Yaalon’s Unwelcome Peace Process Truths. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Yaalon’s Unwelcome Peace Process Truths. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, January 14, 2014.

Ya’alon and Kerry: A plague on both their houses. By David Horovitz. The Times of Israel, January 15, 2014.

Ya’alon’s frustration got out of control. By Ron Ben-Yishai. Ynet News, January 15, 2014.

MK Tzipi Hotovely: Ya’alon Shouldn’t Have Apologized to Kerry. By Tova Dvorin. Arutz Sheva 7, January 15, 2014.

Kerry’s Peace Process Double Standards. By Khaled Abu Toameh. Gatestone Institute, January 16, 2014.

Offensive, inappropriate and dangerously, undiplomatically inconsistent. By Arnold Roth. This Ongoing War, January 16, 2004.

Lessons to be learned from the Kerry-Ya’alon incident. By Herb Keinon. Jerusalem Post, January 16, 2014.

Yaalon’s Not Alone. By Seth Mandel. Commentary, January 16, 2014.

Martin Indyk vs. Moshe Ya’alon. By Rick Richman. Commentary, January 17, 2014.


Tobin:

Give Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu some credit. In his first term as Israel’s leader in the 1990s, he might well have issued a statement like the one attributed to Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon yesterday in which the former general trashed U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and damned the security plan that he presented to Israel this month as “not worth the paper it’s written on.” Since returning to the prime minister’s office in 2009 Netanyahu has done his best to keep the relationship with Washington from overheating. If there have been a series of scrapes with the Obama administration, that is largely the fault of the president’s desire to pick policy fights with him and the prime minister has done his best not to overreact. No matter how wrong Israel’s leaders may think their American counterparts are, little good comes from public spats. As Netanyahu knows, the only ones who benefit from exposing the daylight between the two countries’ positions are the Palestinians and other foes.

 

But apparently Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon hasn’t gotten the memo about not telling off the Americans. In an apparently unguarded moment, the former general spouted off about Kerry, the peace process, and the Palestinians yesterday, and the subsequent report in Yediot Ahronot published in English on their Ynetnews.com site brought down a firestorm on the Israeli government. Though Yaalon walked back his comments in a statement to the media, he did not deny the accuracy of the original Yediot story. This indiscretion won’t help Netanyahu in his dealings with either Obama or Kerry. It is especially foolish coming from a cabinet minister whose department has worked closely with the administration on security measures throughout the last five years to Israel’s benefit in spite of the political differences between the governments. But leaving aside the diplomatic harm he has done his country, honest observers must admit that what Yaalon said was true. The question facing both Israel and the United States is not so much what to do about Yaalon or other members of Netanyahu’s Cabinet who can’t keep their mouths shut, but at what point it will behoove the two governments to acknowledge the futility of Kerry’s endeavor.

 

Having already conceded that Yaalon was stupid to say such things within earshot of a reporter, the defense minister gets no sympathy here for the abuse he is taking today in Israel’s press as well as from parliamentary allies and foes. The Israeli government has to be frustrated with Kerry’s persistence in pushing for concessions from them, especially when they see no sign of moderation on the part of their Palestinian peace partners who will not accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn nor renounce the right of return for the descendants of the 1948 refugees. But as damaging as pressure on Israel to accept the 1967 borders and the division of Jerusalem may be, so long as Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas is prevented by the reality of his people’s political culture and the threat from Hamas and other opposition groups from ever signing a deal that would end the conflict, Netanyahu knows that the best policy is to avoid an overt conflict with the U.S.

 

That said, Yaalon’s reminder of the absurdity of Kerry’s quest does help clarify the situation for those naïve enough to believe the talks have some chance of success.

 

Yaalon’s assertion that the negotiations are not between Israel and the Palestinians but between the Jewish state and the U.S. is self-evident. The PA has repeatedly demonstrated that it won’t budge from uncompromising positions against realistic territorial swaps or security guarantees, much less the existential questions of refugees and two states for two peoples. All that has happened in the past year is that Israel has been prevailed upon to bribe the PA by releasing terrorist murderers for the privilege of sitting at a table again with Abbas.

 

Nor can there be any real argument with Yaalon’s assessment of Kerry’s behavior when he described the secretary’s crusade as “inexplicably obsessive and messianic.” Few in either Israel or the United States, even those who are most in favor of his efforts, thought he had much of a chance to start with and there’s been no evidence that the odds have improved. His crack that “all that can save us is for John Kerry to win a Nobel Prize and leave us in peace” makes no sense since the only way the secretary will get such an honor is if Abbas signs on the dotted line. But it probably also reflects what Abbas is thinking since his goal is to prevent an agreement without actually having to turn one down publicly.

 

Yaalon is also right to dismiss the security guarantees Kerry has offered Israel in exchange for a withdrawal from the West Bank. The example of the Gaza withdrawal—which Yaalon opposed when he was chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, a stand that led to his term being cut short by former prime minister Ariel Sharon—as well as the situation along the border with Lebanon illustrates what happens when Israel tries to entrust its security either to Palestinian good will or third parties.

 

But perhaps the most incisive of Yaalon’s controversial comments was his assertion that Abbas’s future was dependent on Israel’s remaining in the West Bank, not on its departure from the territories:

Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) is alive and well thanks to us. The moment we leave Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) he is finished.

Without an Israeli security umbrella, Hamas or more radical Fatah factions would have deposed Abbas a long time ago. His administration over most of the West Bank is simply impossible without Israeli help. Pretending that this isn’t the case is one of the key fictions that form the foundation of Kerry’s conceit about giving Abbas sovereignty over the area and why such a deal or a unilateral Israeli retreat, as some are now suggesting, would repeat the Gaza fiasco.

 

Most Israelis would applaud any effort to separate the two peoples and desperately want an agreement that would end the conflict for all time rather than merely to pause it in order for the Palestinians to resume it later when they are in a more advantageous position. Though the minister shouldn’t have criticized Kerry publicly, until the secretary and those who are supporting his pressure on Israel and not on the Palestinians can answer Yaalon’s politically incorrect comments, the peace process is doomed.


Horovitz:

Dumb, not entirely wrong

 

None of which is to say, however, that Ya’alon’s dire assessment of the US secretary’s peacemaking skills is a million miles off target. Ya’alon’s been thoroughly dumb. But he’s not entirely wrong.

 

In late July, fresh in office, Kerry voiced his confidence that, where all others had failed before, he could chivy Israel and the Palestinian Authority to a permanent peace accord — and by April at that. Such hubris. Ten visits later, he seems to have given up on that delusional goal, and is now reduced to trying to persuade Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to carry on talking past the end of his own nine-month deadline in April on the basis of a “framework” agreement.

 

But even this modest target is proving difficult to reach, unsurprisingly so, since the two sides disagree on just about everything — notably including those security proposals, the fate of Jerusalem, the route of an Israel-Palestine border, and the destiny of millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees. To date, despite all of Kerry’s diplomacy, the modest framework paper isn’t finished — even though, reportedly, it will be a nonbinding, American document that the sides won’t be required to sign.

 

The Palestinian Authority was never remotely likely to agree to the dramatic policy changes, the reversal of decades of intransigence, required for a peace deal. It has not even begun the process of explaining to its people why it would compromise with the Israelis, whose very presence in the area PA media continues to brand as illegitimate.

 

And the Netanyahu government was only ever going to be less forthcoming than the Olmert coalition that preceded it, and whose peace terms were rejected by Abbas. Yes, most Israelis back an accommodation with the Palestinians, in good part to guarantee that the country maintains both its Jewish and its democratic character, and they would agree to major territorial compromise, but only if it brings them a realistic prospect of peace. Not, as is the case now, when the utter instability in the Middle East means that a West Bank withdrawal is highly likely to see murderous religious extremists fill the vacuum, ousting relative moderates such as Abbas along the way, and placing all of Israel under rocket and terror threat.

 

The defense minister’s absent vision

 

But if Kerry has been arrogant and willfully blind, Ya’alon for his part shows precious little political vision.

 

The defense minister has shifted dramatically across the political spectrum over time, earlier dovishness mugged by the reality of years tackling Palestinian terrorism and wider Arab hostility. Abbas demonstrated as recently as Saturday what a problematic successor he has proved to the duplicitous Yasser Arafat — too weak-willed to challenge Arafat’s pernicious delegitimization of Israel, retreating to ever more inflexible positions on all the core peace issues. But Ya’alon’s conclusion, that Israel is surrounded by enemies and must simply hang tough and continue to defend itself as effectively as possible, offers no prospect of eventual change.

 

Lots of people all around embattled Israel loathe the Jewish state and want to see it wiped out. But that leaves Israel with two imperatives, not just one: Defend the country, and do whatever can safely be done to gradually create a better climate on the other side of the divide, to encourage Palestinians and other Arabs who seek a peaceful future, who are prepared to take conciliatory positions, who are truly prepared to live in peace alongside Israel.

 

No, Secretary Kerry, the path to peace cannot be bulldozed or imposed in nine months. But no, Minister Ya’alon, flooding the moat and pulling up the drawbridge isn’t a long-term answer either.

 

Realistic goals

 

Peace needs to be built bottom up as well as top down. Rather than shooting for an impossible target, with a huge risk of violence if all fails, the US should have focused, and still should focus, on using its dwindling leverage to assist those who preach and foster reconciliation, while outlawing and cutting funding to those who foster hatred — educational institutions, media organizations, international agencies and those who finance them.

 

Israel, for its part, should encourage every opportunity for constructive interaction with Palestinians and other Arabs who seek a better future, and be sure to put its own house in order too, when it comes to incitement by its leaders, media and educators. It should also stop building homes in West Bank areas it does not anticipate retaining in any future accord — for the benefit of its own citizens, and the credibility of its position with the Palestinians and the international community.

 

Eventually, in a gradually improving climate, it will be up to honest and skilled diplomats, doubtless led by the US, to draw the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships — pushed by their peoples, rather than against the peoples’ will — toward binding agreements that will benefit both sides. We’re not there yet. Far from it. Indeed, compounding all too familiar Palestinian rejectionism, it’s now an open secret that we labor under the additional burdens of contemptuous Israeli shortsightedness and unrealistic American evaluation and expectation.

Al Qaeda’s Grand Strategy and the Unmaking of the Middle East.

Know Your Enemy: Al Qaeda’s Grand Strategy. By Thomas Joscelyn. The Weekly Standard, January 20, 2014. Also here.

The Unmaking of the Middle East: Obama’s Historic Misunderstanding. By Mary Habeck and Thomas Donnelly. The Weekly Standard, January 20, 2014. Also here.

America’s Social Democratic Future. By Lane Kenworthy.

America’s Social Democratic Future. By Lane Kenworthy. Foreign Affairs, Vol. 93, No. 1 (January/February 2014).

Kenworthy:

The Arc of Policy Is Long But Bends Toward Justice.

 

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AMERICA

 

Perhaps what is most important to note about the United States’ social democratic future is that it will not look dramatically different from the present day. The United States will not become a progressive utopia; rather, it will become a better version of its current self.

 

A larger share of adults will be employed, although for many, the workweek will be shorter and there will be more vacation days and holidays. Nearly all jobs will be in the service sector, especially teaching, advising, instructing, organizing, aiding, nursing, monitoring, and transporting; only around five percent will be in manufacturing or agriculture. Most Americans will change jobs and even careers more frequently than they do today. More Americans will work in jobs with low pay, will lose a job more than once during their careers, and will reach retirement age with little savings. Families, community organizations, and labor unions might grow even weaker than they are now.

 

But by filling in the gaps in the public safety net, the federal government will improve economic security, equal opportunity, and shared prosperity for most Americans in spite of these changes. A social democratic America will be a society with greater economic security and fairness. Its economy will be flexible, dynamic, and innovative. Employment will be high. Liberty will be abundant. Balancing work and family will be easier. Americans will pay higher taxes than they currently do, but the sacrifice will be worth it, because they will receive a lot in return.

 

The United States has come a long way on the road to becoming a good society, but it still has further to travel. Happily, its history and the experiences of other rich nations show the way forward. One reason the United States is a much better country today than it was a century ago is that the federal government does more to ensure economic security, equal opportunity, and shared prosperity. In the future, it will do more still, and the country will be better for it.

Quelle Horreur: Can Life Get Worse for Hollande? By Alex Berezow.

Quelle Horreur: Can Life Get Worse for Hollande? By Alex Berezow. Real Clear World, January 15, 2014.

National Stupidity. By Stephen M. Walt.

National Stupidity. By Stephen M. Walt. Foreign Policy, January 14, 2014. Also here.

Walt:

In international politics, pride goeth before a fall.


What’s the most powerful force in world affairs? There are plenty of candidates, but nationalism has to be a strong contender. The twin ideas that the human race is divided up into various “nations” (i.e., peoples with various shared traits who regard themselves as part of the same “imagined community”), and that these various nations are entitled to their own “state,” have shaped the formation of the European system, inspired the anti-colonial revolutions that dismantled the British, French, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Soviet empires, and help explain why the number of states has risen steadily for decades and shows no signs of stopping.

 

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. A powerful sense of national feeling has many virtues. It can help societies overcome collective action dilemmas, as contending groups within a country agree to make sacrifices for the common good and to tolerate other forms of difference (such as religion). By encouraging citizens to work hard for shared purposes, it can also help spur national ambition and economic growth. And as the world discovered following the French Revolution, nationalism is a potent source of military power: troops infused by a love of la patrie will fight harder than hired mercenaries or soldiers whose loyalties are divided.

 

But nationalism also has a dark side. National narratives invariably highlight a particular people’s positive achievements and tend to downplay any episodes where they behaved badly. In short, all nations tell themselves a sugar-coated version of their own history. Or as the late political scientist Karl W. Deutsch mordantly observed, a nation is a “group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours.” This feature tends to blind every nation to the views of others and makes it difficult for them to understand why the same event can been seen so differently, sometimes with good reason.

 

It's no surprise, for example, that what Americans label the “Iranian Hostage Crisis” is known to Iranians as the “Conquest of the American Spy Den” – which tells you all you need to know about how the two countries view that particular episode. By whitewashing their own past, nations forget why others might have reasons to be suspicious of them, and this collective amnesia makes them more likely to see an adversary’s present behavior in the worst possible light. Most Americans have long forgotten about our various predations in Latin America, for example, but Mexicans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, and others have not.

 

Nationalism can also make it harder to resolve existing conflicts, especially when competing national narratives create contending claims to the same territory. When this happens, both sides will regard their own claims as beyond dispute and see the other sides’ claims as unwarranted aggression that has no legitimate basis, and must therefore be resisted. (See under: Israel-Palestine.) Moreover, such attitudes rob diplomats of the flexibility that is often needed to reach a compromise, because achieving anything less than complete victory will be seen as a betrayal of some sacred national value.

 

Finally, extreme nationalism also fuels overconfidence. National ideologies tend to portray the nation as both different from others and in some way superior; indeed, national pride depends on convincing citizens that it is better to be Turkish, French, Japanese, Thai, Irish, Egyptian, Russian, etc., than to be anything else. Americans are no strangers to this sort of thinking: just look at all the ink that’s been spilled proclaiming American “exceptionalism.” From there it is but a short step to the conclusion that others are in some sense inferior, and that they will be easy to defeat on the battlefield.

 

In short, despite nationalism’s many virtues, it can also be a profound source of national stupidity. At worst, unchecked nationalism has a way of leading countries to do things that leave them worse off than they would otherwise be. In extreme cases – such as Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan – virulent hyper-nationalist beliefs helped pave the road to national disaster, along with the suffering and deaths of millions along the way.

 

Some have argued that globalization and the emergence of post-national structures such as the European Union mean that these dangers are a thing of the past. Or that now that 1 billion people are on Facebook, that tribalism is dead. Hardly. Just consider the following examples of national stupidity, exacerbated by unthinking nationalism.

. . . .

 

Spoiled Milk and Honey

 

At its root, Zionism is the Jewish version of 19th-century European nationalism. By encouraging national unity, patriotic sacrifice, and the support from the Jewish diaspora, it has been an important source of many of Israel's past accomplishments.

 

Today, however, the evolution of Zionism – in more extreme directions – may be imperiling Israel’s long-term future. Instead of merely seeking a secure homeland, the Israeli state is increasingly fixated on establishing a “Greater Israel” in perpetuity, while confining its Palestinian subjects to a few isolated enclaves under strict Israeli control. Not surprisingly, these policies are accompanied by increasingly racist attitudes toward Arabs both inside and outside the state itself, as Max Blumenthal has recently documented. These trends explain why Israel faces growing international criticism and may even be losing support and sympathy in the United States, including among American Jewry. As with other states, the downside of Jewish nationalism is encouraging policies that are not in the country's long-term interest.

 

A City on a Mountain

 

American nationalism differs in certain ways from many other countries: it is a “civic” nationalism that rests primarily on shared political principles and liberal cultural values, rather than on ethnicity or ancestry. This feature has made it easier for the United States to incorporate successive waves of immigration (albeit not without certain tensions), a phenomenon that was critical to its rise to great power status.

 

Yet over time, and especially since the United States became a great power, American nationalism has also incorporated a dangerously inflated view of its own “exceptional” qualities. In particular, Americans (and especially foreign policy elites), often believe it is America’s right and responsibility to exercise “world leadership,” not simply because the United States is a very powerful country, but because it has the best form of government, the most virtuous citizens, and is always acting for the greater good – even when it is blowing things up in some distant land or toppling some supposedly unfriendly government.

 

The negative consequences of this strand of American nationalism should be apparent by now. Because they believe the United States always acts for good, American leaders routinely underestimate the degree to which U.S. power worries other countries and leads them to try to take various steps to rein in Washington. Because they are convinced the American system of government is the best one ever devised, they overestimate their ability to export that system to other countries. Because the United States is a uniquely successful multicultural experiment, they do not recognize that local identities and sectarian differences are much harder to overcome in other places. And because they think Americans are smarter, more unified, more heroic, and just plain better than others, they have trouble imagining that a bunch of Vietnamese, Iraqis, or Afghans could possibly defeat us – even when we’re fighting on their home turf and in conditions where they are highly motivated and can almost certainly outlast us.

 

My point here is not to rail against nationalism per se, which isn’t going to disappear anytime soon. It is rather to warn against the unthinking, uncritical, “my-country-right-or-wrong” version of nationalism that sometimes infects an entire society. When that happens, legitimate pride in one’s own national group can easily morph into something darker, cruder, and far more dangerous. And when it does, it tends to make a country do stupid things. In international politics, as in the lives of individuals, (national) pride goeth before a fall.

Russia Revisits Its Pivotal Role in World War I. By Christian Neef.

Russia Revisits Pivotal Role in World War I. By Christian Neef. Spiegel Online, January 13, 2014.

At the beginning of World War I, Russia was a member of the Triple Entente, which went on to win the conflict. By then, however, the Russian czarist empire had vanished and the war was swept under the historical rug. Putin is now bringing it back.

Digging for Their Lives: Russia’s Volunteer Body Hunters. By Lucy Ash.

Volunteers Marina Koutchinskaya(l) and Olga Ivshina (r) look for the remains of Russia’s missing-in-action World War II soldiers.

Digging for their lives: Russia’s volunteer body hunters. By Lucy Ash. BBC News, January 12, 2014.

Ash:

Of the estimated 70 million people killed in World War Two, 26 million died on the Eastern front – and up to four million of them are still officially considered missing in action. But volunteers are now searching the former battlefields for the soldiers' remains, determined to give them a proper burial – and a name.


Olga Ivshina walks slowly and carefully through the pine trees, the beeps of her metal detector punctuating the quiet of the forest. “They are not buried very deep,” she says.

 

“Sometimes we find them just beneath the moss and a few layers of fallen leaves. They are still lying where they fell. The soldiers are waiting for us – waiting for the chance to finally go home.”

 

Nearby, Marina Koutchinskaya is on her knees searching in the mud. For the past 12 years she has spent most of her holidays like this, far away from home, her maternity clothes business, and her young son.

 

“Every spring, summer and autumn I get this strange sort of yearning inside me to go and look for the soldiers,” she says. “My heart pulls me to do this work.”

 

They are part of a group called Exploration who have travelled for 24 hours in a cramped army truck to get to this forest near St Petersburg. Conditions are basic – they camp in the woods – and some days they have to wade waist-deep through mud to find the bodies of the fallen. The work can be dangerous, too. Soldiers are regularly discovered with their grenades still in their backpacks and artillery shells can be seen sticking out of the trees. Diggers from other groups elsewhere in Russia have lost their lives.

 

Marina holds up an object she has found, it looks like a bar of soap, but it is actually TNT. “Near a naked flame it’s still dangerous, even though it has been lying in the ground for 70 years,” she says.

 

Many countries were scarred by World War Two, but none suffered as many losses as the Soviet Union.

 

On 22 June 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the largest and bloodiest campaign in military history, aimed at annexing vast areas of the USSR to the Third Reich. St Petersburg, then known as Leningrad, was one of his main targets. In less than three months, the advancing German army had encircled the city and started pounding it from the air.

 

But attempts to take the city by storm fell through, so Hitler decided to starve it into surrender. For more than two years, the Red Army fought desperately to cut through German lines.

 

Olga and Marina are working near the town of Lyuban, 80km (50 miles) south of St Petersburg. Here, in an area of just 10 sq km, an estimated 19,000 Soviet soldiers were killed in just a few days in 1942. So far the diggers have found 2,000 bodies.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s Manifesto.

Two media outlets publish 9/11 mastermind’s manifesto. Video. Charles Swift and Andrew McCarthy with Megyn Kelly. The Kelly File. Fox News, January 14, 2014. YouTube.

Mastermind of the Sept. 11 Attacks Wants to Convert His Captors. By Myriam Francois-Cerrah, Ryan J. Reilly, and Ryan Grim. The Huffington Post, January 14, 2014.

Khaled Sheikh Mohammed’s Manifesto. The Huffington Post, January 14, 2014. PDF.

Dear Tiger Mom: The 1920s Called and They Want Their Racial Theories Back. By David J. Leonard.

Dear Tiger Mom: The 1920s Called and They Want Their Racial Theories Back. By David J. Leonard. History News Network, January 13, 2014.

The American Studies Association Needs to Hit Rewind/Erase. By Thomas Doherty.

The American Studies Association Needs to Hit Rewind/Erase. By Thomas Doherty. History News Network, January 13, 2014.

Doherty:

The heretofore un-newsworthy American Studies Association (ASA)—the umbrella organization for academics devoted to the study of all things American, a cohort I have been a member of, on and off, for some thirty years, through graduate student penury, assistant professor hustling, and finally, praise God, tenured professor complacency – has recently gone off its rocker. On December 18, the group announced that it was boycotting Israeli institutions. Why Israel? “One has to start somewhere,” shrugged ASA president Curtis Marez.

 

The decision that no Israelis need apply to the ASA has generated a fierce backlash—mainly, and encouragingly, from within the ranks of the American university system. Six American Studies programs have terminated their institutional affiliation with the ASA; eleven colleges listed as institutional affiliates on the back page of the American Quarterly, the ASA’s quarterly journal, say they have not paid for the privilege and demand to be de-listed. University presidents, including the presidents of all the Ivy League schools, have inveighed against the ASA’s embargo on an open exchange of scholarship. Not a few of the critics have mentioned the highly selective outrage directed at Israel, when the world presents so many other likely candidates for academic ostracism.

 

The decision to blackball Israel and thrust the ASA into the crossfire of Mideast politics was initiated by the ASA’s Caucus on Academic and Community Activism, which put forward the boycott resolution at the ASA’s annual conference in Washington, D.C. on November 21-24, 2013. The resolution was then unanimously approved by a 15-member executive council and passed on to the membership for a vote. The voting window opened on December 5 and closed on December 15; no arguments opposing the boycott were allowed to be posted on the ASA webpage. Of some 5,000 members, 1252 cast ballots. Of that subgroup, 66% voted in favor, 30% voted against, and 3.4% abstained. I assume the other 3,748 eligible voters were grading final exams or Christmas shopping. Had a majority of the non-voters cast their ballots against the boycott, they might have saved the ASA from an epochal meltdown that seems poised to deep-six the entire association. It has already damaged the group’s credibility as an impartial umpire of scholarly inquiry.

 

In the American Studies Program at Brandeis University, my colleagues and I had been monitoring the developments leading up to the boycott vote. Brandeis is a Jewish-sponsored, though non-sectarian, institution, and it is fair to say we were especially alert to the machinations. When the pro-boycott vote was announced, the faculty convened via email and quickly agreed to sever formal institutional ties. It being the twenty-first century, the news went out via Twitter and a statement was posted on our webpage. “We view the recent vote by the membership to affirm an academic boycott of Israel as a politicization of the discipline and a rebuke to the kind of open inquiry that a scholarly association should foster,” the statement read. “We remain committed to the discipline of American Studies but we can no longer support an organization that has rejected two of the core principles of American culture—freedom of association and expression.” Not incidentally, and despite what some pro-boycott websites have claimed, the decision was made by the faculty alone with absolutely no input or pressure from The Powers That Be in the university administration, still less from outside Israeli lobby groups.

 

The boycott resolution marks a sad decline in the stature of the ASA—or perhaps rather the logical culmination of the ideological activism that has, for some time now, supplanted the scholarly inquiry that was once the central purpose of the ASA. Years ago, reflecting on the sensibility change in the association, a gray-bearded founder told me that his generation of pioneering American Studies scholars, who came into the profession in the 1950s and 1960s, basically had good feelings about America. That for all its faults, they believed America was a force for good in the world, that when she needed to be upbraided – for Jim Crow, for Vietnam, for any failure to live up to her avowed ideals — the criticism was delivered more in sorrow than anger. Moreover, whether working on Puritan sermons or slave narratives, Hollywood movies or the Delta blues, most practitioners of the discipline tried to keep their politics from coloring their scholarship.

 

Today, the membership of the ASA is dominated by activist-scholars who emphasize the first half of the hyphen and who look upon America as its own axis of evil. The papers and panels at any recent ASA conference drip bile at the nation that names the discipline, a land congenitally and irredeemably imperialist, genocidal, racist, sexist, classist, and heteronormative. For years the joke among the lingering old guard was that the organization should be renamed the anti-American Studies Association. It wasn’t very funny then and it is even less funny now.

 

Like any academic guild, however, the ASA can exert a powerful influence as an arbiter of professional standards. The imprimatur of the organization matters, or it did before December 16. Especially for up-and-coming PhD students and assistant professors, being selected to deliver a paper at the annual conference or having an article published in the journal was a coveted validation of one’s scholarly chops. Now, in the popular mind and throughout the academy, the ASA stands for one thing: lockstep adherence to a controversial position over Israeli occupation and Palestinian autonomy. Ironically, the issue that has hobbled the ASA was not even born in the USA.

 

The implosion of the ASA could not have come at a worse time. For all the talk of globalization and wired worlds, the study of American culture remains as urgent as ever – as is the need for an even-tempered, rigorous scholarly guild devoted to it. Basic common sense argues that such an association welcomes – besides the random Israeli professor – traditional scholars, with no particular political ax to grind, as well as those who want to rage against the American machine.

 

So, how do we get out of this mess? My suggestion: rewind/erase. Rescind the boneheaded boycott. We can borrow a page from that classic American text, the television show Dallas, when a misguided narrative lurch in the ninth season was simply wiped clean from the slate with a wake-up call. Afterwards, we can look back and say, “It was all a dream . . . a horrible, horrible dream.”

Israel Feels the Wrath of the MLA. By Walter Russell Mead.

Israel Feel the Wrath of Modern Language Professors. By Walter Russell Mead. The American Interest, January 13, 2014.

Mead:

The American Studies Association’s decision to boycott Israeli universities has met with mockery and scorn for the most part, but one scholarly guild is feeling inspired. The annual convention of the 30,000-member Modern Language Association held a panel last week called “Academic Boycotts: A Conversation about Israel and Palestine.” It probably seemed satisfyingly cutting-edge to the participants and their admiring audience, but will sound pretty humdrum to anyone familiar with academe: no one who disagrees with the BDS movement against Israel was allowed to speak on the widely-attended panel. Haaretz reports:

The audience consistently applauded the panelists’ calls for boycotts against Israel and harsh condemnation of Israeli policies regarding the Palestinians. Panelists also compared Israel’s actions in the territories to the apartheid government in South Africa and alleged that Israel suppresses Palestinian education and research. [...]

 

After the session, which ended without disruption, [panel moderator Professor Samer Ali, University of Texas at Austin], said “I think it went really well. People were very respectful. This was MLA at its best.”

 

He also defended the decision not to include any dissenting voices, saying this was a common approach in academic environments where panelists who agree on a particular model discuss their approaches while the audience raises critiques.

The MLA isn’t boycotting Israel quite yet, but its delegate assembly will vote this weekend on a resolution to condemn the Jewish state for various moral infractions. We’ll venture to guess that the resolution will pass, and that the modern language professors so sensitive to the needs of Palestinians will feel like the Great and Good upholders of ethical norms their university positions clearly entitle them to be.

 

Newly outraged charges of anti-Semitism likely will follow, and we have no doubt that some genuine bigotry against Jews poisons the dark recesses of the MLA. But, as we wrote in the wake of the ASA boycott, there’s something a bit more complicated going on here. The cheering audience was probably made up of academics who are (unforgivably) misinformed about the ethnic makeup of Israeli society, confident they’re fighting colonial injustices committed by a white, European country when in fact the majority of Israeli Jews are (or descend from) refugees from Arab or Slavic lands; scholars of Arab or Muslim dissent who understandably sympathize with the Palestinian side of the conflict most; and left-leaning American Jews who feel (again, understandably) justified in holding Israel to a higher ethical standard than any other nation.

 

As with the ASA, these groups are part of a body of professionals generally uncomfortable with dissenting opinions and tending to have little experience in the world outside the university. The result is a steady stream of ill-informed and self-righteous panels and resolutions. Those who find themselves shocked by all this should probably brace themselves for quite a few more disturbances like these.

 

Israel faces graver threats today than misguided modern language professors, but this is still an issue worth keeping an eye on. It’s disquieting that many academics in the West are hostile to intellectual and academic freedom. Ill-informed anger directed at the Jewish state is but one manifestation of a larger trend our campuses need to fight.

The General. By Ari Shavit.

General Ariel Sharon standing in the Suez Canal, October 31, 1973.

The General. By Ari Shavit. The New Yorker, January 23, 2006.

An Israeli journalist’s six years of conversation with Ariel Sharon.

Ariel Sharon in His Own Words. By Rick Richman. Commentary, January 12, 2014.


Shavit:

Surprisingly, this secular, Israel-born soldier defined himself not as an Israeli but as a Jew. Israel’s raison d’être, he said, is to be the place where the Jews will finally be cured of their mortal illness, their “eternal wandering.” But he had doubts about whether they would, in fact, be cured. He felt a profound uncertainty about the Jews’ ability to maintain sovereignty, and to hold on to the land and to preserve it. He spoke about the Arabs with great envy—they, he said, knew much better how to keep their honor and their land. “If there is something that I respect about the Arabs, it’s the fact that they never change their position,” he said. “The Palestinian leadership did not give up any of its demands, not one inch.”

 

Sharon took me on a tour of his ranch in a four-by-four, pointing out his orchard, his sheep, his bulls. He said that his primary concern was with the Jewish future: “What will become of the Jews in thirty years’ time, and what will become of them in three hundred years’ time?” He complained that young Israelis didn’t know their Bible. They weren’t familiar with their history. They didn’t feel a right to this land the way he did. “One generation after another is drifting away from anything Jewish,” he said.

 

Sharon portrayed himself as someone who lived inside Biblical history in a very intimate and palpable way. Whenever he was in Hebron, he said, the thought that for seven years David ruled the city aroused tremendous excitement in him. When he travelled in the Judaean desert, he narrowed his eyes, so as to see not the electricity lines and the modern highways but, instead, Abigail, the wife of Nabal the Carmelite, decked in her necklaces and bracelets, and riding on her donkey—a scene from the First Book of Samuel. And on the road that descends from Beit Aryeh and crosses Shiloh Creek, not far from Beit El, he always stopped to recall another episode from Samuel, in which a runner is sent from the battle of Aphek to Shiloh, forty kilometres away, bearing the bitter news of the capture of the Ark of the Covenant. He always experienced these ancient scenes anew.

 

At the time of our interview, Prime Minister Ehud Barak had revived peace talks, and there was a general notion that the conflict with the Palestinians might soon end. So, with considerable effort, I tried to bring Sharon back to the political present. I asked him whether the establishment of settlements in Gaza and the West Bank had been a mistake. No, he said. There wasn’t a single shipping container or generator that had been positioned in the territories without a reason. Every settlement was placed in such a way as to consolidate Israeli control of essential regions like the Jordan Valley and the hills overlooking the coastal plain.

 

Sharon’s charm took me by surprise. Unlike most of Israel’s leaders, who tend to be arrogant and remote, he had empathy and a sense of humor that could even be self-deprecating. He had none of Barak’s haughtiness or Benjamin Netanyahu’s emotional unease. But I was equally surprised by his pessimism. Despite Israel’s military might, he saw the country as a small and fragile state surrounded by hostile countries that would go on wanting to destroy it. As a result, he believed not in peace agreements based on mutual trust but only in non-belligerence agreements based on deterrence. In this Realpolitik, he saw himself as a follower of Henry Kissinger. But, unlike Kissinger, who argued for substantial territorial compromise, Sharon thought that Israel could not risk the little strategic depth it had. Without buffer zones, he argued, Israel would not be able to stand up to new threats when Arab missiles endangered its air superiority.

 

Sharon was perceptive but not conceptually brilliant; he had charm, but he did not radiate greatness. Sitting in a deep armchair in the living room, as his wife, Lily, offered him muffins on a silver tray, he resembled neither Samson nor Nero. There was something of the overgrown child about him. Grinning, he admitted that he had never had the patience for books on military strategy. What interested him much more was the person, the individual fighter, and what made him attack or lose his balance.

 

His thinking was not analytical but intuitive, leading him from story to story, from recollection to recollection. He was neither quick nor articulate. His formulations were heavy, like clods of winter earth. Occasionally, Sharon read literature and history, but in a deep sense he was anti-intellectual. Some people who have known Sharon well say that he is a limited, even primitive person. Ideas made him suspicious. What he admired was deeds, facts. Although he was the head of the Likud Party, he saw himself as an heir to the Labor Party. For him, Vladimir Jabotinsky and Menachem Begin, the great Likud forebears, were men of words, of hollow talk. David Ben-Gurion and Yigal Allon, who were leaders of the Labor movement, were men of action, and it was perfectly clear that he felt closer to them. Allon, he said, was the most brilliant commander in the 1948 war: “His concept of national security is the one we should follow.”

 

Throughout our meeting, Sharon, whose appetite is legendary, plied me with food and drink, and by the time I headed home I was undoubtedly several kilos heavier. As I thought about our conversation, I came to the conclusion that one explanation for Sharon’s power is that he is organic. Without romanticizing him, I found his insistence on land neither rhetorical nor superficial. He had a kind of instinctive intelligence, like a Bedouin tracker or a Cherokee scout. In this, he was an un-Jewish Jew: lacking self-awareness and intellectualism, devoid of complexes, yet the embodiment of the radical Zionist potential. Neither a statesman nor a theoretician, he knew how to strike people at their weak spots and how to win battles by reading a map. He called his autobiography “Warrior.” I thought of him as the samurai of Zionism.
. . . .

Sharon said these things for our interview. Informally, he was even tougher. He made it clear that he did not believe in peace agreements. He said that the 1948 War of Independence had not ended, and that we must be prepared for a struggle that would last for generations. He argued that the unilateral withdrawal from Southern Lebanon carried out by Ehud Barak in May, 2000, had led Yasir Arafat to believe that Israel had softened and that he could acquire more at no cost. Only two years before Sharon erected the separation wall, he scorned the idea. “How are you going to separate?” he had said. “Are you going to put up a wall in Jerusalem? Can you maintain a barrier at all inside a city? And you have to have security zones. You can’t make a separation along the Green Line”—that is, the pre-1967 borders. “So what are you going to do? Separate the Arabs from their lands?”

 

Sharon wore jeans, a light-blue shirt, and Birkenstock sandals for the meeting, and, affable as always, he insisted that I eat a large breakfast with him: salad and cheese, sardines and olives. During the meal, he said he would prefer that we not talk about politics. “I know more about wheat and olive trees than I do about politics,” he said, laughing. And, indeed, he gave me a long lecture about the olive tree: its longevity, the depth of its roots. He told me that in Israel there are olive trees that are two thousand years old and were harvested by the Jews during the Second Temple period, from 538 B.C. to 70 A.D. He described their precise location.

 

When we went back to the cozy living room and he sank into his favorite armchair, he showed me the book he was reading: it was about the Arab Revolt of 1936-39. He said that what interested him was the way the rebellion had ultimately collapsed, causing a disintegration of Palestinian society. He clearly saw a certain similarity between the revolt of the nineteen-thirties and the intifada that began in 2000. In time, it became evident that the strategic plan that Sharon was considering involved bringing the Palestinians to a point of political chaos and then luring them into a partial agreement on Israel’s terms—one that would not require evacuation of major settlements in the West Bank and a return to the pre-1967 borders.

 

“It is impossible at this time to bring about the end of the conflict,” he said. “Therefore we must be cautious. Very cautious. Give the Palestinians only the minimum necessary.”
. . . .

When the talk of food and children faded, I asked Sharon whether the conflict would have an end.

 

“The conflict isn’t between us and the Palestinians,” he said. “The conflict is between us and the Arab world. And the problem at the heart of the conflict is that the Arab world does not recognize the Jews’ inherent right to have a Jewish state in the land where the Jewish people began. This is the main problem. This also applies to Egypt, with which we have a cold peace. It also applies to Jordan, with which we have a very close strategic relationship, but this is a relationship between governments, not between peoples. The problem is not 1967. The problem is the profound nonrecognition by the Arab world of Israel’s birthright. This problem will not be solved by an agreement. It will not be solved by a speech. Anyone who promises that it’s possible to end the conflict within a year or two years or three is mistaken. Anyone who promises peace now is blind to the way things are. Even after the disengagement, we will not be able to rest on our laurels. We will not be able to sit under our fig tree and our vine.

 

“It may be that we will never have peace,” he went on. “And it may be that it will take a great many years to have peace. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t talk. It’s better to talk than not to talk. It’s important to conduct negotiations. Maybe it’s possible to solve one thing or another. But it has to be understood that the conflict may never be resolved. If it is ever resolved, it will be in a very long process.”

 

Sharon said that he was certain Israel would live in a state of danger for a long time, and that all he recommended was that Israel not “make any moves in which it takes risks that are too great.”

 

He continued, “What bothers me about the peaceniks is their hatred of the settlers and their excessive faith in the Arabs. They apparently never got the phone calls I got from my mother when I was conducting talks in Egypt in 1980. My mother, who was eighty at the time, would call me in Cairo and tell me what she had harvested in the field that day and what she was going to harvest the next day. And she would always end with the same sentence: ‘Arik, don’t believe them.’ She had been in this country for many years, but she had a heavy Russian accent. And I remember her very clearly, saying to me, in her heavy Russian accent, ‘Arik, don’t believe them.’”

 

And so, I asked, to this day you don’t believe them?

 

“No, I don’t believe them,” he said. “And there is a reason for this. The Arabs don’t recognize the Jewish people’s birthright to an independent Jewish state.”

 

He tried to explain what he derived from this pessimistic assumption. He said that time was the essential factor, which was why he was trying to establish the principle that the Palestinians would have to reform before Israel made further concessions. “The greatest danger is in signing some document and believing that as a result we will have peace. This is not going to happen. . . . Instead, we have to build a process that will enable us to ascertain that indeed a change is taking place in the Arab world. It is necessary to teach all the teachers that Israel is a legitimate entity. And it is necessary to replace all the Palestinian textbooks. And this is beyond the elementary demand for the cessation of terror and the cessation of incitement and the implementation of reforms in the security organizations and the implementation of governmental reforms. It is necessary not to omit a single one of these steps. Under no circumstance should there be concessions. A situation must not develop in which Israel retreats and is chased by terror. Once you accept that, it will never end. Terror will keep chasing us.”

 

Sharon, it seemed, did not believe in the possibility of a final agreement, or what the negotiators call a “permanent-status agreement.” “What is a permanent-status agreement?” he asked testily. “It is completely unrealistic.”

 

Throughout Israel, commentators speculated about whether the Gaza withdrawal was merely Sharon’s way of buying time while the Palestinians struggled to bring some order to the miserable enclave that Israel had left behind, and tried to solve their internal political battles. Or was Sharon preparing for another, even more dramatic unilateral move: perhaps an Israeli withdrawal to the separation fence throughout the West Bank?

 

“There isn’t any possibility of doing this,” he said. “This would be a mistake. . . . There is only one unilateral move. There will not be another unilateral move.”

 

I asked if he would agree to evacuate twenty or thirty settlements in the West Bank in the near future.

 

“That isn’t going to happen,” he said. “That isn’t on the agenda. We will discuss that after there are changes among the Palestinians.” He was referring to the requirements imposed on the Palestinians by the U.S.-proposed road map, including an end to terrorism. In any case, Sharon made it clear that the Etzion Bloc, Ma’ale Adumim, Ariel, and other large, well-established settlements in the West Bank would never be handed over to the Palestinians. Nor could the Jordan Valley be totally evacuated. “There will be security zones,” he said. “In essential territories that are east of the separation fence, there will be security zones.”

 

In 2000, at Camp David, Barak and Arafat debated, unsuccessfully, a compromise on control of the Temple Mount, the site of the Western Wall and the Al Aqsa mosque. Sharon was not prepared for such negotiations. “This is the place that is most sacred to the Jewish people,” he said. “It is untenable that it not be under Israeli responsibility.”

 

I asked him about Hebron, where there is a tiny but fervent Jewish settlement in what is essentially an Arab city.

 

“Can you conceive that one day Jews will not live in Hebron?” Sharon retorted. “Ben-Gurion called Hebron Jerusalem’s elder sister. If we were a normal nation, when a visitor arrived here we would take him not to Yad Vashem but, rather, to Hebron. We’d take him to the place where our roots are. No other people has a monument like the Tomb of the Patriarchs, where Abraham and Sarah are buried. And Isaac and Rebecca. And Jacob and Leah. There isn’t anything like it. No other people has anything like it. Therefore, under any agreement Jews will live in Hebron.

 

“We put too much stress on the security issue,” he went on. “That was a mistake. My mistake, too. The element of the cradle of the Jewish people is critical for us to be able to live here. Indeed, there is a constant questioning of our right. Therefore we have to stress the matter of our right. We have to talk about the continuum of Jewish life that has been here. Even in order to live in Tel Aviv, we need a root in Hebron.”

Is the Demand for Recognition as a Jewish State Just or Wise? By Jonathan Rosenblum.

The demand for recognition as a Jewish state. Is it just? Is it wise? By Jonathan Rosenblum. Jerusalem Post, January 9, 2014.

Rosenblum:

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will never get an even break from The New York Times. After the tentative – and as yet unimplemented – agreement between Iran and the P5+1, the Times treated Netanyahu’s “bellicose” criticisms of the agreement as if were the only barrier to a spirit of amity breaking out all over between Iran and the rest of the world, and suggested that the prime minister of the only country whose annihilation has been repeatedly called for by Iran should just keep his mouth shut.

 

The paper takes the same dim view of Netanyahu’s approach to peace talks with the Palestinians: But for Netanyahu – inevitably described as “right wing” – peace would have long since broken out.

 

Jodi Rudoren’s January 1 “Sticking Point in Peace Talks: Recognition of a Jewish State” is by no means the most egregious or one-sided of the Times’s offerings on the subject. But once again Netanyahu stands accused of “catapult[ing] to the fore an issue that may be even more intractable than old ones like security and settlements: a demand that the Palestinian people recognize Israel as a Jewish state.” Unnamed critics are quoted as accusing Netanyahu of having inserted a “poison pill” in order to scuttle the negotiations, knowing that the Palestinians will never agree.

 

It is possible, even likely, that Netanyahu does not expect the Palestinians to acquiesce on this point. But that does not make the demand unjustified. Netanyahu’s task as prime minister is not to sign peace accords with the Palestinian Authority, but to achieve security and peace for Israel. And the two should never be conflated, as they have so often in the past when “peace process” became a substitute for “peace.”

 

Netanyahu’s demand flows from a recognition that since the outset of Oslo the Palestinian leadership has not even begun to educate its people for peace. They have never told their people that a Palestinian state cannot be achieved without “painful concessions,” including renunciation of the “right of return” by the Palestinians and the acceptance of limitations on Palestinian sovereignty necessary to ensure Israel’s ability to defend itself.

 

Rather the official Palestinian education system and media has whipped the population into a frenzy of hatred for Israel worse than what preceded Oslo. The hero’s welcome accorded by Mahmoud Abbas to perpetrators of the most heinous crimes against Israeli civilians, who were freed by Israel under American pressure, is but the most recent example. (The sheer evil of forcing a country to pardon the murderers of its citizens was tacitly admitted by the Americans when they protested the return of a Palestinian who murdered an American citizen.) The failure of peace education has rendered Palestinian leaders incapable of negotiating seriously about peace because they know that as soon as they compromise a single holy principle they are dead men walking.

 

Arafat told Clinton at Camp David that he was asking him to commit suicide, and if that was true of Arafat, the symbol of the Palestinian national movement, how much more so the far less popular Abbas? But without such an education for peace Israel is being asked to agree not to a two-state solution – something to which a majority of Israelis consent in principle – but to a two-stage solution in which the Palestinians receive their state as a launching pad for eventually regaining what they consider their patrimony. Islam views any concession of even an inch of land ever under Islamic sovereignty – so-called dar al-Islam – as strictly forbidden.

 

And that is still the view promoted by the Palestinian Authority in both secularized and religious forms.

 

Yuval Steinitz, minister of intelligence and international affairs, laid out the four intertwined strands of the Palestinian Authority’s failure to educate for peace in an excellent op-ed in The New York Times last October, “How Palestinian Hate Prevents Peace.” The first strand consists of denial that there exists a Jewish people with any connection to the Land of Israel. Arafat’s refusal to acknowledge that a Jewish Temple ever stood in Jerusalem, which so dumbfounded president Clinton at Camp David, is one example. The second strand portrays Jews and Zionists as the most inhumane and corrupt people on the face of the earth.

 

The third strand of official Palestinian propaganda promulgates the message that the struggle must continue until the replacement of Israel by an Arab-Palestinian state, and the fourth that all means are legitimate in pursuit of that goal, including terrorist murders. The repeated references in Palestinian textbooks to all of Israel as Palestine, including cities such as Haifa, Tiberias and Safed, are examples of the third strand, and the idolization of even the most savage of released terrorists by Palestinian leaders from Abbas on down of the fourth.

 

ACCORDING TO Rudoren, Netanyahu’s emphasis on Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state raises several profound, unresolved questions, such as, “Can Israel preserve its identity as a Jewish democratic state while also providing equal rights to citizens of other faiths and backgrounds?” But Israel has been doing that for 65 years. Israel is the only country in the Middle East with a growing Christian population. In every Muslim country, including the Palestinian-controlled city of Bethlehem, terrorized Christian populations are fleeing.

 

Israel’s Arab population enjoys more democratic rights than they would in any Arab state, including the Palestinian Authority. Only 25% of residents of the West Bank and 18% of those in the Gaza say they feel free to criticize the government, according to Palestinian polls. Journalists who criticize the government regularly find themselves in prison or worse. And both Abbas and Haniyeh have pushed off new elections for years.

 

The Palestinian claim that recognition of Israel as a democratic state would disenfranchise Israel’s 1.6 million Arab citizens is completely bogus. Arab citizens have been living in a self-proclaimed Jewish state for 65 years already. Every time a proposal is floated to exchange heavily populated Arab areas from Israel into a Palestinian state as part of a peace deal Israeli Arabs lash out against the instigators of such evil plans. They prefer their lives as Israeli citizens to anything they could expect in a Palestinian state.

 

The claim that Israeli Arabs might ever be disenfranchised is nothing more than projection by the Palestinians, who never tire of insisting that their state will be entirely judenrein, without a single Jewish resident. One could well ask why that demand is always treated as self-evidently just.

 

The West, in general, has consistently reduced any hopes of peace by treating the Palestinians as spoiled children to whom all must be given but from whom nothing can ever be expected. Thus they are by far the largest per-capita recipients of foreign largesse from Western countries despite both the PA and Hamas-controlled Gaza being run as kleptocracies, and an entire UN apparatus, UNRWA, exists solely to care for Palestinian refugees and their descendants in perpetuity, even as tens of millions of other refugees from ethnic strife since 1948 have long been removed from the refugee rolls.

 

By failing to treat Palestinian incitement against Jews and Israel as an issue of the highest importance fundamentally undermining Israelis’ capacity to trust Palestinian intentions, the West has reduced the possibility of any final status agreement being signed any time in the near future. Prime Minister Netanyahu is insisting Palestinian education for peace as a basic Israeli requirement for a peace agreement.

 

WHILE THE demand for recognition is both wise and strategically required, it is still possible to ask whether as a tactical matter it is being given too much prominence.

 

What would happen if, miraculously, a Palestinian leader were prepared to sign off on such recognition? Would Israel, having placed such emphasis on the importance of recognition, then find itself under greater pressure than before for concessions on other issues no less important for its long-term survival? Such recognition without a preceding revamping of Palestinian education and media to educate for peace and without a popular Palestinian referendum would remain not credible in the eyes of most Israelis. Rudoren points out that Palestinian support for such recognition of Israel has dropped dramatically over the last decade – from 65% to 40% – influenced in large part by the continued official PA propaganda.

 

Overemphasis on Palestinian recognition of Israel’s Jewish character must also not be expense of the no less intractable security issues, of which Israel maintaining security control over the Jordan Rift Valley is only one part. The greatest concern about a Palestinian state in the West Bank is that it would simply become a failed-state haven for terrorism against Israel, like Gaza or Southern Lebanon.

 

The three great “game changers” that keep Israeli strategists up at night are anti-tank missiles and short-range rockets, says former national security adviser Gen. Giora Eiland. Only the Israeli security presence in Judea and Samaria has prevented this from taking place so far.

 

TO PREVENT a return to the situation of the pre-1967 “Auschwitz borders,” Israel needs to retain control over the high ground overlooking Ben-Gurion Airport, the Tel Aviv Jerusalem highway and the narrow coastal plain in which most of Israel’s population and industrial capacity is located. It would also have to retain full control of Palestinian air space – it is only four flight minutes from the Jordan River to Jerusalem – and the electro-magnetic spectrum to prevent jamming. It is even more doubtful that the Palestinians would ever agree to these limitations on their sovereignty that they will recognize Israel as a Jewish state. But Israel cannot live without them.

 

Israel must ensure that it does not set itself up for concessions on its most basic security needs as the price for formal Palestinian recognition of its Jewish character that might not be worth the price of the paper it’s written on.