a girl as young as 10 years old to be married.

 

Women’s rights are a bellwether of the current conflict in Egypt. The revolutionaries are fighting for equality, whereas the reactionary forces of both the Brotherhood and the Mubarak regime are trying to strip women of their political and social rights and make them subject to men’s authority.

 

The conflict will eventually be resolved in favor of women because the revolution represents a future that no one can prevent. In 2002, Lotfia El Nadi died at age 95. Shortly before her death, she said: “I don’t recognize Egypt as it is now, but the Egypt I knew will return. I am certain of that.”

Obama Takes a Selfie at Mandela Memorial. By Peter Grier.

President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron pose for a picture with Denmark’s Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt next to First Lady Michelle Obama during the memorial service of South African former president Nelson Mandela at the FNB Stadium in Johannesburg on December 10, 2013. (Photo: ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images.)

Obama takes selfie at Mandela memorial. Inappropriate? By Peter Grier. The Christian Science Monitor, December 10, 2013.

President Obama poses for a funeral selfie and gets chummy with Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt but Michelle does not look impressed. By Leslie Larson. New York Daily News, December 10, 2013.

President Obama snaps a selfie at Mandela’s memorial service. By Caitlin Dewey. Washington Post, December 10, 2013. Also here.

Obama Takes Selfie with World Leaders at Mandela Memorial, and Michelle Is Having None of It. By Paige Lavender. The Huffington Post, December 10, 2013.

The media’s Michelle Obama problem: What a selfie says about our biases. By Roxane Gay. Salon, December 10, 2013.

Gay:

The overanalysis of the first lady’s expression speaks volumes about America’s expectations of black women. . . .

 

More than anything, the response to these latest images of Michelle Obama speaks volumes about the expectations placed on black women in the public eye and how a black woman’s default emotional state is perceived as angry. The black woman is ever at the ready to aggressively defend her territory. She is making her disapproval known. She never gets to simply be.


Michelle Obama was not unhappy during Nelson Mandela “selfie,” photographer insists. By Natasha Clark. The Telegraph, December 11, 2013.

Mandela funeral selfie adds to image problem for Denmark’s prime minister. By Andrew Anthony. The Guardian, December 14, 2013.

The Great Mandela Selfie. Cartoon by Chip Bok. Bokbluster, December 13, 2013. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt of Denmark: Bilateral Meeting with President Obama (2012). Video. The Film Archive, May 20, 2012. YouTube.






Raúl Castro Honors Mandela, But Ignores His Message. By Alex Massie.

Raúl Castro Honors Mandela, But Ignores His Message. By Alex Massie. The Daily Beast, December 10, 2013.

“The last great liberator”: Why Mandela made and stayed friends with dictators. By Max Fisher. Washington Post, December 10, 2013. Also here.