Why I Am a Member of Peace When. By Richard Landes.

Why I am a member of Peace When. By Richard Landes. The Augean Stables, February 2, 2016.

Landes:

Two State Solution, yes, just not now; or, Why I am a member of Peace When.

Almost everyone in the positive-sum world of “getting to win-win” agrees that the most equitable resolution to the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, is a two-state solution. Land for peace, reciprocal compromise, give a little, get a lot. This positive-sum thinking lies at the heart of what makes modern democracy possible, and has enabled the Europeans to replace millennia of wars between tribes and nations (in medieval times, an annual activity) with a cooperative and productive Union. To progressives, it’s so obvious that, as one BBC analyst put it: you could work it out with an email.

And yet, the conflict has proven amazingly enduring, and resistant to the best intentioned efforts of Western outsiders for the last twenty years. Indeed, not only did it ruin the final year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, but it made fools of both of Obama’s Secretaries of State, who confidently predicted that they would resolve this in less than a year(!). Like a Sisyphus with Alzheimers, doomed to repeat the same motions without registering the repetition, Western “conflict resolution” experts repeatedly attempt to implement the same “positive-sum” solutions, with predictably the same results: not just no success, but actual failure. The situation is worse after than before.

What escapes many who, like me, accept the idea of a two state solution, is the unmentioned now that accompanies all current efforts. This notion that this solution can and should be implemented right away, has good reasons behind it. In addition to its concern for a putting an end to the suffering caused by the conflict as soon as possible, the haste acknowledges the demographic problems in the next generation: can Israel be both Jewish and democratic?

Both are good reasons to want to move quickly, but not good reasons to ignore the obstacles in the way. The reality on the ground, the combination of “strong horse” political culture, and tribal, apocalyptic Jihadi religious culture, makes it impossible to close one’s eyes and hope that both sides are ready for it, and it’s just a matter of finding the right formula of compromise to hit the jackpot.

The majority of voices in the public sphere blame the lack of progress on the Israelis. This is a main theme of European diplomacy and post-colonial scholarship since the mid-1970s, Western mainstream news media (BBC and NYT leading the charge) especially since 2000, and has now moved into policy circles even in the US. This tendency makes sense only in that the Israelis, being at once more flexible and more self-critical, are easier to blame, even when it’s not their fault. How much the easier to take this path when, on the one hand, the Palestinians greet criticism with great hostility, and on the other hand, one finds strong support from self-critical Israelis and Jews.

These “Jews against themselves” provide the arguments for politicians and pundits, not particularly eager to criticize the Palestinians or actually make demands on them, to redouble the load on the Israelis. After all, there are few Palestinians clamoring for criticism and harsh denunciations of their people the way there are Jews and Israelis whod so. On the contrary, there are no Palestinian mainstream journalists, no policy-makers, no politicians ready to take any responsibility for any error, fault, or misstep on their side. It is an object of faith among them, which, increasingly, many in the West share: Israel is to blame; the Palestinians are innocent victims.

And yet, if we look at what Palestinian leaders say in Arabic to their people, we find an entire culture of intransigence, irredentism, and incitement. Here is a zero-sum culture, not only in its attitude towards its neighbor Israel – From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free – but towards its own people. Like the elite in every other Arab country, the Palestinian leadership, whether religious (Hamas) or “secular” (PLO), lives in luxury while its people live in misery.

If one takes Dennis Ross’ mordant reflections on why Oslo failed as a guide, the PA continues to replicate Arafat’s “one greatest failing”: not preparing their people for peace. On the contrary, it continuously and systematically brainwashes them with war propaganda. Indeed, the very insistence that Israel is entirely to blame is part of that war propaganda. It identifies the problem: they are not looking for compromise, which involves recognizing at least some of the other side’s complaints, they are looking for the zero-sum solution. Israel is to blame and must pay, so that Palestinians win big and Israel loses big.

The most moderate position one finds in the Arabic discourse of the Palestinians, is the notion not of a two-state solution (which only appears in Western op-ed pages), but the two stage solution, namely take what the Israelis offer and use it as a staging area for further attacks, until Israel is destroyed. And even that appears to be too great a compromise with Arab honor, because even when offered large tracts of land, including Jerusalem, the “moderates” consistently say no.

Despite the reluctance of the media to cover it at the time, we now know that in 2007, Abbas turned down Olmert’s offer, the most generous so far. Today, even Gershon Baskin, one of the most determined and dedicated advocates of peace now, someone who has in the past always insisted that the Palestinian leadership has and is willing to make the necessary compromises for peace, has given up on the current (“moderate”) Palestinian leadership .

Europeans have systematically avoided paying attention to this “internal” Palestinian discourse. Either desperate to believe that peace is possible now, or eager to blame Israel for Palestinian intransigence, they prefer the version of events in which Israel is the obstacle to peace, and continue to believe that pushing Israel to make further concessions is the fastest way to get there. Today, France makes the ludicrously self-fulfilling threat that if peace negotiations fail, they will recognize a Palestinian State: who could ask for better motivation for the Palestinians to have the talks fail?

Were they correct in their assessment – Palestinians are ready for compromise, Israelis not – then pressuring Israel might work. Of course it hasn’t, doesn’t, and won’t, because the assessment is based on an inversion of the actual situation here. Instead of moving towards the positive-sum goal that benefits “both sides”, it just pushes Israel towards greater vulnerability, and the Palestinians towards greater intransigence.

The latest threat by French Foreign Minister Fabius that if the next round of talks fail, France will unilaterally recognize Palestine illustrates the folly perfectly: It tells the Palestinians that if they remain intransigent they’ll win, and threatens the Israelis with sanctions for refusing to commit suicide. And the French side boosts Palestinian Jihadis even as they know not what to do with their own. The more Palestinians resist making compromises, the more support they get, the more outsiders adopt their belligerent narrative: Eliminate Israel for World Peace.

Trafalgar Square, London, August 21, 2011.

Nor is this a simple matter of Palestinian political will (what the West thought Arafat had during Oslo), but rather a cultural problem about which most of us do not want to think. Some political scientists speculate that Palestinians are one of the more likely Arab nations to become a democracy (often explained by their proximity to Israeli democracy). But from both the behavior of the elites (Strong Horse politics) and the patriarchal males (shame-murders), suggests the Palestinians are far from the kind of institutional and social commitments necessary for launching and sustaining that experiment in freedom.

The existence of these cultural blocks to peace on the Palestinian side, places liberal Jews and Israelis, committed to the compromises they feel are worth making to achieve a two-state solution (including dividing Jerusalem), in great difficulty. On the one hand, bringing up these issues explicitly will predictably elicit offense among Palestinians and their supporters (like Saïd). On the other hand, by pressing Israel to push forward with a two-state solution now, they actually, if unintentionally, weaken Israel and strengthen the enemies of peace, especially among the Palestinians. Every failure of peace now, based on positive-sum resolutions, weakens the positive-sum players and strengthens the zero-sum players on both sides. In this dynamic, that means reinforcing political players among Palestinians whose attitudes towards Israel share a great deal with those of apocalyptic Jihadis.

This dilemma becomes more toxic when a sense of urgency leads well-meaning Jews to grow impatient with Israeli reluctance to make moves that its electorate, up close with incitement-fueled, Palestinian violence, considers suicidal. It’s so much easier for liberals to denounce Netanuyahu as a right-winger, intransigent and unyielding, and praise Abbas as a moderate, ready to make peace. But if it turns out it’s the opposite (which it is), then every move the peace camp pushes for leads to war; and the harder they push, the worse the war they unwittingly prepare.

On the other hand, if the problem is Palestinian resistance, and the radical unreadiness of Palestinian political culture for peace with Israel, then a rather different set of policies are likely to improve the prospects for the eventual, but not imminent, two-state solution. Here, instead of the (easy but unproductive) pressure on Israelis for more concessions, we find the (difficult but much more productive) pressure on Palestinians to do what Dennis Ross faulted Arafat for not doing, “prepare their people for peace.”

The attitude of Palestinian power holders towards Israel currently reveals the gamut of Palestinian intolerance: no Jews living in a Palestinian state, no Jews among any foreign force stationed in Palestine. Not even Palestinian refugees from camps around the Arab world in the Palestinian state (they have to go to Israel). This of course is what one calls ethnic cleansing, and is the kind of thing that belligerent, authoritarian regimes do as a matter of course.

It’s what the Ottomans did in the 1910s and 20s, to both the Armenians and the Greeks, whom they massacred and expelled. There is no perceptible difference between Ottoman political and religious culture, and the kind operating among Palestinian elites (“secular” and religious). Indeed, today’s Palestinians are a definite regression from Ataturk’s magnanimity towards the Greeks.

And yet the very same people who rejoice in accusing Israel of ethnic cleansing (despite her 20% Arab population who enjoy freedoms and privileges they have nowhere else in the Middle East), seem to have no objection (or knowledge of) this Palestinian, openly intended, ethnic cleansing, often accompanied by the kind of genocidal incitement that, under the right circumstances, can produce the terrible deed. A sober observer (i.e., one not besotted by Saïd, or worried about offending Muslim honor), would note plainly: Palestinians have yet to undergo the kind of moral revolution in their “honor group” that permits greater tolerance of the “other,” and thus lays the grounds for both democracy and peaceful relations with “others.” And until they have, any concessions made to them constitute a recipe for war.

Peace When.

The two-state solution is indeed the most equitable resolution to this tragic fight between two peoples who could well be productive friends. But in order to reach that kind of justice, it will take some time before Palestinian culture has developed the ability to move from the zero-sum world of dispute settlement through violence (upon which, despite always losing so far, Palestinian leaders insist) to dispute settlement through a discourse of fairness that includes reciprocity. Until then, pushing Israel to make concessions to players who reject reciprocity and view concessions as signs of weakness, merely plays to the hand of war.

All of the following suggestions are demands that are perfectly reasonable if the Palestinians are planning to make peace with Israel; they’re unacceptable if the Palestinians are planning to destroy Israel. Seems like the least that well-intentioned outsiders, who say they believe in a two-state solution now, could ask from the Palestinian leadership:

·         Show of good faith about compromising on the refugees by beginning to move refugees out of camps and into decent, permanent housing.

·         Show of respect for women, by seriously tackling the problem of honor-killings, including cases where father or brother raped the victim.

·         Stop persecuting Palestinians who get along with Israelis for being spies and traitors.

These items are chosen because they attack the cultural issues making peace so hard. Obviously any effort for peace would also include asking that the Palestinian officials stop broadcasting the ugliest kind of war propaganda: incitement to genocide, irredentist claims and promises, glorification of people who kill innocent civilians. But that’s almost too obvious to mention… or is it?

How Both Parties Lost the White Middle Class. By R.R. Reno.

How Both Parties Lost the White Middle Class. By R.R. Reno. New York Times, February 1, 2016.

Reno:

LONG after the dust settles in Iowa — and New Hampshire, and even the 2016 campaign itself — one question will remain: Why, after decades of supporting the liberal and conservative establishments, did the white middle-class abandon them? Wherever Donald J. Trump and Bernie Sanders end up, their candidacies represent a major shift in American politics. Since World War II our political culture has been organized around the needs, fears and aspirations of white middle-class voters in ways that also satisfied the interests of the rich and powerful. That’s no longer true.

As we know, the rich are now quite a bit richer. In itself, this need not disrupt the old political consensus. More decisive is the fact that the white middle class is in decline, both economically and culturally.

This story of decline is often told in racial and ethnic terms: White America is being displaced by a multicultural America, and especially on the right, voters are retreating to racist posturing. There may be some truth to this story, but for the most part it’s a huge distraction.

In fact, the real cleavage is not interracial, but intra-racial: The populism we’re seeing stems entirely from the collision of whites who flourish in the global economy — and amid the cultural changes of the last 50 years — with those who don’t.

And while we’ve heard a lot about the economic decline of the middle class, the cultural decline of the white middle class isn’t discussed nearly as often. It should be.

First, there are the consequences of the great success of the upper middle class, which today lives in a separate world of well-manicured neighborhoods with good schools, intact families and cultural confidence. We compliment ourselves that a generally meritocratic system is open to far more people than was true 50 years ago. And it has been — but the resulting culture of ambition paradoxically erodes middle-class confidence. Today, the vast middle of the middle fears that unless you’re on the way up, you’re on the way down.

And it’s not just competitiveness that is eroding the white middle class. When I was coming of age in the 1970s, drug use was already undermining the white middle class. Since then marriage rates among high school-educated whites have declined and illegitimacy has increased. A priest I know serves three small-town parishes in rural, white Pennsylvania. I asked about his pastoral challenges. The biggest: Grandparents parenting their grandchildren, as their own children are too messed up to raise them.

Cultural instability compounds economic instability. A person near the median in our society is on shaky ground. He feels that what was once reliable is now eroding. This is as much a source of today’s middle-class anxiety as stagnant household incomes.

What’s striking — and crucial for understanding our populist moment — is the fact that the leadership cadres of both parties aren’t just unresponsive to this anxiety. They add to it.

The intelligentsia on the left rarely lets a moment pass without reminding us of the demographic eclipse of white middle-class voters. Sometimes, those voters are described as racists, or derided as dull suburbanites who lack the élan of the new urban “creative class.” The message: White middle-class Americans aren’t just irrelevant to America’s future, they’re in the way.

Conservatives are no less harsh. Pundits ominously predict that the “innovators” are about to be overwhelmed by a locust blight of “takers.” The message: If it weren’t for successful people like us, middle-class people like you would be doomed. And if you’re not an entrepreneurial “producer,” you’re in the way.

Is it any surprise that white middle-class voters are in rebellion?

Democratic and Republican Party establishments appeal to the interests of these voters, promising to protect them (Democrats) or spur growth that will renew economic opportunity (Republicans). But these appeals miss the point.

Our political history since the end of World War II has turned on the willingness of white middle-class voters to rally behind great causes in league with the wealthy and political elite: Resist Communism! Send a man to the moon! Overcome racism! Protect the environment! Today, white middle-class voters want to be reassured that they can play an active role in politics. They want someone to appeal to their sense of political self-worth, not just their interests.

This is precisely what Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders offer. Mr. Trump speaks about restoring American greatness, rhetorical gestures akin to Barack Obama’s vague 2008 slogan, “Yes, we can.” We can mock both as empty. But voters who feel disempowered and marginalized latch on to this promise. They want to be partners with the rich and powerful in defining our future as a country, not recipients of their benevolent ministrations, which explains why they’re untroubled by Mr. Trump’s great wealth.

Mr. Sanders also appeals to the strong desire that the white middle class has to recover its central role in the national project. While he attracts support from a wealthier stratum of the middle class than Mr. Trump, the appeal is the same. He asks them to join him in fundamentally remaking our political economy. We can dismiss his socialism as an unworkable throwback, but he’s doing something our political establishment can’t or won’t: asking middle-class voters to undertake a nation-defining transformation.

If these candidates have traction, it’s because over the last two decades our political elites, themselves almost entirely white, have decided, for different reasons, that the white middle class has no role to play in the multicultural, globalized future they envision, a future that they believe they will run. This primary season will show us whether or not they’re right.

The Unsexy Truth About Why the Arab Spring Failed. By Amanda Taub.

The unsexy truth about why the Arab Spring failed. By Amanda Taub. Vox, January 27, 2016.

Taub:

Tarek Masoud of Harvard on the Failure of the Arab Spring.

Tarek Masoud (Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government) on the Failure of the Arab Spring. Transcript excerpt. Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN, January 31, 2016. Video clip at Internet Archive. Also here.


MASOUD: This question that you asked Leila about, sort of, where the revolutions are and where the revolutionaries are, it’s really difficult for me to think about Egypt’s revolution without alternatively feeling either really stupid or really callous.

Because, you know, I remember back – being on your show in January of 2011 and totally believing with every cell in my body that Egypt could and would move from Mubarak to a liberal democracy. And now, of course, that that dream has really come apart, we can come up with multiple reasons why the dream was never a rational one to begin with. And everything that I was taught in graduate school should have caused me to not be optimistic about the chances of democracy.

So I feel really, sometimes, stupid when I think about how optimistic I was. But then, when you think that, look, democracy could never have succeeded and really all they can hope for in those places is some kind of stability, you feel really callous and you feel really – you feel really brutal, because, as Leila pointed out, many of these young people who were at the forefront of trying to agitate for a more hopeful Egypt, or more hopeful countries throughout the region, are now behind bars. And it is a very sad fact of life that today everybody is excluded, not just Islamists but liberals and secularist – they’re also excluded from governance. And you have to ask yourself not just if Islamists are going to be radicalized but if this entire population is going to be alienated and atomized, and what kind of politics is going to result from that? It can’t be pretty.

Hillary’s “Blame-Men-First” Feminism May Prove Costly In 2016. By Camille Paglia.

Hillary’s “blame-men-first” feminism may prove costly in 2016. By Camille Paglia. Salon, January 27, 2016.

Paglia:

It’s Not Just the Settlements, the Palestinians Reject All of Israel. By David Horovitz.

Family and friends of Dafna Meir at her funeral in Jerusalem on January 18, 2106. Meir was stabbed to death at the entrance to her home in the settlement of Otniel on January 17. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Stop the incitement, stop the killing. By David Horovitz. The Times of Israel, January 26, 2016.

Horovitz:

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has taken to giving press conferences to Israeli journalists of late. A picture of wounded innocence and goodwill, he has been using the opportunities to berate Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for refusing to meet and talk peace with him, highlighting his forces’ ongoing security cooperation with Israel in the territories, and trying to wriggle out of his own personal role in fostering the vicious incitement against Israel that lies at the root of this ongoing Palestinian terror wave.

About to turn 81, Abbas may not be in politics that much longer, and there are plenty of Israelis who argue that we are missing an opportunity to make progress with him when it is clear that any successor is likely to be still more impossible to deal with.

His successor may indeed well be worse, but Abbas is impossible. His duplicitous terrorism-fostering predecessor Yasser Arafat assured the Palestinians that they had no reason or need to compromise with the Jews because we were colonial invaders, an unrooted and temporary presence that his people’s stubbornness and terrorism would eventually see off. Abbas chose not to counter that narrative, not to acknowledge to his people the Jews’ history of sovereignty in the Holy Land, and more recently intensified the strategic campaign of misrepresentation — telling Palestinians that the Jews have no business at the Temple Mount.

Meanwhile, the Fatah hierarchy he heads has been openly encouraging attacks on Israelis, and the Hamas terror group with which he seeks to partner in government is again plotting suicide bombings, developing more sophisticated rockets, and digging tunnels under the Gaza-Israel border ahead of its next planned war.

Abbas may well be deploying his forces to keep a lid on clashes in the West Bank, but he’s presiding over an ongoing, strategic demonizing of Israel and Israelis — via his education system, political and spiritual leadership and mainstream and social media — that positively guarantees Palestinian violence and terrorism. So effective is this process that, nowadays, when a young Palestinian has a row at home, feels depressed, or wants to make a name for him or herself, the default response is to grab a knife and go kill the nearest vulnerable Jew.

Dafna Meir

And so, last week, we buried Dafna Meir.

Shlomit Krigman

And today, we buried Shlomit Krigman.

Israel paid for Abbas’s last ostensible readiness for peace talks, in 2013-14, with the release of dozens of killers and other Palestinian terrorists from our jails. Prior to that, in 2008, Abbas spurned Ehud Olmert’s extraordinary readiness to give him everything he purportedly sought: We were gone from Gaza, and Olmert offered to leave the West Bank — with one-for-one land swaps — and to divide Jerusalem, including relinquishing sovereignty in the Old City. If that wasn’t good enough for Abbas, then obviously nothing we can offer will be.

While the United States and much of the international community refuse to internalize this, the simple, bleak fact is that everything Arafat, Abbas and Hamas have done since the collapse of the Bill Clinton-hosted Camp David 2000 attempt at forging a deal has persuaded Israelis that they dare not relinquish territory to the Palestinians, despite the imperative to separate in order to maintain a Jewish, democratic Israel.

Arafat returned from the United States and fostered the Second Intifada’s onslaught of suicide bombings — attacks throughout Israel that murderously demonstrated that it was not merely the territories that the Palestinians sought. That it’s not just the settlements, it’s all of Israel that is rejected.

In the years after Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, the rocket fire intensified, the Palestinians gave Hamas a parliamentary majority in elections, and Hamas ousted Abbas’s forces from the Strip in hours — underlining to Israelis the dangers of leaving adjacent territory, and the ease with which Islamist forces could seize power in any vacuum. The latest Israel-Hamas conflict, in 2014, only re-emphasized the danger: If a single rocket fired by Hamas that got through the Iron Dome defenses and landed a mile from Ben-Gurion Airport could send two-thirds of foreign airlines fleeing from Israel, including all the American carriers, how could Israel possibly entertain the idea of leaving the West Bank? Hamas would be running the show within days, and our entire country would be paralyzed and isolated.

The irony, of course, is that if the Palestinians had been capable of hiding their hatred for just a short period after we left Gaza, if they had managed to pretend for even a brief time that their hearts were set on peaceful coexistence, we probably would have withdrawn unilaterally from much of the West Bank as well.

Instead, Palestinian words and deeds have persuaded mainstream Israelis — those who don’t want to rule the Palestinians, don’t want to expand settlements in areas we do not envisage retaining under any permanent accord, don’t want to have to live by the sword forever — that no partnership is viable at present. They’ve even managed to kill off the optimism of the leader of the Israeli opposition, Isaac Herzog, who sadly concluded last week that a two-state solution is simply unrealistic: He “yearns” for it, said Herzog in a radio interview. But it’s “not possible” right now.

A grassroots approach

So, how, then, to break out of this awful new reality — of more Palestinian generations strategically brainwashed to hate, and a bleeding Israel unable to advance its own interest in a safe separation to guarantee the maintenance of our Jewish democracy?

Self-evidently, there will no accord with Mahmoud Abbas. But one thing that Abbas has been saying at his recent press conferences is worth picking up on. Previous peace efforts created a joint mechanism intended to combat incitement on both sides, and Abbas has pronounced himself ready to revive that mechanism. Israel should take him up on that right away.

Netanyahu has rightly focused on incitement as a root cause of the current terror wave. We all have an interest in utilizing any and every tool that just might help alleviate some of the hostility.

It was lousy politics of Herzog to publicly give up for now on the two-state solution. If peace is not on the horizon, after all, why would Israelis elect a leader who is now acknowledging that his whole prior strategy was misguided? But Herzog’s sad and sober conclusion underlines that there can and will be no quick fixes.

What’s needed, what has always been needed, to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, is a grassroots approach to peacemaking. An approach focused on education. An approach under which international resources and leverage are utilized to rewrite educational curricula, to marginalize extremist political and spiritual leaders, to promote moderation and peaceful interaction.

The Arafat-Abbas-Hamas strategy of hostility to Israel achieves the precise opposite of what the Palestinians purport to seek — independent statehood. It has now even managed to persuade the center-left opposition, the peacemaking Labor Party, that Israeli readiness for compromise is insufficient.

Perhaps the international community — so insistently led by US President Barack Obama in seeking to persuade Israelis that they can afford to take risks for peace when the bloody evidence all around them shows the contrary — will learn Herzog’s lesson.

Perhaps it will move to adopt the grassroots approach.

Perhaps it will use its immense leverage to gradually help create a climate in which it is not the most natural thing in the world for teenage Palestinians to set out with knives and kill Israeli mothers of six and 23-year-old industrial design graduates.

Democrats Will Hold Their Noses and Nominate Hillary. By Dana Milbank.

Hillary Clinton, former U.S. secretary of state, speaks during the Clinton Global Initiative CGI America meeting in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., on Thursday, June 13, 2013. Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images.

Democrats would be insane to nominate Bernie Sanders. By Dana Milbank. Washington Post, January 26, 2016.

Milbank:

I adore Bernie Sanders.

I agree with his message of fairness and I share his outrage over inequality and corporate abuses. I think his righteous populism has captured the moment perfectly. I respect the uplifting campaign he has run. I admire his authenticity.

And I am convinced Democrats would be insane to nominate him.

Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is a dreary candidate. She has, again, failed to connect with voters. Her policy positions are cautious and uninspiring. Her reflexive secrecy causes a whiff of scandal to follow her everywhere. She seems calculating and phony.

And yet if Democrats hope to hold the presidency in November, they’ll need to hold their noses and nominate Clinton.

Ultimately, I expect that’s what Democrats will do — because as much as they love Sanders , they loathe Donald Trump more. It seems more evident each day that Republicans have lost their collective reason and are beginning to accept the notion that Trump will be their nominee. And I doubt Democrats will make an anti-immigrant bigot the president by nominating a socialist to run against him.

Sanders and his supporters boast of polls showing him, on average, matching up slightly better against Trump than Clinton does. But those matchups are misleading: Opponents have been attacking and defining Clinton for a quarter- century, but nobody has really gone to work yet on demonizing Sanders.

Watching Sanders at Monday night’s Democratic presidential forum in Des Moines, I imagined how Trump — or another Republican nominee — would disembowel the relatively unknown Vermonter.

The first questioner from the audience asked Sanders to explain why he embraces the “socialist” label and requested that Sanders define it “so that it doesn’t concern the rest of us citizens.”

Sanders, explaining that much of what he proposes is happening in Scandinavia and Germany (a concept that itself alarms Americans who don’t want to be like socialized Europe), answered vaguely: “Creating a government that works for all of us, not just a handful of people on the top — that’s my definition of democratic socialism.”

But that’s not how Republicans will define socialism — and they’ll have the dictionary on their side. They’ll portray Sanders as one who wants the government to own and control major industries and the means of production and distribution of goods. They’ll say he wants to take away private property. That wouldn’t be fair, but it would be easy. Socialists don’t win national elections in the United States .

Sanders on Monday night also admitted he would seek massive tax increases — “one of the biggest tax hikes in history,” as moderator Chris Cuomo put it — to expand Medicare to all. Sanders, this time making a comparison with Britain and France, allowed that “hypothetically, you’re going to pay $5,000 more in taxes,” and declared, “We will raise taxes, yes we will.” He said this would be offset by lower health-insurance premiums and protested that “it’s demagogic to say, oh, you’re paying more in taxes.”

Well, yes — and Trump is a demagogue.

Sanders also made clear he would be happy to identify Democrats as the party of big government and of wealth redistribution. When Cuomo said Sanders seemed to be saying he would grow government “bigger than ever,” Sanders didn’t quarrel, saying, “P eople want to criticize me, okay,” and “F ine, if that’s the criticism, I accept it.”

Sanders accepts it, but are Democrats ready to accept ownership of socialism, massive tax increases and a dramatic expansion of government? If so, they will lose.

Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire and former New York mayor who floated a trial balloon over the weekend about an independent run, knows this. As the New York Times reported: “If Republicans were to nominate Mr. Trump or Senator Ted Cruz, a hard-line conservative, and Democrats chose Mr. Sanders, Mr. Bloomberg . . . has told allies he would be likely to run.”

President Obama seems to know this, too — which would explain why he tiptoed beyond his official neutrality to praise Clinton in an interview with Politico’s Glenn Thrush. “I think that what Hillary presents is a recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics,” he said. He portrayed Sanders as “the bright, shiny object that people haven’t seen before.”

It doesn’t speak well of Clinton that, next to her, a 74-year-old guy who has been in politics for four decades is a bright and shiny object. The #feelthebern phenomenon has at least as much to do with Clinton as with Sanders: Democrats are eager for an alternative to her inauthentic politics and cautious policies.

I share their frustration with Clinton. But that doesn’t make Sanders a rational choice.

In An Age of Terror, How Thinking Right Can Save the Left. By Richard Landes.

In an Age of Terror, How Thinking Right Can Save the Left. By Richard Landes. Tablet, November 24, 2015.

Landes:

What’s needed is more tribalism, not less.

Among the responses in Israel to the Paris Terror Attacks, there has emerged a divide that deserves attention. Depending on where you spend your political time, one or the other response will appear predictable (and lamentable).

First, there are the self-referential Zionists who think, as they did after the attacks of Sept. 11 and the London bombings of July 7, 2005, and so many other moments: “Now, maybe they’ll understand our plight, and realize we have the same enemies,” and “We Israelis have a lot to teach you.” Their battle-hardened cousins further to the right reply, “Don’t bother trying, they’re all anti-Semitic and judge us by a double standard” or even “The West deserves what they’re getting, as a punishment for their hypocrisy.”

On the other hand, we have those who see this entire range of responses as distasteful, to say the least. Instead, they urge an expression of sympathy and solidarity unclouded by words of reproach, by displaying the French flag online as a way to declare #JeSuisFrançais. It’s really not cool for Israelis to complain about a double standard at a time like this, they scold. It’s not about us—it’s about France. As for those people, like the prime minister, who compare ISIS to Palestinian terrorists, they are engaging in a low form of propaganda, trying to use the victims of other wars in other places to wash away the sins of Israeli occupation.

In a deeply disturbing and repeating 21st-century, paradox, however, the approach of Israel’s generous and selfless ones has worked to the benefit of most regressive forces on the planet—while on the contrary, the voice that awakening Europe needs most to heed in the current crisis is that of those self-centered Israelis who relate European woes to their own pain. The failure to understand this paradox explains both why Western elites are so poor at resisting global jihad, and why, for a disaffected youth—Muslim by birth or by choice—it makes sense to join that jihad. Indeed, this split in Israeli discourse about the Paris attacks illustrates the disproportionate impact of a peculiar Jewish dispute on the current cognitive disorientation of the West.

But first, let’s explain our terms. Let’s call the first response the tribalist approach. It is centered on the self, preoccupied with defending family, clan, group; suspicious by default of others, especially of strangers; and easily rendered defensive by threatening behavior. Tribalists think in terms of “us vs. them”; they treat “their own” differently from others, and when they feel sufficiently threatened, they will lash out. They think of their own pain and feel anger at hypocrisy (in this case against the French for their 15-year-long indifference to the pain of their Jews). This mindset historically favors vengeful attitudes—“they deserve it”—and rough justice.

Politically, these folks appear on the “right” of our spectrum, and they remind us of historical periods when people with power lacked empathy and used it cruelly, a political culture of rule or be ruled, that democracies hope to have outgrown. Tribalists are the zero-sum folks: “I only win if they lose,” and, “they only understand force.” Like Huntington, one of their intellectual heroes, these tribalists tend to look for enemies. They find reasons to be belligerent, to provoke war, they “invent the enemy.”

Let’s call the second response the universalist: considerate of others, self-abnegating: “This is not about Israel.” These are the positive-sum folks, the ones who make friends, who build on trust, who come up with mutually beneficial projects from which everyone profits, who look for the voluntary win-win rather than the coerced win-lose. They reject the selfish me first, the invidious us-them, the tribal my side right or wrong.

These folks appear on the “left” of our political spectrum. They empathize with the “other” and embrace diversity. They can and want to trust. In renouncing the win-lose, they become capable of granting dignity and freedom to others—the fundamental social contract of a successful egalitarian culture. They imagine themselves as inhabitants of a future diverse, civil, and peaceful global community, where racism and xenophobia are no more.

This dichotomy between tribal and universal sheds light on the current paradoxical situation in Europe, where the most extraordinary cognitive disarray rules. Specifically, when it comes to judging Israel’s conflict with its neighbors, Europeans have inverted vision. And the ensuing radical cognitive disorientation contributes to a fatal misreading of the forces Europeans themselves face.

By and large, the European elites—journalists, academics, policy pundits, political class—are members of the universalist camp. In their reading, Israelis are the zero-sum players. They deserve the hostility of their neighbors; they have brought upon themselves the suicide bombings, the intifadas, and the deep hatreds. They have done so with their settlements and occupation and humiliating checkpoints and periodic bombing raids that kill hundreds of children and thousands of innocent civilians.

They think the Israelis are the tribal players here, needlessly but persistently humiliating their poor Palestinian victims; that if Israel stopped constantly frustrating Palestinian aspirations with their insistence on ruling over them and rather made noble gestures, Israel would take a dramatic step toward that peace and make the world a better place for all. Its refusal to so act, proves that Israel is the greatest obstacle to peace, the great provoker of Palestinian grievance. However lamentable, Palestinian hostility comes from an understandable reaction to what Israel does to them.

Many a prominent Israeli, especially among their cultural elites, shares this view. They embrace and promote the story frame of the Israeli Goliath crushing the poor Palestinian David. For them, the conflict with the Palestinians has nothing to do with the jihadi attacks on the West, and it’s offensive for Israelis to complain about not being included among the victims of terrorism. They believe that Palestinians have limited, national goals, and that once Israelis stopped being so awful, Palestinians would stop hating them. They fervently hold that this conflict is not a religious war about eliminating the Jews from the Waqf—holy trust—that goes from the river to the sea.

In order to think this way, of course, one has to ignore a lot of important data, especially what Muslims say to each other. And yet, despite its immediate relevance to the European predicament, both Europeans, and many Israeli intellectuals, insist on ignoring the basic terms of jihadi discourse. Like those who say, “ISIS is not Islamic,” they turn a deaf ear to a discourse that is not theirs.

***

To universalists who wish to understand just what kind of peril they—and their universal values—are in, I would suggest that they might pay attention to the unmistakable voices of the hardest of zero-sum thinking among Israel’s declared enemies. Here you find the regressive, drive for “our” domination and “your” subjection, of gaining honor from debasing the “other.” At their worst, such voices demonize and dehumanize (devil, apes, and pigs). They appeal to the most megalomanic hopes and paranoid fears of their audiences. They cultivate an irredentist hatred of the “other.” And such voices permeate the discourse of Palestinian hatred of Israel.

Now compare the tribal and religious hatreds that target Israel with those that move the jihadis who attacked Parisian nightlife this month, the United States on Sept. 11, Barcelona, London, and who knows how many more places. How different are they? Here we find the same raging sense of victimhood, the same call to pre-emptive vengeance, arising from a firm conviction that one’s very self is under attack, the belief that, if “we” do not exterminate our foe, “they” will exterminate “us.” Here we find the same wanton attitude toward human life, even one’s own: Muslim kills Muslim to kill infidels; Hamas kills Gazans to rocket Israel.

At its most intense, we find in both places, apocalyptic believers for whom the current conflict is both existential and cosmic. They engage in a pitiless war on evil, in which the enemy must be wiped out or subjected, lest “they,” by their malevolent existence, destroy “our” faith. If you want to touch the gold standard of genuine xenophobia, paranoia, and genocidal hatreds, listen to what apocalyptic Muslims say about the infidel.

In France, the motto is “padamalgam”: Don’t lump the vast majority of innocent and peaceful Muslims with the tiny minority of crazies who have hijacked their religion. But that move falls into the equally problematic amalgam of all nonviolent Muslims as moderates. Indeed, here’s the problem. The amalgam, “the vast majority of nonviolent Muslims,” actually spans a great gamut of Muslim religiosities, from those ready to live side-by-side in tolerance and peace with non-Muslims, to enthusiastic but not public supporters of the jihadis.

The key to distinguishing within this “vast majority” between genuine moderates and covert jihadis is to identify what one might call “triumphalist” Islam.

If “religiosity” represents a way of “living” one’s religion, triumphalism represents that form of religiosity that needs to assert visible dominance in order to prove the validity of its claims about God and especially claims to being God’s favorite. Many a patristic theologian argued that the “Conversion of the Roman Empire” proved the superiority of Christianity over paganism, philosophy, and Judaism. The use of power to impose religious truth—crusades and inquisition, permitted by this “triumph,” was not undone until the American Constitution when, for the first time in Christian history, tolerance was a winner’s creed.

When conquering Muslims built empires based in Damascus and Baghdad, Sharia, and especially that governing the behavior of dhimmi (non-Muslims), legislated an inequality that honored Muslims and disgraced those who were stubborn enough to reject the true faith. All jihadis are triumphalists; not all triumphalists are jihadis; and not all Muslims are triumphalists.

Europeans who bother to inform themselves about their and Israel’s enemies will find the same zealous hatred of infidels, the same misogynistic fear of difference, of otherness, of dissent, of contradiction, a fear of the very possibility of humiliation at the hands of someone who should be inferior, like women and infidels, the same deep discomfort at the very thought of equal treatment for infidels and the faithful.

They will find the same shrill insistence on a triumphalist Islam that proves the truth of its claims to superiority over all other faiths, by dominating and subjecting recalcitrant infidels, by humiliating, and, where necessary exterminating those who threaten their superiority.

The hatred these triumphalist Muslims feel for the “Zionist Entity” comes not from Israel’s unwillingness to compromise, not because of settlements and occupation since ’67, but because any territory in Dar al Islam where infidels have sovereignty, constitutes an unbearable blasphemy. And triumphalist Muslims, everywhere, share this hostility to autonomous infidels, the contempt, the desire to spread dar al Islam to hold dominion, to raise up a triumphant Islam by debasing and subjecting the West.

This triumphalism explains why Israel is a peculiar variant on the more extensive jihadi hostility to infidels. Most threatening of all to this kind of religiosity, tiny Israel’s ability to resist being obliterated constitutes the supreme modern sacrilege to the triumphalist’s notion of Allah. Triumphalist Muslims, humiliated more generally by the modern success of infidels since Napoleon, have experienced repeated humiliation since 1948 by Israel and the United States. In their mind, global jihad means that, at last, now, is the time for the apocalyptic hadith enshrined in the Hamas charter, about a final war of extermination on the Jews, when the Jews will flee and hide, and the rocks and trees will call out to Muslims to denounce the Jew hiding behind them. And although that particular hadith does not go on to discuss what happens next, the larger apocalyptic scenario sees the elimination of the Jews as a prelude to subjugating the rest of the infidels.

From this critical perspective, ISIS and Hamas are part of the same jihad against the West—maybe differing in their stage of development, their circumstances, their leadership, their life-destroying strategies, but essentially the same in their triumphalist belief in Islam’s destiny to rule the earth, and their role in violently bringing about that destiny. They share a hatred and contempt for infidels of all kinds—dhimmi, apostates, blasphemers, pagans, ignoramuses. They share the same paranoia, the same sense of victimization, the same sense of existential threat, the same sense that they defend the true faith by taking vengeance on those who mock the Prophet.

People who insist that Hamas and ISIS have nothing to do with each other give global jihad an enormous boon: They disguise Hamas by presenting it as a movement for national liberation even as it fans the flames of global jihad. In so doing, many Westerners think they help the Palestinian cause, when in fact they empower a leadership that willingly sacrifices ordinary Palestinians to advance its cause, and at the same time, empower the global jihadis by running their Palestinian propaganda as news, and reinforcing a collective sense of victimization. Instead of recoiling from the horror, the more demented—but sincere—Western “progressives” shout “We are Hamas.” And those Israelis who rush to assure the global community that people who argue, as I have above, are just trying to hide their own crimes against the Palestinians, effectively blind those who listen to their counsel to a shared foe of all decent people—Muslim, Jew, Christian, and secular, alike.

***

When Western Europeans opened their gates to receive a rapid influx of hundreds of thousands even millions of Muslims fleeing the madness that ruled in their homelands, it stunned those of us who see Islamic radicalism as a real and global threat. Who, knowing the cultural and demographic dynamics, would imagine that Europe would throw its gates open to a massive wave of largely male Muslim immigration? How many of these newcomers, who made it into Europe undocumented, would, we thought, immediately disappear into those “non-existent” no-go zones and provide a powerful reinforcement to the jihadi presence already there? How many more, stuck in refugee camps, would offer a perfect recruiting ground for the caliphate? Indeed, among other things, the recent attack in Paris reflects how much these reinforcements have increased their confidence. As more and more people realize, this massive influx of newcomers—refugees, migrants, jihadis—is a catastrophe for civil society in Western Europe.

And yet, far from thinking they were committing cultural suicide, the Europeans perceived themselves as saving their humanity, their commitment to universalist values, their compassion. In their minds they were giving succor to a wave of desperate refugees, showing their universalist values (and atoning for the Holocaust). In this they were systematically encouraged, not only by the news media but also by their elected officials. All these players resonated to the progressive and redemptive call to make a grand and compassionate gesture that could transform hostile relations with Muslims into peaceful ones. The Universalists, unaware of whom they dealt with, welcomed into their safe spaces, tribalist enemies.

Earlier this month I was slated to speak on a panel sponsored by a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons on the BBC. After the public announcement, Ben White, an activist journalist, published a piece on how an MP was about to appear on a panel with a known Eurabian conspiracy thinker: Me. His major proof was a remark I made in 2007 at a Herzilya Conference:

European democratic civilization can fall before the Islamic challenge. Do not say that this will never happen in Europe and that Islam will not be able to take control of Europe. If Europe continues its current path, the fall will be sooner.

This remark, amply supported by events during the following eight years, and which today I would only amend by adding “triumphalist” to modify “Islamic challenge,” was sufficient to frighten a pro-Israel MP into bumping me from the panel. White’s article had caused him “considerable embarrassment,” he noted in explanation for his decision. One thinks fondly of A Fish Called Wanda, in which Archie (John Cleese) describes to the American Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis) Brits’ greatest fear: “You see, Wanda, we’re all terrified of embarrassment. That’s why we’re so … dead.” A Britain in which warning about the plans of global jihadis to bring Dar al Islam to where Dar al Harb used to be, can so embarrass one’s associates that they cringe, is a Europe, which, because it cannot even identify the enemy, cannot figure out how to fight back.

What has this got to do with the two Jewish-Israeli responses with which I began this discussion? Ironically, it suggests that those tribal Jews/Israelis that Europe deplores are fighting not only for themselves, but for a decent democratic and egalitarian culture the world over, against a deeply regressive, triumphalist Islam. The “left-wing” Israeli responses that disdain tribalism, and promote lofty universalist values, dismiss this Israeli tribal voice as paranoid, conspiracy-minded, xenophobic, Islamophobic. Yet, in so doing, they contribute to the cognitive disorientation of the outside nations and peoples. In their eagerness to confess Israel’s sins, to consider Palestinians innocent and Israel guilty, they shield outsiders from hearing the much harsher jihadi voice that explicitly targets not just Israel but them.

The foreign minister of Sweden or the head of the socialist party in the Netherlands shows just how powerfully this cognitive disorientation has Europeans in its thrall. Responding to events in Paris, they did not make reference to the problems in Sweden and Holland, all of them a function of their own ever-more aggressive, triumphalist Muslim fringe. Instead they invoked the contribution of Israel to the frustration of Palestinian Muslims, apparently in the empirically contradicted hope that dumping on Israel will improve rather than further damage their own situation.

When those who wish for peace are not prepared for war, not even cognitive war, when they ignore the Roman dictum si vis pacem para bellum, then they bring about a war they will lose. Bellum efficiunt, et pacem volentes.

Do we, as Jews and Israelis, beneficiaries of, and contributors to, free and democratic societies the world over, really want to contribute to the catastrophic disorientation that now, astonishingly, rules the discourse of free nations? Or are we ready to set aside, at least momentarily, our universalist self-abnegation, and help people of good will everywhere understand our plight, which is also theirs?