The End of Palestinian Nationalism. By Liel Leibovitz.

Israeli Rina Yaffa Ariel, mourns over the body of her daughter Hallel, a 13-year-old girl who was fatally stabbed by a Palestinian attacker in her home, during her funeral in the Kiryat Arba settlement outside the Israeli occupied city of Hebron on June 30, 2016. The Israeli army said that a young Palestinian killed Hallel in her bed after breaking into her home in the Kiryat Arba settlement outside the flashpoint city of Hebron. Security personnel rushed to the house and fired on the attacker, who wounded a guard before being shot dead, the army said. The girl was taken to hospital in Jerusalem in critical condition and died of her wounds. Getty Images / AFP / GIL COHEN-MAGEN.

The End of Palestinian Nationalism. By Liel Leibovitz. Tablet, July 5, 2016.

Leibovitz:

When a movement devolves into a death cult, it’s time to rethink our assumptions.

With the Israelis murdered this week by Palestinian terrorists—13-year-old Hallel Ariel, stabbed in her sleep, or Michael Mark, father of 10, shot in his car with his wife and children by his side—it’s also time to bury the bloated corpse of the Palestinian national movement. A cause that had once attracted the sympathies of just and compassionate people everywhere is increasingly devolving into a call heard only by the wild and the deranged.

How did that happen? Like all questions of its scope, this one, too, contains multitudes. You could argue pragmatism and say that it was Israel’s fault, that the Jewish state’s stringent policies and its penchant for settlements drove the fragile Palestinians to despair. You could argue essentialism and say that it will always be in the Arabs’ nature to hate the Jews. There’s no shortage of good stories to tell, and all likely contain some dusting of the truth. But none explain 17-year-old Muhammad Nasser Tarayrah taking a smiling selfie and then leaving his luxurious two-story house in Bani Naim, ambling over to Ariel’s home in Kiryat Arba, watching her as she slept peacefully in her bed, exhausted from a dance recital the evening before, and slaughtering her with a kitchen knife. None explain Tarayrah’s mother and sister hailing the murderer as a hero who has made them proud. This is not nationalism. It is madness.

And yet, don’t expect the arbiters of global rectitude to pay much attention. The world, moved both by moral rightness and political necessity, has gotten used to holding two opposing narratives about the Palestinian national movement in its head at the same time. The first of these—some versions of which are inclusive of Israeli rights and aspirations, and some of which are entirely hostile to the existence of Israel itself—is about the right of the Palestinian people to their own state. The second is about the wrongs committed by both Palestinians and Israelis, and which tend in the minds of most reasonable people who are not deeply staked in the tangled history of the conflict to drown each other out: Oppression leads to terror attacks which lead to more oppression.

This clash between narrative A (the Palestinians deserve a state) and narrative B (bad deeds on both sides make a Palestinian state more and more unlikely) is frequently referred to by Western reporters and diplomats, usually with a schoolmarmish clicking of the tongue, as the “cycle of violence.” If only both sides could get along, the common wisdom among the global elites still runs, it would be easy enough to find some sort of solution, and the world would be at least a moderately better place.

But what if both narratives of rights and wrongs are in fact inseparable? That’s what the leaders of the BDS movement believe. In their view, the deeds of the occupation they decry are hardly an accident, because all of the land of Mandate Palestine properly belongs—by transcendent right, if not by international law and treaty—to the Arabs of Palestine. Compromise with Zionism is a compromise with inherent oppression and injustice, which by its very nature will only inflame further conflict. The only morally right, and politically stable long-term solution, therefore, is to eliminate the Zionist State of Israel, once and for all, even if both Zionists and devotees of international law might read the historical record and the facts on the ground very differently. The great virtue of the BDS position is that it replaces contradictions with clarity: Zionism is occupation, always and forever, plain and simple.

It is worth considering whether the leaders of the BDS movement have stumbled on something profound about the conflict, a premise that people in the West who oppose the elimination of the State of Israel might also want to consider. Maybe it isn’t true that both sides are right. Maybe the easy nostrum that both national movements have justice on their side and that both sides do bad things is a false appeal to complexity of the kind that comforts people who would really rather not deal with hard real-world questions of right versus wrong. Maybe the failure of decades of painstaking but fruitless efforts by the most sophisticated diplomats and map-makers and negotiators on the planet, backed by unending rivers of cash, is telling us something important: that there isn’t room for two full-fledged national movements in the same tiny sliver of land, even if, in a perfect world, it would be better if there was. What if what you see on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is what you get? Then what?

It is in fact impossible to separate the Zionist dream of creating a Jewish nation-state in the Biblical land of Israel from the abridgment of the national aspirations of those Arabs who were previously living in that land under the Turks, or who were drawn there in growing numbers in the early 20th century by the economic activity of Jewish colonists. In that sense, while Zionism doesn’t have to—and should never—imply that non-Jewish citizens of Israel do not have absolutely the same rights as Jewish citizens to live, work, think, and speak freely, the BDS movement is certainly right that Zionism absolutely does imply the abrogation of the national dream of the Palestinian people to enjoy the whole of historical Palestine as their national homeland. It is perfectly fine for some Palestinians to see that abrogation as a burning injustice, and to reject Zionism as a cruel, unjust imposition on their own experience, just as Zionists are free to celebrate the return of the Jewish people to its historic homeland, and wish that all the Arabs would pack up and leave. Whether settled in courtrooms or on battlefields, it is an argument that, really, only one side can win.

By the same token, it is also time to see the Palestinian national movement as a unified whole, rather than picking and choosing among its parts in order to construct a Western-friendly creature that can then be positioned as a likely partner for negotiations that—for reasons that should now seem obvious to every thinking person—go absolutely nowhere, because they are premised on a fantasy of a thing that doesn’t actually exist. Is there actually any meaningful difference in the aspirations of the leaders of Hamas and the leaders of Fatah, both of whom compete to incite and lionize the unending stream of zombie-like killers who murder Jews wherever they can find them, whether in settlements or on the beaches of Haifa and Tel Aviv? These killers, and the leaders who incentivize them, are not something separate from the Palestinian national movement. They are, as the wall posters and the television broadcasts in their honor claim, the front-line soldiers of the movement, and its purest representatives.

And that’s the real catastrophe facing the Palestinian people these days. There are plenty of other nations created by colonists on occupied land—America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and all of Latin America come immediately to mind, even if none of the Europeans who forged new nations in those places had even the slightest historical connection to the lands they seized. And there are some examples of national movements pushing off their oppressors and winning back their ancestral homelands. There are, however, no examples of nations, even failed ones, created by death cults. And a death cult is just what the Palestinian national movement has now become.

To understand how that is possible, we’ve few better guides than Leo Strauss. Lecturing in 1941, the philosopher was tasked with trying to explain what the hell had happened in his native Germany, and how so many seemingly normal people slid past reasonable reservations about logical geopolitical considerations and into the Hitlerian dance of death. The answer Strauss gives is chilling: The young Nazis weren’t so much ardent anti-Semites or staunch nationalists as they were nihilists repulsed by seeing their closed society threatened by the promise of progress and change. “Their Yes,” Strauss wrote as his subjects were still very much on the rise, “was inarticulate—they were unable to say more than: No! This No proved however sufficient as the preface to action, to the action of destruction.”

The Palestinian genius for nay-saying is well-documented, but what’s at play here is something new, something that transcends the dull boundaries of international negotiations and seeps into the hearts and minds of the young. Once the essential No that has guided Palestinian policy for decades has been turned inward, it could find no other outlet but destruction and no better target than the Jews next door. Anti-Semitism has something to do with fanning this derangement, but it is not its essence; neither are pure yearnings for an independent Palestinian homeland. The revolt we’re seeing now is more profound, more ontological in nature: It’s the revolt of an educated and relatively well-off generation—note how many of the stabbers have come, like Tarayrah, from comfortable and stable families—that looks for meaning and honor and sacrifice and can find it nowhere in the vastly compromised world outside, succumbing instead to the all-consuming fire of utter annihilation. We’ve seen this tide rise before under similar circumstances, and we’ll see it rise again.

It’s easy to argue that Tarayrah and his fellow pogromists are merely youth pushed into murder by the constant torrent of incitement prevalent in every corner of Palestinian culture; this is true, but it eerily assumes, like the looniest moralists do when they argue that violent video games or gangster rap will inevitably lead to shootouts in the streets of suburban Connecticut, that adolescents are spongy creatures incapable of doing much more than soaking violence and spurting out violence in kind. It’s even easier to continue to blame that mythical horned beast, the Occupation, as if there was no other reason for young Palestinians to feel hopeless—like, say, the fact that their own government is one of the world’s most repressive and corrupt—and as if hopelessness necessarily translated into taking knives to the throats of slumbering children. If we abandon these simplicities, and acknowledge instead that what bedevils Palestinian society is a much more wicked problem, we’re left to make some uneasy decisions of our own.

First, we should realize that we must approach a death cult differently than we would a healthy national movement. The latter calls out for compromise. It rewards negotiations, and it reassures its foes by offering indications, real and symbolic, that future reconciliation is likely and at hand. This is why we often forgive it its missteps, and are willing to look away even when it occasionally unleashes bloody hell, as even the most well-tempered and responsible national movements sometimes do. The former, however, has no appetite for anything but destruction, and measures its triumphs with the crude arithmetic of body counts and death tolls. It cannot be reasoned with. It can only be forcefully stopped. Until it is, any attempt to pretend that Palestinian nationalism is still viable is simply grotesque.

This should come as little surprise to any serious student of national movements throughout history. Reread Herder’s remark that, in a certain sense, every form of human perfection is first and foremost national in spirit, and reflect again on the Treaty of Westphalia, which sliced Europe into nation-states erected on the basis of self-determination and committed to diplomatic congress as a means of resolving disputes. Then go forth and observe the myriad national movements that failed miserably to live up to this new spirit of creative nationalism. Ask the Moravians or the Transnistrians about their efforts at self-determination, and that’s just one small corner in Europe. The world is thick with failed national movements that, for one reason or another, saw their dreams disintegrate into violence, or irrelevance, or both. Sadly, the Palestinians now join them. This will have many implications, for Palestinians and Israelis alike, but if history is any guide, the only way to counter a No is with an equal or greater Yes, a spirit that meets death by loudly and enthusiastically affirming life.

Why So Many Missed the Nationalist Surge. By William A. Galston.

Why So Many Missed the Nationalist Surge. By William A. Galston. Wall Street Journal, July 5, 2016.

Galston:

Politicians and young, educated urbanites live in an economic and cultural bubble.

In this year of Brexit and Donald Trump and ethno-nationalism rising across Europe, it is time to take stock of what we have learned.

Even in an era when globalization is thought to be an inexorable force, national sovereignty still matters. It was national political decisions that created the European Union and may end up dismantling it. Political leaders reached the trade treaties that allow goods and services and capital to flow more freely. Many countries welcome these flows yet seek control over the movement of people across their borders. It was the EU’s unwillingness to decouple population movement from other liberties that crystallized the U.K.’s pro-Brexit majority.

Population flows matter in part because they affect national economies, but even more because they challenge national cultures. Some native-born citizens welcome increased variety; others resent it. “Diversity” is a divisive norm, especially imported diversity, and promoting it can stir resistance.

It is one thing when immigrants remain in ports of entry and capital cities, quite another when they spread out into smaller communities that have been demographically stable for generations if not centuries.

Education shapes attitudes toward diversity. In most Western democracies, people with college and professional degrees tend to be comfortable with immigrants. From their standpoint, what’s not to like? The local cuisine improves; declining neighborhoods spring back to life; walking their city’s streets is more interesting.

Educated professionals’ easy acceptance of demographic diversity is part of a larger reality: They don’t fear change. Experience has taught them that they can adjust and even turn change to their advantage.

Not so for people with less education, many of whom see change as threatening. In their local stores, they encounter shoppers and soon counter clerks who are not fluent in their language. The immigrants’ manner is unfamiliar, and often their dress is too. These surface differences suggest deeper cultural disjunctions. “I feel like a stranger in my own country” is a familiar refrain among people who want things to stay the way they have been for ages.

National demography increasingly reflects these divisions between more-educated and less-educated classes. People with education—especially young people—have been drawn to urban centers as hubs of innovation as well as diversity. Meanwhile, older and less-educated people have remained in small towns and rural areas. The clash between the city and the countryside has been a staple of politics since classical antiquity, but now it has resurfaced full-force.

Perhaps cultural change wouldn’t be threatening for less-educated people if the economic changes of recent decades hadn’t been so devastating. There is a difference, alas, between statistics and the lived reality they represent. Many in my line of work have been writing for years about wage stagnation, income decline and the disappearance of manufacturing jobs. Too few of us have spent much time with the victims of these trends. If we had, their revolt against politics-as-usual wouldn’t have come as such a surprise.

At a recent foreign-policy conference, I heard Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a former Danish prime minister, discussing the Brexit vote, when she blurted out: “I feel so guilty.” I didn’t have a chance to ask her what she meant, but I think I know: As her country’s leader, she had been as insulated from discontented citizens as Britain’s leaders had been, unaware of what these voters were thinking and, more important, feeling. Educated professionals—including most politicians—live in an economic and cultural bubble, and they all too easily assume that what they see and hear around them represents the entire country.

This matters more than ever because globalization has turned out to be a divisive force within rather than between nations. In the decades after World War II, most groups and classes gained ground. Manufacturing generated stable employment with decent pay and working conditions that were achieved and defended through powerful labor unions. Sustained economic growth enabled governments to expand the welfare state without straining public budgets.

Since then, the emerging economy—more global and less local, increasingly focused on services and information, rewarding innovation more and standardization less—has divided populations in advanced democracies into winners and losers.

As economist Branko Milanović’s pioneering work has shown, the new economy has brought enormous benefits to populations in less-developed nations and to wealthy and upper-middle-class individuals in advanced democracies—but not to the working and lower-middle classes in these democracies. These people wonder: If globalization isn’t helping us economically but is undermining our way of life, why shouldn’t we embrace nationalism instead?

A fair question, and those of us who fear that resurgent nationalism could trigger a rerun of the 1930s must come up with better answers than we have so far. If we don’t, Brexit and Donald Trump are just the beginning.

Andrew Solomon: An Eyewitness to History. Interviewed by Fareed Zakaria.

Andrew Solomon: an eyewitness to history. Interviewed by Fareed Zakaria. Video. Fareed Zakaria GPS. CNN, June 26, 2016. Also at AndrewSolomon.com. Transcript.




Transcript:

ZAKARIA: Andrew Solomon is one of the most acute observers of our time. He's traveled the world, writing beautifully for the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker, and many other places; won the National Book Award for his penetrating look at depression; and won a National Book Critic Circle award for his look at the challenges facing the disabled and other disadvantaged groups.

His latest offering, Far and Away, is a collection of essays from his decades of witnessing historic change – the twilight of the Soviet Union, the turmoil of post-9/11 Afghanistan, the tyranny of Gadhafi in Libya.

Andrew Solomon, pleasure to have you on.

ANDREW SOLOMON, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR: What a pleasure to be here.

ZAKARIA: You’ve been reporting for 25 years, traveling for 25 years. You talk about travel as a kind of moral imperative.

SOLOMON: It’s really drawn from the uprise of xenophobia in the country at large right now. I think that people have a very difficult time making sense of countries they've never visited. People have a very difficult time conceptualizing places that they don’t know.

I feel like, if every young person in the world were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country before they reached full adulthood – doesn’t matter what country; doesn’t matter what they did there – half the world’s diplomatic problems would be gone. So many of them arise out of the fact that people don’t understand what is specific to my culture, what is universal.

ZAKARIA: You’ve traveled to places that we think of as very scary, like the Middle East, and you approach it really as an author and an intellectual, not as an expert in the Middle East. So what I’m interested in is how do you react to, you know, the general feeling, “Oh, my god, that place is just full of chaos and violence, bloodshed and despair?”

SOLOMON: I think that, in every one of these societies, there is a large body of people, who are probably the people who watch this program, who are intelligent, thinking people, interested in and engaged with the situation of their own country and the world, and that those people are often neglected.

I started off writing about artists and going to various countries and meeting artists. Partly, I was writing about art, but more I was writing about these engaged people. And it’s been my mission ever since then to go to places we find scary and to find the human stories of people, articulate people, with a point of view, and say, this is what it is. Afghanistan is not, contrary to what people had heard, a country of corrupt bureaucrats and warlike peasants. There are a lot of other people there.

ZAKARIA: For you, Libya was in some ways the – heartbreaking, to watch that country descend? Explain why.

SOLOMON: I was in Libya in the late Gadhafi period. And life under Gadhafi was worse than you can possibly imagine. It was a ridiculous place. It was unbelievably stressful. There was nothing to be said for the system that existed. But I made the mistake of thinking that, if they got rid of that system, which was so awful, that something better would have to rise in its place.

And what happened instead is that it went into a state of complete chaos, so that even the patriotic Libyans I met when I was there have mostly tried to flee if they possibly can.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that democracy and justice are the natural default state, and if you remove all of the impediments to those qualities, that is what will rise up. And what I learned, sort of, as a personal lesson in dealing with Libya, having argued that we should support the attacks against Gadhafi, is that the natural state to which people default is not democracy and is not order but is a terrifying, violent, brutal chaos.

ZAKARIA: It’s a very difficult thing for Americans to understand because America has always had order, inheriting it from, I think, the British colonies, you know. You look at Brazil. Brazil is a country that was, when you were looking at it, struggling to create a functioning democracy. In fact, even now the struggle continues with these recent proceedings, the impeachment of the president.

What did you learn from that experience?

SOLOMON: I was fascinated in Brazil by the relationships between the classes. You know, in many places, in most places really, the wealthy live in an enclosed area, and the poor live in outlying areas. And the points of contact are relatively minimal.

Rio de Janeiro has a physical structure in which the wealthy live in the flat areas, and the poor have accumulated in the favelas, in the hills that rise above those areas. I was interested in what happens when everyone is put together. I was interested that so many of the Brazilians I met, of privilege, wanted to take on characteristics they associated with the favelas, the intensity, the music, the relationship to football that so many models have come out of there.

And I loved what Regina Case, who is, sort of, the Oprah Winfrey of Brazil, said to me. She said, “I’ve been in North America. You have a pine grove here; you have oak trees there.” She said, “In Brazil” – she said, “Have you been to our tropical rainforest? Everything is growing on top of everything else; the sunlight is being choked out, and there's still more happening than anywhere else. And just as our rainforest is making the oxygen the world needs to breathe, so this social structure creates a social oxygen of intimacy from which the rest of the world could profit.”

ZAKARIA: What are the places that – that haunt you, that remain in your memory now?

SOLOMON: I’m certainly haunted by Afghanistan. I went there thinking it would be a punishing assignment, and when I got there, I fell in love with the place. I’ll always remember walking with my translator one day. I had bought one of those little fur hats like the ones Karzai always wore. And we were walking back through a crowded market at a time when most foreigners were either U.N. or military and weren’t allowed to walk in those areas.

And Faruk (ph), my translator, said, “Why don’t you put on your hat?”

And I said, “Oh, I think, you know, going native always looks a little bit silly.”

And he said, “No, come on. Put on your hat.”

So, I said, “All right.”

And I put on the hat and suddenly everyone around us burst into applause. And I didn’t know what was happening. And one of the people stepped forward and he said, “You’re an American; you’re a foreigner, but you’re in the market with us. You are wearing a true Afghan hat. We all want you to know that you’re welcome here.” It was difficult not to fall in love with that.

ZAKARIA: What do you think of Putin’s Russia? Or is it even fair, from the way you look at a country, to call it Putin’s Russia?

SOLOMON: Oh, I think it is fair to call it Putin’s Russia. I wish it weren’t fair. I think that it’s been a terrible tragedy to see Russia revert to the kind of autocracy that it was in its much darker days. There are some freedoms that exist now that didn't exist when I first went there at the end of the Soviet Union, but there was a kind of blissful idealistic notion of where everyone was headed, and none of it has come to pass.

ZAKARIA: Do you look at America differently? Have these travels made you look at your own country differently?

SOLOMON: Travel is always both a window and a mirror. So part of what you do is to discover the other place and part of what you do is to see yourself and your own country differently.

I’ve come to understand that, while we have a great many freedoms in the United States, there are freedoms that exist elsewhere that don’t exist here. And I’ve come to understand that we take for granted many things that give people much greater joy when they’ve had to fight for them. And I’ve come to understand that American policy around the world has an enormous effect on the minutia of people’s day-to-day lives and that what we think of as sweeping decisions that are made on a broad scale in economic or military or even citizen-to-citizen terms have much more grave consequences than we often realize.

ZAKARIA: Andrew Solomon, pleasure to have you on.

SOLOMON: Pleasure to be here. Thank you.

Donald Trump: Anti-Hillary Clinton Speech in New York City.

Donald Trump: Anti-Hillary Clinton Speech in New York City. Video. Right Side Broadcasting, June 22, 2016. YouTube. Transcript.

Trump’s Speech About Hillary Was Terrifyingly Effective. By Michelle Goldberg. Slate, June 22, 2016.





Goldberg:

He left the clown act to his surrogates, mixed in a truth or two among the lies, and zeroed in on what people hate about Clinton.

Donald Trump’s Wednesday morning speech about Hillary Clinton’s record is probably the most unnervingly effective one he has ever given. In a momentary display of discipline, he read from a teleprompter with virtually no ad-libbing, avoiding digs at Bill Clinton’s infidelity or conspiracy theories about Vince Foster’s suicide. Standing in a low-ceilinged conference room bedecked with square chandeliers in the Trump SoHo, a lawsuit-plagued hotel and condo development, Trump spoke for 40 minutes without saying anything overtly sexist. Instead, he aimed straight at Clinton’s most-serious weaknesses, describing her as a venal tool of the establishment. “Hillary Clinton gave China millions of our best jobs and effectively let China completely rebuild itself,” he said. “In return, Hillary Clinton got rich!” He added, “She gets rich making you poor,” and called her possibly “the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency.”

The point is not that this is true; as political analyst David Gergen said on CNN, the speech was slanderous. But the lies in the speech, many taken from Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash, were not obviously self-refuting. At one point, Trump said, citing Schweizer, “Hillary Clinton’s State Department approved the transfer of 20 percent of America’s uranium holdings to Russia, while nine investors in the deal funneled $145 million to the Clinton Foundation.” This has been debunked many times over, including by FactCheck.org.

To explain why it’s not true, though, you have to go into details about Clinton’s role on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which approved the sale of a Canadian-based energy company with American mining stakes to Russia’s nuclear energy agency. It’s a very different sort of lie than the one Trump told at a meeting of evangelicals on Tuesday when he said there’s “nothing out there” about Hillary Clinton’s religion—in fact, her Methodism is extremely well-known even to her political enemies.

Like all skillful demagoguery, Trump’s speech on Wednesday interwove truth and falsehood into a plausible-seeming picture meant to reinforce listeners’ underlying beliefs. In May, Morning Consult polled people with an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton about why they didn’t like her. Fifty-eight percent said she was too liberal, while 22 percent said she was too conservative. But 82 percent of Hillary-averse voters said she was corrupt, and 88 percent said she was untrustworthy. These are the beliefs that unite her foes across the political spectrum. It’s why Trump, with his devious talent for derisive nicknames, was smart to dub her “Crooked Hillary.”

Some of the examples Trump chose to reinforce this caricature are true. Describing Clinton as “a world-class liar,” he said, “Just look at her pathetic email and server statements, or her phony landing in Bosnia where she said she was under attack but the attack turned out to be young girls handing her flowers, a total self-serving lie. Brian Williams’ career was destroyed for saying far less.” One could quibble about whose exaggerations have been greater, but Clinton’s Bosnia tale really was mostly made up, and it will likely haunt her throughout the campaign.

Trump is clearly hoping to reach working-class whites in places like Ohio, where a recent poll shows him tied with Clinton. “We’ll never be able to fix a rigged system by counting on the same people who rigged it in the first place,” he said. “The insiders wrote the rules of the game to keep themselves in power, and in the money. That’s why we’re asking Bernie Sanders’ voters to join our movement, so together we can fix the system for all Americans. This includes fixing all of our many disastrous trade deals. Because it’s not just the political system that’s rigged. It’s the whole economy.” It was a direct appropriation of the rhetoric Sanders used to woo the white working class.

When the speech was over, I spoke to Carl Paladino, Trump’s New York co-chairman and frequent surrogate, who said that he expects the speech to mollify some of Trump’s Republican critics. “They can’t come griping anymore,” he said. “He’s on the teleprompter, and he’s on message. It’s a lot easier when you’re scripted in your presentation.”

Paladino then provided some of the extemporaneous insults missing from Trump’s speech, deriding Republicans who’ve expressed concern about their party’s nominee. “The press is always going to find some of these screwballs,” said Paladino. I asked if he considers House Speaker Paul Ryan a screwball. “Absolutely he’s a screwball,” he replied. “He doesn’t understand his responsibility to the people. He wasn’t elected by all the people. He was elected by some people up in Wisconsin and put into that office, and that office should have more dignity and understanding that when you have a candidate who’s chosen by the people, you will support that candidate, unequivocally. Paul Ryan thinks he can pass judgment on the specifics of a Donald Trump. He can’t pass judgment.”

Maybe not, but for at least one morning Trump did his best not to terrify his own party, and it was terrifying to watch him succeed.

Five Enduring Myths About U.S. Middle East Policy. By Aaron David Miller.

Five Enduring Myths About U.S. Middle East Policy. By Aaron David Miller. Newsweek, June 16, 2016.

Miller:

The Middle East has become a veritable graveyard where U.S. illusions and myths come to die.

Here are five of the most enduring and pernicious that need to be permanently retired.

Whoever is lucky enough to advise the next president ought to make that task the subject of briefing memo No. 1.

1. There are comprehensive solutions to the region’s problems.

No there aren’t. And I challenge anyone to identify a single one in the entire issue that has any kind of meaningful or sustainable end state. From the Syrian civil war to the political situation in Iraq; the war against the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, we are dealing with problems that require careful and extended management because there are  no quick or easy resolutions.

Think outcomes not end games. Even the Obama administration’s signal but highly flawed achievement—the P5 plus 1 Iranian nuclear agreement—is an arms control accord limited in time and scope with no guarantees or assurances that Iran’s nuclear weapons aspirations have been laid to rest.

Indeed, we need to stop thinking about fixing things in what I call administration time—four to eight years—and start thinking about a decade or two which is more realistic.

2. America has the answers.

No we don’t. The Middle East is a broken, angry and dysfunctional region where an absence of leadership; effective institutions; coherent, let alone good governance and presence of sectarian, regional and religious rivalries have combined to guarantee continued instability and in some cases fragmentation and chaos.

And we trivialize just how broken the region is and infantilize the peoples who live there by assuming that somehow Washington can and must be involved as the indispensable power in fixing all of this.

Hillary Clinton is more inclined to see the region in this way. But even Mr. Trump has talked about solving the ISIS problem once and for all. 

Nor are the region’s leaders just waiting to embrace American fixes. The fact is, most positive outcomes in this region emanate first from circumstances that force the locals to change their calculations and accept ownership for solving their own problems.  Only then does the U.S. have the capacity to play a consequential role.

Clearly, this has been the case in Arab-Israeli peacemaking. And it applies double when it comes to trying to promote coherent functional governance in places like Iraq, Syria and Libya.

Without Arab leaders willing and able stand up and take the lead role in stabilizing and reforming their own countries, Washington cannot succeed.

3. There must be real consistency in U.S. policy. 

Absolutely not. Great powers behave in anomalous, contradictory and even hypocritical fashion. It’s built into their job descriptions; and doctrines or cookie-cutter approaches straightjacket U.S. policy and deny it flexibility to fix problems are a recipe for disaster. 

This is particularly the case when human rights issues surface. It’s very hard in most areas of the world to somehow harmoniously reconcile U.S. values and interests.

Take the Middle East, for example. We encouraged an Arab Spring in Egypt and Tunisia. Are we obligated to encourage one in Saudi Arabia or Bahrain too, if the chaos wrought by the events of 2011 would threaten their stability?

What do we do with the current government of Egypt if it refuses to reform and to stop repressing the media and it continues to arrest thousands, when we need Egyptian cooperation on any number of regional issues?

We invaded and occupied Iraq to remove an evil dictator, with disastrous consequences. Are we obligated to do the same to remove Bashar al-Assad? Or, in the case of Libya—after helping NATO undermine Muammar el-Qaddafi—to occupy that country too?

4.  Israeli-Palestinian peace should be a top priority for the next administration.

No it shouldn’t. Not only is the conflict impossible to resolve right now without Israeli and Palestinian leaders doing more themselves, the issue is not the most pressing priority for the U.S. in the region.

Dealing with ISIS, the meltdown in both Syria; dysfunction in Iraq and Libya; managing relations with traditional partners such as Saudi Arabia; Israel and Egypt—all suggest a threatening and fragmenting region that will not be substantially ameliorated or repaired by a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which just isn’t possible now.

Nor are the Arab states, now far more preoccupied with their own internal problems—the challenge from Iran and the Sunnis jihadis—all that focused on the Palestinian issue.

Next year at this time Israel will have occupied much of the West Bank for half a century. And there’s little indication that either Israelis or Palestinians are willing or able to exchange that reality for something better.

5. The U.S. can just disengage.

No we can’t. America has allies, enemies and vital interests in the Middle East that guarantee there will be no major pivot, rebalance or exit out. Washington’s conundrum is that it’s stuck in a region it can’t transform, fix, or leave.

In the face of that challenge, it must focus on protecting and managing as best it can. That means drilling down on what’s really vital: fighting transnational terror to protect the homeland and U.S. allies; maintaining access to Middle East oil; countering the emergence of any regional hegemon (such as Iran) that seeks nuclear weapons; and to find a way to work with Middle East partners that may not share U.S. values or even all of its interests.

It’s neither a pretty nor heroic picture. But it’s a far smarter and realistic approach for an angry, broken and dysfunctional region that will suck America dry if it’s not careful.

What the Politics of Andrew Jackson’s Era Can Tell Us About Today. By Jackie Mansky and Steve Inskeep.

Andrew Jackson by Thomas Sully, 1845. National Gallery of Art.

What the Politics of Andrew Jackson’s Era Can Tell Us About Today. Interview with Steve Inskeep by Jackie Mansky. Smithsonian, June 8, 2016.

Mansky and Inskeep:

NPR correspondent Steve Inskeep speaks about his book Jacksonland and what it says about America’s democratic tradition.

Until the 1830s, there were, for all intents and purposes, two ways of mapping America. There was “a white man’s map and an Indian map.” In Jacksonland, NPR’s Steve Inskeep rigorously revisits the events leading up to Indian removal, focusing on two men fighting for their respective maps—one who saw necessary real estate for white settlement and the other who had legal and historic claim to the space.

While Andrew Jackson’s name looms large in American history, many might not be aware of one of Jackson’s greatest foils, a mixed-race politician named John Ross who “passed” for white or Cherokee depending on what the politics of the day called for, and fought his cause all the way to John Marshall’s Supreme Court.

Jacksonland steps into a centuries-old historic argument about the forces at work that led to the genocidal chapter of Indian removal in American history. In Inskeep’s hands, he creates a complex portrait of two key players of the day—one whose life’s work revolved around Indian removal and other who stood in his way. Inskeep spoke with Smithsonian.com about how the events in Jacksonland, recently released in paperback, offer a powerful parallel to today’s society and how he thinks the U.S. Treasury should design future bills. He even touches on the comparisons between Andrew Jackson and Donald Trump.

The title of your book is Jacksonland, but it almost felt like the story centered more on John Ross, the Cherokee politician who went up against Andrew Jackson. How did you decide on the title?

I wanted Jackson and Ross to be equals as characters in the book. Ultimately though, Jackson won and Jackson got to put his stamp on that real estate, and real estate was the heart of the whole thing.

But Ross was also a revelation to me. I learned a lot about Andrew Jackson in the process of writing this book, but I learned everything about Ross. I’d never heard about him before a few years ago, and even though he did lose, I make the argument that he added a lot to our democratic tradition and was an innovator in a lot of ways.

What got you interested in writing about this intersection of history?

I cover politics and that can be kind of depressing. It was especially bad a few years ago and that drove me back into history, which I’ve written some in the past and I’ve studied all my life. I ended up focusing on the 1830s, which is when our democratic system as we know it began to take shape in a way that we would recognize today. Of all the stories I looked into during that period, the story of Indian removal is the one that feels really visceral and still an open wound. There were other amazing things that happened in the era, but they don't have that same feeling of being unresolved.

The Martin Van Buren quote, that while other controversies “agitated the public mind in their day” would fade, the emotions aroused by Indian removal would probably “endure…as long as the government itself.”

I loved that quote, and it’s so true. In the afterword, I lay out all the different takes on this. Every generation has had their own version of this story and they’re widely different versions.

You write about how 1830 was this changing point in American history. Can you talk about the events and technologies that conspired to make this a crucial era in America’s timeline?

In the early years of the country, there was a free press, but not all that many newspapers, and there was a right to vote, but it was rather limited. There were property qualifications, and white men almost universally were the only ones who could vote. There were a handful of places where a few women and a few African-Americans voted, but white men essentially had the vote. Not even all of them, or necessarily most of them could vote, and what had happened by Jackson's time was first that the franchise had been expanding and so more people had the opportunity to vote, and the media was expanding decade after decade. I believe there’s around three dozen newspapers in the colonies at the time of the Revolution, and by 1828 there's something like 800 of them. And every decade, there’s another few hundred of them, so there's more people who can vote and they're better informed and engaged by this increasingly competitive media that's often sharing competing points of view.

States were changing the way that they voted for a president. These electors who actually choose a president had been themselves chosen by state legislators, but state after state was changing that, and by Jackson’s time, the majority of states were having popular votes for president.

The competition of that period massively increased participation itself, which allowed a space for Jackson.

What parallels do you see in the changes happening in Andrew Jackson’s era and the changes in America today?

One of the things I learned that I felt instinctively, but I feel that I can now document, is the way that we build upon our political traditions without necessarily even knowing it. When people today make certain statements that seem a little paranoid or that they’re worried about who's really running the government, and, sometimes in legitimate ways, talking about how the government has been captured by outside forces, worrying about foreigners, worrying about unelected judges, things like that. You hear those same patterns of argument in the 1820s and ’30s. The issues are different but the attitudes are quite similar.

I wrote an article for The New York Times in February, it compares Jackson to Trump. I want to be really, really careful about that comparison, I waited for months before I came around to writing that article because they’re very different people in terms of their resumes and so forth. What Trump captures is Jackson’s attitude, which you could probably say of a lot of other politicians through the generations; there’s this political tradition of talking a certain way, assuming a certain fighting stance. “The people who are on my side, I’m going to do everything to defend them and I don’t care who gets hurt.” That was Jackson’s approach, it is Trump’s approach and it is a particular American political attitude.

It was fascinating to see Andrew Jackson’s relationship with the newspaper reporters of his day in Jacksonland. You point out that he drew a circle of them in as advisers, and also point out the elite newspaper he didn’t trust, The National Intelligencer. Did it surprise you how similar the president’s relationship with the press was back then compared to how it is today?

In the early 1800s there was this paper, The National Intelligencer, and people would say it was The Washington Post of its day, it was The New York Times of its day, but there's really no comparison because it was the newspaper. Sure, there were other newspapers across the country, but this was the established newspaper. Because there was basically one ruling party (that had its different factions and wings) for a couple of decades after the Federalists faded away, you only needed one newspaper.

By the 1820s, people like Jackson were concluding that they needed their own outlets to get their own views out and not rely on this establishment paper. Not just powerful men like Jackson thought like that. African Americans recognized in this period that they needed their own newspapers, and the very first black-owned newspaper was founded in 1827. The Cherokees realized they needed a newspaper and founded theirs in 1828.

We worry a lot about the fragmentation about media today because we fear that everybody is just tuning into stuff that confirms their biases. I think that happens, but generally speaking, the increase in the number of outlets is great—you can throw any idea out there in the marketplace and if people are interested in it you can find an audience.

You have mentioned that one of the toughest questions you were asked while doing your book tour came from a Cherokee man who asked, “Are you just another white man making money off us? Or will you help us get our land back?” How did you approach researching and writing the Cherokee side of this story?

You’ve put your finger on one of the hardest things, because Indian history is extraordinarily complicated. The sources in those early years are really, really difficult because so many of the people involved were illiterate. You’re relying not on Indians in their own words, but on Indians’ words and customs as interpreted by white men who I guess were sympathetic, because they were hanging out with Indians. Or they might be patronizing. There’s so many opportunities for misinterpretation there.

The first thing you have to do with the sources that are available is try to sort through that and figure out what is credible there and what to disregard. I give an example in the book; there are a number of people who left descriptions of Native American nations in the southeast. They wrote them down as part of an effort to prove their theory that Indians were the lost tribe of Israel—which is kind of, wow, that’s really something, no evidence for that.

But nevertheless, they were there and observing people, and so you have all these useful observations. You have to somehow sort through all of that and try to do it in a respectful way, but also an accurate way. Ultimately, the challenge of this influenced the characters that I chose. There are any number of Indian leaders who are extremely interesting that we could have focused on who were illiterate, and the only words we have of them are things that they said or supposedly said to white men. The white men wrote them down accurately, or not so accurately, or whatever.

In John Ross, I had a guy who wrote enough letters that they filled two thick volumes in the Library of Congress, and that’s not even a complete set of his letters. I had thousands and thousands of his own words.

The most important thing for me to do was to make sure that Native American story fit into the broader strand of American history. I think that there’s a tendency to take Indian history and deal with it one or two ways that are different than that. One is just to assume that it all ended; that people were here, they were crushed and that’s the end of that, and the other is to assume that it is this unusual specialty way off to the side that isn’t all that relevant to America today. Neither of those is quite what I wanted to get at. I felt as I researched this material that what we had was a part of American culture and, as I argue with Ross, particularly, a part of American democratic tradition and it ought to get its place.

Speaking of American democratic tradition, in the book, you chronicle Ross’ legal struggle to maintain Cherokee land and the failure of the system to follow through with its promises. What did Jacksonland show you about the failings of democracy?

We see in this book a country that’s really diverse—more diverse than we may have realized—and people are struggling with this question of how to respect everybody’s individual rights and still make sure we fit together as one country.

People who were here in the early 1800s came up with some really terrible answers to that question. But the nature of democracy is that nothing is ever over, nothing is ever finished and so we come back and we argue it again and we argue it again and we argue it again. I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’ve come up with better answers over time and so we can hope that we’ll come up with better answers still.

You paint a nuanced picture of Andrew Jackson in this story, a man who has this incredible temper but wields it strategically and has an eye for posterity. How did your understanding of Jackson change writing this book?

I don’t think I had a clear idea of what Jackson did or who he really was or why he had such a hold on the American imagination. This is another guy I chose because he left behind so many of his own words and his letters are amazing. He’s so full of fire and passion and such a jerk sometimes, but very strategic as you point out. I just didn’t quite grasp what he had done.

I was aware of Indian removal since junior high school. It was a page in my seventh grade history class, I think. And it was a memorable page, but it was only a page. But the thing I realized was that Indian removal wasn’t just a thing he did among many things that he did—it was a central project of his life and his presidency. It was the making of the South that we’re much more familiar with from the Civil War onward. I just hadn’t realized quite what his significance was in just literally building the country, assembling the real estate for it.

You’ve mentioned that during your book tour you encountered many modern fans of Jackson. What were they saying? What surprised you about how they saw him?

There were people I ran into that had a son or a nephew named after Andrew Jackson. Today. And you find people in Nashville and elsewhere who kind of wonder, “Why does everyone pick on this man? He’s a great hero.”

And I really do understand that. No matter how much some people will instinctively dislike Jackson, he was really persistent. He never gave up. He constantly overcame health problems and just kept showing up for work and doing what he was doing.

Now, we can wish he did things differently. But the way he handled himself, there’s something admirable about that. And you understand why it is that some people today admire him although that admiration is kind of below the surface. It’s been muted. You’ll notice in this whole $20 bill controversy there hasn’t been a huge faction of America that has spoken up for Jackson, although I know from my experience that they’re kind of out there.

I saw that you wrote an op-ed last year arguing that Jackson should be on one side of the $20 bill and Ross on the other. To me, that image almost seems like a short summary of your book.

I think that would be a graphic illustration of what the book is trying to say, that democracy is a struggle, that it’s not one great person who comes up with the obvious right answers and you just do what's best for the country. You have an argument about what’s best for the country and the argument goes on, and it’s from the argument you would hope over time that better and better answers emerge.

I love the idea that they’ve ultimately chosen. They didn’t do exactly what I proposed, but they’re doing a two-sided bill: Andrew Jackson on one side, Harriet Tubman on the other. That’s actually kind of cool. You have this guy who for all of his greatness was also a slave owner and actually personally chased down escaped slaves. And on the other side of the bill you have a woman who helped slaves escape. That is democracy right there in a really visceral way. That’s going to be a powerful bill, and I wouldn't mind if they did something like that with all of the bills.

Why Palestinians Reject Peace. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

A Palestinian carries a poster marking “Nakba” Day lamenting the 68th anniversary of the creation of Israel in 1948. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser).

Why Palestinians Reject Peace. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, June 14, 2016.

Tobin:

As the New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief from 1979 to 1994, David Shipler was was the focus of a great deal of justified criticism about the paper’s bias against Israel. He wrote a 1987 book titled Arab and Jew, which was the recipient both of a Pulitzer and full-throated and passionate criticism for its pure moral equivalence. But an interview with Shipler in the Times of Israel reveals a change in his thinking that tells us something about the way the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has changed since his reporting days.

The conventional wisdom about Israeli society in most of the mainstream international media holds that the Jewish population has become more intractable and opposed to peace. Shipler provides a far more nuanced view, derived from conversations with young people conducted for a new edition of his book. They display a diversity of thought that is surprising to him. Whereas as late as 1993, the time of the signing of the Oslo Accords, almost all Israelis saw themselves as the sole victims of the long war for their independence, now they provide a variety of answers—with many recognizing the Palestinian narrative of suffering or seeing “everybody” in the region as victims of the conflict.

The contrast with Palestinians attitudes is what’s so striking. At the time of the publication of his book, Palestinians merely wanted to “turn back the clock to 1967” with an Israeli withdrawal from the territories. Today, Shipler says, things are very different.

But in speaking to people now, I understood that the time frame has become 1948 for the Palestinians. … Now Israelis are seen only as colonialists. There is no recognition of Jewish history in the Land of Israel, of the Holocaust, and the real reasons for the creation of history.

Just as important is that he says that, whereas there was a wide gap between what Palestinian leaders and their people were saying in the 1980s, now there is no daylight between the sort of incitement that is spewed by Hamas and Fatah and the conversations he had with ordinary Arabs.

When Shipler was actively reporting on the conflict, he was an exponent of the idea that peace could only come when both sides would be able to see the justice in the claims of the other side. By that definition, it’s clear that one side has moved toward peace, the other has not.

Shipler’s assertion that most Israelis no longer view themselves as the sole victims in this conflict is unquestionable. It is also unquestionable that Palestinian attitudes have gone in the other direction. Indeed, Shipler’s impressions reinforce research conducted by Daniel Polisar demonstrating that support for terror and opposition to peace was mainstream Palestinian opinion and not merely the views of a small group of violent extremists.

After two decades of concessions and withdrawals on Israel’s part, Palestinians now routinely speak of all of Israel—including liberal, cosmopolitan Tel Aviv, where terrorists struck last week—as “occupied” territory. So, despite the emphasis on settlements and Netanyahu’s supposedly hardline personality, Israel’s willingness to do what Shipler and peace activists advised had the opposite effect on the Palestinians than they thought.

By granting legitimacy to Palestinian concerns, Israelis haven’t inspired reciprocity but have encouraged their foes to double down on their narrative in which the Jews are interlopers without rights or history. It has convinced them that the Israelis are thieves who must be forced to disgorge all of their stolen goods (i.e. all of Israel) rather than fellow humans with whom they must share land if there is to be peace. Shipler seems to have caught onto the basic conundrum of the peace process that has eluded many of his successors at the Times and elsewhere in the media.