Ariel Sharon: A Man of His Times. By Alan Dershowitz.

Ariel Sharon: A man of his times. By Alan Dershowitz. New York Daily News, January 5, 2014.

Where Is the Palestinian Ben-Gurion? By Efraim Karsh.

Where is the Palestinian Ben-Gurion? By Efraim Karsh. Jerusalem Post, September 15, 2011.

Karsh:

Sixty-four years after partitioning Palestine into two independent states – one Jewish, the other Arab – the UN General Assembly is set again to vote on the same issue. While this time around Palestinian leaders appear to be preaching compromise, closer scrutiny reveals this to be a tactical rather than a strategic change of heart, stemming from the different circumstances of the two votes and aimed at disguising their lingering unwillingness (or perhaps inability) to live with a two-state solution.

 

In 1947, prior to the first UN General Assembly vote, Palestinian leaders rejected any form of Jewish self-determination in Palestine. Hajj Amin Husseini, their most prominent leader from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, upheld that “there is no place in Palestine for two races.” All areas conquered by the Arabs during the 1948 war were cleansed of Jews.

 

These days the Palestinians can hardly ask the UN to dismantle one of its longest standing member states and to expel its citizens.

 

Yet by seeking international recognition of their statehood and pressure for a complete Israeli withdrawal without a peace agreement, or, indeed, any quid pro quo, they are continuing their predecessors’ rejection of a negotiated settlement and laying the diplomatic groundwork for the renewal of the assault on the Jewish state.

 

The PLO’s hallowed National Covenant envisages the permanent departure of most Jews from Israel. PLO chairman Yasser Arafat’s phased strategy of June 1974, which was never disowned, stipulates that any territory gained through diplomacy would merely be a springboard for the “complete liberation of Palestine.” At the negotiating table during the Oslo years, the PLO’s most adamant demand was for the subversion of Israel’s demographic composition by forcing it to accept the so-called “right of return” and allow refugees of the 1948 war, and their descendants, to return to territory that is now part of the state of Israel. At the moment Jews presently constitute about 80 percent of Israel’s seven million- strong population; by 2020, nearly one in four Israelis will be Arab, owing to this sector’s far higher birth rate. Were millions of Palestinians to be resettled within Israel, it would soon cease to be a majority Jewish state and everybody knows it.

 

To present the “right of return” as a nonnegotiable demand is not to negotiate at all, particularly when Palestinian leaders themselves refuse to accept alien minorities as part of a peace settlement: In June, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas told the Arab League that the future Palestinian state should be free of Israelis (that is Jews, since virtually no other Israelis live in the West Bank). He reiterated this vision of a Judenrein Palestine last month, telling a delegation of visiting members of Congress that “I am seeking a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with Jerusalem as its capital, empty of settlements.”

 

Like Husseini, Arafat was far more interested in destroying the Jewish national cause than in leading his own people to statehood. As far back as 1978, he told his close friend and collaborator, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, that the Palestinians lacked the traditions, unity and discipline to have a successful state. He was right. It was the Palestinians’ lack of communal solidarity – the willingness to subordinate personal interest to the collective good – that accounted for their collapse and dispersion during the 1948 war. The subsequent physical separation of the various parts of the Palestinian Diaspora and longstanding cleavages between West Bankers and Gazans prevented the crystallization of a cohesive national identity.

 

Sadly, Arafat had no intention of redressing this predicament. Given control of the Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza as part of the Oslo process, he made his bleak prognosis a self-fulfilling prophecy, establishing an oppressive and corrupt regime in the worst tradition of Arab dictatorships, while launching the most destructive confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians since the 1948 war.

 

In the process, he destroyed the fragile civil society and relatively productive economy that had developed in the interim.

 

Two years ago, in a bold departure from this destructive path, PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad embarked on the first state building effort in Palestinian history, one that has had some successes. However, while he recently pronounced his initiative a mission accomplished amid the diplomatic buildup to the UN vote, he knows better. Abbas’s presidency, and by extension Fayyad’s own premiership, remain unconstitutional. Not only because Abbas defied Hamas’s landslide victory in the January 2006 parliamentary elections by establishing an alternative government headed by Fayyad, but also because his own presidency expired in January 2009.

 

Fayyad barely challenged the corrupt and dysfunctional system established by Arafat.

 

The two groups dominating Palestinian life, the PLO and Hamas, remain armed groups (and active practitioners of terrorism) rather than political parties – an assured recipe for a failed state. (The Oslo Accords charged the PA with dismantling all armed groups in the West Bank and Gaza, but Arafat never bothered to comply.) Even if Abbas were to genuinely commit himself to reform after the attainment of statehood, his tenuous authority would continue to be defied by Hamas, which has not only transformed the Gaza Strip into a an Islamist micro-state but also wields considerable power and influence in the West Bank.

 

Whatever the UN vote may achieve, it will not be a step toward Palestinian statehood.

 

Contrary to the received wisdom, Israel was established not by a UN General Assembly resolution but through the unwavering determination of the Zionist leadership, or rather David Ben-Gurion, shortly to become Israel’s first prime minister, in the face of mounting international skepticism regarding partition (in March 1948 the US administration effectively backed down from the idea) and doubts about the new state’s ability to fend off both Palestinian violence and a pan-Arab attempt to abort it at birth.

 

In doing so, Ben-Gurion could rely on an extraordinarily resilient and vibrant national community, armed with an unwavering sense of purpose and an extensive network of political, social and economic institutions built over decades of pre-state national development.

 

In this respect, eighteen years after being given the chance to establish their own state free of Israel’s occupation, and despite the billions of dollars in international aid poured into this effort, the Palestinians have barely made it out of the gate. One can only hope that the international community will at long last pressure Palestinian leaders to own up to their obligations and opt for a true build-up of civil society that will ensure their constituents a decent and peaceful existence, rather than seek illusionary shortcuts and intensified conflict with Israel.

The Catastrophe Called Nakba. By Sam Sokol.

The Catastrophe Called Nakba. By Sam Sokol. Middle East Forum, May 10, 2012. Also at Secular Zionist. Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Sokol:

“All of the world knows what happened here in 1948,’ Daoud Abu Lebdeh says, while leaning against a table in a coffee shop on the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus.

 

“The Israeli soldiers or the Israeli militias like the Hagana, Kahane, the Irgun and Lehi came here and they [kicked] the people outside from their homes.”

 

Daoud is a nondescript man of 24 from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Wadi Joz. A correspondent and blogger with the Palestinian website the Middle East Post, Daoud has come highly recommended as an expert on the Nakba, the “catastrophe” of the birth of the State of Israel, and concurrently, the start of the Palestinian refugee problem, by Fatah Youth activist and Jerusalemite Mousa Abassi.

 

Except for the historical inaccuracy of placing the radical Jewish nationalist movement of Kahanism in the 1940s, several decades too early, Daoud’s statement echoes the standard Palestinian narrative of the Nakba, a topic which comes up every year as Arabs within Israel, the Palestinian Authority and around the world commemorate the what they see as the tragedy of Israel’s establishment on May 14, 1948.

 

Elaborating on the Palestinian narrative regarding what they have termed “ethnic cleansing,” Daoud explains that “the English books, the American history books, it’s all the same. There is nothing to change. The whole world knows what happened here.”

 

“[The Jews] came here and established their own state [and] until today they have prevented us [from] establishing our state near to their state.”

 

The Palestinian narrative is very clear. According to Daoud and the Arab version of events, the Zionist movement began bringing in Jews to Palestine, then a peaceful backwater of the Ottoman Empire in which a distinct Palestinian culture had developed over centuries.

 

Having convinced the British to back their nationalist goals at the expense of the local Palestinians, the Jews began to bring in illegal immigrants and eventually drove the Palestinians out of their homes in an orgy of violence and massacre.

 

The Jews, explains Daoud, have no claim to any part of Palestine.

 

Asked why his predecessors did not accept the 1947 United Nations partition plan, unlike the Zionist movement which endorsed it wholeheartedly, and instead chose to go to war, the Palestinian journalist grabs my iPhone off of the table.

 

“I have taken your phone,” he says. “What do you do?” The partition resolution, he claims, was like someone stealing a smartphone and then asking to split it. He asserts that the Zionist movement had no claim to any part of the land and that asking the Arabs to accept that they did was a trampling of their rights.

 

According to Daoud, the ancient Jewish presence in Israel, preceding the arrival of Arabs and Islam to the country by thousands of years, does not have any bearing on the current political reality.

 

Asked why, he counters that the Jewish presence in this land is similar to that of the Muslim Moors who conquered Spain.

 

“Just as I can’t, in the name of Islam, go to Spain to occupy it and [expel] the Spanish because [in the past we were there],” he says, “it’s the same thing that you [Israel] are doing now. It’s not my problem that [King] David was here and Muhammad was there.”

 

The Palestinian focus on the Nakba, and on the return to homes lost in the fighting and subsequent Arab mass flight from Israel in 1948, has intensified over the past few years, he asserts. Despite an emphasis on the Nakba, and Israel’s illegitimacy, in the PA’s educational curriculum since the early 1990s, Daoud is sure that his people have grown more attached to the Nakba narrative because they are disillusioned by the failure to achieve a two-state solution.

 

However, despite the popularity and wide currency enjoyed by the Palestinian version of events, not everybody subscribes to the Nakba narrative.

 

Efraim Karsh, an expatriate Israeli, historian and Arabist, is the editor of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Quarterly, published by Dr. Daniel Pipes’s think tank the Middle East Forum, and, speaking with the Post by Skype from his home in the city of brotherly love, affirms his contention that the popular version of events is based on erroneous sources.

 

Karsh, who recently published Palestine Betrayed, a history of the Nakba, explains that it is precisely the widespread acceptance of Palestinian historiography that has stood in the way of implementing a two-state solution and accounts for, in his view, Palestinian intransigence.

 

An accurate history of the conflict, he opens, should be independent of political ideology. He believes history has no relation to political ideology. He himself, he continues, is an advocate of the two-state paradigm, despite his absolute rejection of the Palestinian narrative.

 

One of Karsh’s main contentions in his book is the responsibility of the Palestinian and outside Arab leadership for the events of 1948.

 

“In 1947, prior to the first UN General Assembly vote, Palestinian leaders rejected any form of Jewish self-determination in Palestine. Hajj Amin Husseini, their most prominent leader from the early 1920s to the late 1940s, upheld that ‘there is no place in Palestine for two races.’ All areas conquered by the Arabs during the 1948 war were cleansed of Jews,” he wrote in this newspaper last year.

 

Delving through Arab, Israeli and British archives, Karsh in Palestine Betrayed paints a portrait of a divided and not at all cohesive Palestinian-Arab society that, as he put it “all but disintegrated, with 300,000-340,000 of its members fleeing their homes to other parts of Palestine and to the neighboring Arab states.”

 

Writing that “nowhere at the time was the collapse and dispersion of Palestinian Arab society al-Nakba, ‘the catastrophe,’ as it would come to be known in Palestinian and Arab discourse – described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by Jews,” Karsh went on to quote contemporary Palestinian Arab leader Musa Alami, who stated that “If ultimately the Palestinians evacuated their country, it was not out of cowardice, but because they had lost all confidence in the existing system of defense.”

 

Even more damning, in Karsh’s eyes, is a statement by Sir John Troutbeck, the head of the British Middle East Office in Cairo, regarding a 1949 fact-finding mission to the Gaza Strip.

 

“‘We know who our enemies are,’ they [the Arab refugees] will say, and they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare, persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes.”

 

Referring to these and similar statements, Karsh tells the Post that “the beginning of my book basically tells it all. In 1948-1949 no one among the Palestinians spoke about the Jews as responsible for their plight. It came only later, ex post facto, that they started explaining why they ran away. If you look, there are quotes of refugees in Gaza in 1949 telling the British ‘look, our leaders, the Arabs, they pushed us out but not the Jews’ so I cannot think that you need much more than this [to understand the situation].”

 

In the Fifties, Karsh says, the narrative began to change, with the plight of the Palestinian refugees being used as a tool in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

 

“In the Fifties you see the discredited Arab leaders like the Mufti and others begin an attempt to basically absolve themselves or rehabilitate themselves in their constituents,” he says.

 

This alternative narrative, combined with statements by Daoud regarding repeated Israeli rejections of Palestinian peace offers which Karsh rejects as untrue, paint a picture, he says, of a people unwilling to face reality.

 

The current Palestinian historiography is “a combination of ignorance and reluctance to reconcile themselves to reality [and] the result is very dispiriting for the future for peace,” he continues.

 

Certainly, the PA’s continuing demand for the “right of return” would be looked upon differently by a world that believed the Palestinian exodus to be the fault of the Arab states and local communal leaders.

 

In fact, Karsh continues, while there has been, even after the Roman exile, a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel for millennia, the very concept of Palestinian nationalism is a 20th-century creation.

 

Among his sources, Karsh quotes former Arab nationalist, Knesset member and alleged Hezbollah spy Azmi Bishara, who once made an appearance on Israeli television to announce that he doesn’t “think there is a Palestinian nation at all. I think there is an Arab nation.

 

“I always thought so and I did not change my mind. I do not think there is a Palestinian nation, I think its a colonialist invention – Palestinian nation. When were there any Palestinians? Where did it come from? I think there is an Arab nation. I never turned to be a Palestinian nationalist, despite my decisive struggle against the occupation. I think that until the end of the 19th century, Palestine was the south of Greater Syria.”

 

Of course, Daoud is having none of this. He says that while he is ready to accept a two-state solution, there really is no legitimate Jewish sovereignty in Palestine and that the entire conflict is the fault of Zionist territorial hunger and ethnic cleansing. Karsh’s opinion, he believes, is the historical revision, not the current Nakba narrative.

 

“The Jews suffered at the hands of the Nazis. What we don’t know is why we the Palestinians must pay the price for that.”

2014: Finally, the Liberal Moment? By George Packer.

A Year to Test Liberalism’s Fighting Faith. By George Packer. The New Yorker, January 3, 2014.

Packer:

Is 2014, finally, the liberal moment?

 

With the financial crisis and Barack Obama’s ascent to the Presidency, 2008 struck many observers—including this one—as reminiscent of the watershed election year 1932. Even Obama’s personal moderation recalled the careful, budget-balancing F.D.R. of that campaign. It was national calamity and need that would push President Roosevelt in a more radical direction, and it seemed that similar events—bank failures, mass unemployment, epidemic foreclosures, despair—would drive President Obama the same way, toward equally far-reaching policies.

 

It didn’t happen like that, and for many reasons: this time around, the onset of an incipient depression nearly coincided with the arrival of the new Administration, and the hard times never ran quite deep enough to unite the country; the new President showed his inexperience, governed more cautiously than he had campaigned, and lost the rhetorical power that had connected him to the voters; his opponents, far from beaten, grew more extreme than ever; key institutions like Congress, the media, and corporations were no longer responsive to the demands of democracy; the public had lost its trust. And so we’ve had five years of far-from-unmitigated letdown.

 

The new year began with the inauguration of Bill de Blasio. In his first address as this city’s new Mayor, he aligned himself with New Yorkers from that earlier era: Roosevelt himself; Al Smith, the reform-minded machine pol, who fought for improved working conditions in sweatshops and later turned against the New Deal; Frances Perkins, the social worker who became Roosevelt’s labor secretary and implemented the forty-hour week and the minimum wage; and Fiorello La Guardia, de Blasio’s favorite predecessor in the mayor’s office, a Republican who, according to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “played the broker between New York radicalism and the progressivism of inner America.”

 

Along with Elizabeth Warren, de Blasio is the most visible face and potent voice of a new political spirit. For the first time in decades, liberalism is once again becoming “a fighting faith” (Whitman’s phrase, revived by Schlesinger). This spirit has almost nothing to do with the perpetual battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, or the Center for American Progress against the Third Way, or Clinton vs. Warren in 2016. It is the political articulation of a wide and deep sense of outrage and disenchantment, which is why it has legs. It has to do with a sense that the deck is stacked in favor of the few, that ordinary people’s aspirations hardly stand a chance.

 

Americans are loath to feel that way, which is why the moment has been such a long time coming. It took form through the crises of 2008, the muddled legislative battles of 2009-10, the Occupy memes and protests of 2011, the electoral campaigns around the country for a higher minimum wage, and the emergence of inequality as the focal point of profound economic discontents. Obama gave a speech about it in Osawatomie, Kansas, in the wake of Occupy, and last year he pushed it toward the center of his second Inaugural Address, and last month, speaking in a poor Washington neighborhood, he gave it his fullest consideration to date, calling inequality “the defining challenge of our time” and pledging to devote his second term to confronting it.

 

But breakthroughs rarely happen in second terms, not even in Roosevelt’s, certainly not in today’s Washington. Obama’s contribution to fighting inequality and enlarging opportunity is already law, a historic one—the Affordable Care Act. Therein lies his Presidency’s claim to greatness, and its pathos: not just the political bloodshed, the flawed rollout, and the uncertain implementation but also the sense—which Obama perhaps shares—that he should have achieved even more. If there’s a new liberal moment, President Obama may have missed it.

 

Anyone who’s disgusted with the politics and economics of inequality should wish Bill de Blasio well. He made it his theme and rode it to an overwhelming victory, in the process surprising opinionmakers who live on the winning side of the divide with the news that large numbers of other New Yorkers feel left out and discarded. It’s unclear how much the Mayor of New York can do about entrenched economic unfairness, beyond bringing to bear the power of rhetoric. It’s also unclear whether de Blasio is the mayor to do it. New York’s mayors are managers more than policymakers—that’s where they succeed or fail. It’s risky for de Blasio’s tenure to symbolize so much when his power to realize the vision is so limited. I admire him for aiming so high, but it’s like watching a man set out on a tightrope strung between skyscrapers.

 

De Blasio’s speech at City Hall was a ringing affirmation of his own cause; as such, it placed an immense magnifying glass over his mayoralty, one that also projects a target. The inaugural ceremonies were an unusually ideological and harsh indictment of the Bloomberg years and Bloomberg’s New York. A minister described the city as a “plantation.” Letitia James, the new public advocate, portrayed New York as a heartless place with a “Dickensian” justice system, where the only person who cares about the homeless and hungry is, apparently, Letitia James. De Blasio, though more tempered, cast his “progressive” vision starkly against the “far-right” policies of recent years—fair, accurate, but divisive. You don’t have to be a member of the one per cent to feel uneasy with the us-against-them tone of the proceedings.

 

De Blasio won in a landslide, but his mandate won’t extend beyond the first severely botched snow removal, the first transit disaster, the first spike in violent crime. New York is a city with many power centers, all of them more or less booby-trapped. De Blasio, with more than just garbage pickup riding on his term, is going to need all the help he can get.

What the Pope Meant to Say. By William McGurn.

What the Pope meant to say. By William McGurn. New York Post, January 3, 2014.

John Kerry and America to the Rescue – But Is It Too Late? By David Blair

John Kerry and America to the rescue –but is it too late? By David Blair. The Telegraph, January 2, 2014.

John Kerry’s attempt to resolve the most toxic disputes in the Middle East may be doomed.

John Kerry’s Mideast peace bid may yet bear some fruit. By Jackson Diehl. Washington Post, January 2, 2014. Also here.

How Craven Art Thou, Professor. By Eileen F. Toplansky,

How Craven Art Thou, Professor. By Eileen F. Toplansky. American Thinker. January 3, 2013.

The Jewish State and the Story the Palestinians Hold Dear. By Rick Richman.

The Jewish State and the Story the Palestinians Hold Dear. By Rick Richman. Commentary, January 3, 2014.

Richman:

In her “Memo from Jerusalem” in the New York Times, Jodi Rudoren asserts that “in recent weeks,” Benjamin Netanyahu has “catapulted to the fore” an issue “even more intractable than old ones like security and settlements: a demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.” She reported it is now a “core issue” in the current negotiations and that “critics” say Netanyahu raised it as a poison pill:

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has repeatedly said that the Palestinians will never agree to it, most recently in a letter to President Obama last month. The Palestinians . . . contend that recognizing Israel as a Jewish state would disenfranchise its 1.6 million Arab citizens, undercut the right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees and, most important, require a psychological rewriting of the story they hold dear about their longtime presence in the land.

The issue, however, was not recently “catapulted to the fore” by Netanyahu; it is an issue that long pre-dates him; and it goes to the heart of whether the “peace process” is about peace. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane, picking up the story with the internal 2007 Palestinian memorandum entitled “Strategy and Talking Points for Responding to the Precondition of Recognizing Israel as a ‘Jewish State’,” leaked in the “Palestine Papers.” The memo contained the following instruction for Palestinian negotiators:

We recommend that the Palestinian negotiators maintain their position not to recognize or otherwise characterize the state of Israel as “Jewish”. Any recognition of Israel within a treaty or agreement should be limited to recognizing it as a sovereign state. It should not recognize Israel as a “Jewish state”, “state for the Jewish people”, “homeland for the Jewish people” or any similar characterization.

The reasons in the memo did not include “the story [the Palestinians] hold dear about their longtime presence in the land.” Rather, the memo warned that “[r]ecognizing the Jewish state implies recognition of a Jewish people and recognition of its right to self-determination.” The Palestinians did not want to recognize a Jewish people, a Jewish state, a Jewish homeland, Jewish self-determination, or any Jewish demographic considerations.

 

Netanyahu assumed office on March 31, 2009 and began preparations for his May meeting with President Obama. On May 3, 2009, Netanyahu’s senior advisor, Ron Dermer (currently Israel’s U.S. ambassador), spoke at the AIPAC Policy Conference, setting forth Israel’s position (see the videos here and here). He identified the “core issue” preventing peace:

The half of the Palestinian polity that is not openly dedicated to Israel’s destruction [as Hamas is] are unwilling to recognize Israel as the Jewish state. … For those of you think that this has anything to do with the refugee issue — you’re wrong. In 1947, there wasn’t a single refugee, and the Palestinian and the Arab world was not willing to recognize a nation state for the Jewish people. That is a core issue, the core issue. . . .

In their May 18, 2009 press conference, Obama and Netanyahu both referenced Israel as a Jewish state. Obama affirmed “[i]t is in U.S. national security interests to assure that Israel’s security as an independent Jewish state is maintained.” Netanyahu said that for there really to be an “end to the conflict,” the Palestinians “will have to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.” He explained why in his June 14, 2009 Bar-Ilan speech:

Many good people have told us that withdrawal from territories is the key to peace with the Palestinians. Well, we withdrew. But the fact is that every withdrawal was met with massive waves of terror, by suicide bombers and thousands of missiles. . . . [T]o our regret, Palestinian moderates are not yet ready to say the simple words: Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people, and it will stay that way. … Therefore, a fundamental prerequisite for ending the conflict is a public, binding and unequivocal Palestinian recognition of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.

In his 2010 appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations, Netanyahu called on Abbas to give a Bir Zeit speech, to affirm the Palestinians would recognize a Jewish state if Israel recognized a Palestinian one:

They have to openly say it, not for our sake but for the sake of actually persuading their people to make the great psychological change for peace. I’ve said it. I’ve stood before my people and before my constituency and I said what my vision of peace includes, and I did that not without some consequence … But this is what leaders have to do. They have to educate their people.

In 2011, Tal Becker, a lead Israeli negotiator in the year-long Annapolis Process in 2007-08, published “The Claim for Recognition of Israel as a Jewish State,” under the auspices of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, explaining that recognition of a Jewish state is the natural counterpart to recognition of a Palestinian one:

This is not a new demand. It is a reaction to the sense that what was once largely self-evident is now under threat. Israel’s leaders increasingly view the erosion of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish nation-state as a challenge not just to national identity, but to national security. . . . [T]he physical threat posed by Israel’s regional enemies has been compounded by an assault on its raison d’etre as a Jewish homeland … In this context, [demanding recognition of] the Jewish people’s right to self-determination has acquired significance within Israel . . . as a component of the national defense.

The premise of the “two-state solution” is “two states for two peoples” (another phrase no Palestinian leader will utter). But if the Palestinians won’t recognize a Jewish state, what they have in mind is not a solution but a two-stage plan, in which the Palestinians first gain a sovereign state and then prosecute their “right of return” to the other one–the one whose status as a Jewish state they never conceded. They seek not an end of the conflict, but a chess move in a bigger game.

 

A “psychological rewriting”–to use Rudoren’s quaint phrase–is precisely what peace requires, but it has nothing to do with “the story [the Palestinians] hold dear.” It has to do with their longstanding objective since 1947. They want a state, but not if it requires that they recognize a Jewish one. In today’s Jerusalem Post, Khaled Abu Toameh reports that Palestinian sources have told the Palestinian daily Al-Quds that the “most dangerous” part of Secretary of State Kerry’s proposed “framework” is Israel’s demand that the Palestinians recognize it as a Jewish state. One can see why: if the Palestinians accepted it, they would have to end the conflict.


The Jewish State in Question. By Bernard Avishai. The New Yorker, January 2, 2014.

Sticking Point in Peace Talks: Recognition of a Jewish State. By Jodi Rudoren. New York Times, January 1, 2014.

The Claim for Recognition of Israel as a Jewish State: A Reassessment. By Tal Becker. The Washington Institute. Policy Focus No. 108, February 2011.

We’ll ignore a “worthless” framework deal, says PLO. By Khaled Abu Toameh. Jerusalem Post, January 3, 2014.

Program in Jewish Studies: Visting Professor Bernard Avishai on the Hebrew Republic. Video. Vanderbilt University, October 27, 2008. YouTube.

Ariel Sharon and the Great Leader Peace Myth. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Sharon and the Great Leader Peace Myth. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, January 2, 2014.

Why Ariel Sharon Could Have Saved Israel. By Jacob Heilbrunn. The National Interest, January 3, 2014.


Tobin:

After almost eight years in a vegetative state it appears that former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s long struggle for life may be at its end. According to Tel Hashomer Hospital’s spokesman, Sharon’s condition has deteriorated and sources are telling the Israeli press that his organs are failing, leaving little doubt about the ultimate outcome. When the end comes it is to be expected that most of the international press will center their obituaries on the more controversial aspects of his public career. As a military officer, a Cabinet minister, and then prime minister, Sharon was often viewed as a “bulldozer” with few fans outside of those who care about Israel’s security and many detractors, both at home an abroad. They will focus on the debate about the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon and the building of Israel’s security fence in the wake of the Palestinian terror offensive known as the Second Intifada so as to besmirch his reputation as well as that of the Jewish state that he spent his life defending.

 

But as much as Sharon was the bête noire of the Israeli left as well as Israel-bashers in general, he will also be spoken of as an example of a leader who had the credibility and the guts to try to end the conflict with the Palestinians. Sharon’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza will be cited repeatedly by Middle East experts like Aaron David Miller not so much for his failure to devise a unilateral solution to the conflict but because it provides a contrast with what Miller and other members of the foreign-policy establishment consider Benjamin Netanyahu’s lackluster leadership. Having exited the scene years ago Sharon has now been elevated in the eyes of many of his country’s friends and critics (such as the National Interest’s Jacob Heilbrunn) if only because it allows them the opportunity to bash the man who occupies the office he once held. Though they will be right to say that no one on the current Israeli political scene has the mythic status that Sharon attained, the idea that peace might be possible if Sharon or someone like him were in the prime minister’s office is a fallacy.

 

It is true that only someone with the security credentials that Sharon, who was a hero of several Israeli wars, possessed could have pulled off the Gaza withdrawal. Having been reelected in 1983 by running on a platform skewering Labor candidate Amram Mitzna’s proposal for abandoning Gaza, Sharon blew up the Likud Party and rammed the same proposal through the Knesset and implemented it despite the opposition of most of those who had supported him. That took not only guts but also the kind of self-confidence that perhaps only war heroes who have won landslide election victories possess.

 

Perhaps the aftermath of the Gaza withdrawal would have gone better or at least differently had Sharon not fallen ill. Like those who fantasize that the Oslo peace process might not have been such a failure if only Yitzhak Rabin had lived and forced the Palestinians to abide by the accords and rallied Israelis behind the deal, some will spin similarly unlikely, counter-factual scenarios about Sharon. Perhaps he would not have tolerated the Hamas coup in Gaza or not responded to the rain of missile fire that emanated from the Strip after the withdrawal with the same passivity that his successor Ehud Olmert displayed for almost three years before authorizing a counter-attack. But it is just as likely, if not more so, that Sharon would have been boxed in by the same unfortunate circumstances as Olmert. After all, Hamas had been shooting rockets at Israeli settlements in Gaza as well as southern Israel for years before the withdrawal without provoking a significant military response from Sharon’s government.

 

However, the real lesson to be drawn from this chapter of history is that the lack of great men with the vision to try something new is not what is preventing peace. From 2001 to 2005, Israelis and Palestinians were both governed by larger-than-life figures. Though it is unfair to compare Sharon, an honorable soldier and a veteran of democratic politics, to a terrorist murderer like Yasir Arafat, one must concede that if any leaders had the standing to sell peace to their respective constituencies, it was those two. What was lacking was not someone with the ability to convince Israelis to take risks but a Palestinian partner and a Palestinian people ready to accept the notion of recognizing the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn. If Israelis are skeptical about Secretary of State John Kerry’s current campaign to get them to again contemplate withdrawing from territory it is not because they lack leaders, a desire for peace, or are devoted to the cause of keeping settlements but because they think repeating Sharon’s Gaza fiasco in the far more strategic West Bank would be madness.

 

Netanyahu may seem like a small man when compared to Sharon just as Mahmoud Abbas may strike Palestinians as a pygmy when contrasted to Arafat. But what are needed in the Middle East are not great men so much as a sea change in Palestinian culture that will make peace possible. Until that happens, waiting for another Sharon or even another Arafat won’t hasten the end of the conflict.

How Zionist Extremism Became British Spies’ Biggest Enemy. By Calder Walton.

How Zionist Extremism Became British Spies’ Biggest Enemy. By Calder Walton. Foreign Policy, January 2, 2014. Also here.

Beware of Future Terrorism. By Zalman Shoval.

Beware of Future Terrorism. By Zalman Shoval. Israel Hayom, December 31, 2013.

A Conservative Vision of Government. By Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner.

A Conservative Vision of Government. By Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner. National Affairs, No. 18 (Winter 2014).

Listening to the Founders. By Michael Gerson. Real Clear Politics, January 3, 2014. Also at the Washington Post.

Conservatism for the People. By Henry Olsen. National Affairs, No. 18 (Winter 2014).

The Bitter Pill Israel Must Swallow If It Wants Peace. By Yehezkel Dror.

The bitter pill Israel must swallow if it wants peace. By Yehezkel Dror. Haaretz, January 2, 2014.

Dror:

The recent discourse between Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Israeli business leaders reflects clearly the political-security dilemma facing Israel. It is highly unlikely that a stable agreement with the Palestinians meeting the security needs of Israel can be achieved. However, without substantive progress in the peace process, Israel is likely to face political and economic decline and escalating security dangers.

 

As we reach the 100-year anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, many books are being published on its causes. Having read four of them, one clear conclusion emerges: It could have been different, but a small number of decision makers suffered from sleepwalking and went, with blind bravado, into catastrophe.

 

It is difficult not to see some points of similarity with Israel (and, differently, its neighbors). The comparatively good situation of Israel in recent times serves as a blinder on future trends. The “right” clings to the illusions that strength will prevail and that settlements in the West Bank are creating permanent facts on the ground. And the “left” clings to the illusion that a permanent agreement with the Palestinian Authority will produce a stable peace, as if the unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 didn’t result in missiles and wars.

 

In contrast to such fixations, long-term estimates of the conflict's dynamics have identified grave trends: The increasing ability of a few to kill many, with Israel being one of the likely targets; novel forms of attack such as cyber war, to which we are vulnerable; the nuclearization, in one form or another, of Iran, with Israel having missed important action opportunities, despite understanding the danger; and growing international pressures to withdraw from being an occupying force – right up to a bad “enforced solution.” To these, one must add, and emphasize, the paradox of the turmoil in Arab states possibly creating a unified front, with revolutionary energy directed against Israel.

 

Conversely, it’s far from easy – albeit not impossible – to map out realistic, thriving long-term futures for Israel without the calming of the Arab-Islamic/Israeli-Jewish conflict. For instance, the chances of the Arab states getting used to Israeli rule over the West Bank and Greater Jerusalem are slim. Therefore, without a resolution of the conflict, some decline of Israel is likely, with the possibility of an encompassing Middle East catastrophe.

 

Israel is, therefore, caught in a dangerous aporia. The defense minister is right about the near-impossibility of reaching an agreement with the Palestinians that satisfies Israel’s security needs. And the business leaders are correct in expecting decline in the absence of progress toward peace.

 

It therefore follows that present modes of thinking provide no way to avoid dangerous futures. The ongoing peace process does not fit the multidimensionality of the conflict, its scope and cultural-psychological depth. Therefore, a quantum leap is essential – one into a different statecraft geometry that can cope, in phases, with the core of the conflict, including its innate roots.

 

Let me start with what is required from Israel. Hardest of all in this real-political necessity is relinquishing the vision of owning “all the Promised Land.” This does not involve negation of the moral right of the Jewish People to the Promised Land (which may be a good argument before a Cosmic Court). But in the real world, its ignoring of real-political constraints may result in devastation. Consequently, there is no way around the renunciation of the “Greater Israel” ideology.

 

On an action level, Israel should, among other things, avoid setting up and enlarging settlements outside of the territories likely to be included in agreed exchanges of land (and clearly marked as such). Hate crimes against Palestinians – so-called “prize-tag” attacks – and other provocative actions are to be strictly controlled. It's also necessary to change the way the conflict is taught in our schools, by presenting our rights together with the Arab narrative as a “fact” that we regard as incorrect but one that cannot be ignored. Also essential are multimedia efforts to reach broad Arab and Islamic audiences, and cooperation between Jewish and Arab communities in the Diaspora.

 

On the policy level, Israel has to declare unambiguously that – within a comprehensive peace agreement and subject to credible security arrangements – it is willing to withdraw to the 1967 borders, with agreed exchanges of land and establishment of a Palestinian state; to move toward an agreement on Jerusalem, including shared rule over the Holy Basin; and, whenever Syria has a peace-seeking government, Israel should be willing to move toward a resolution of the Golan Heights issue.

 

All this should take place within a comprehensive regional peace – including full relations between Arab and Islamic states and Israel, shared action against people acting as obstacles to peace, and parallel steps to advance a cultural-psychological peace atmosphere. Accordingly, the negotiations with the Palestinians will be expanded into a component of advancing regional peace. At the same time, Israel needs a new security doctrine integrating the advancement of peace with absolute deterrence and harsh punishment – beyond “proportionality” – of all who attack Israel despite the peace efforts.

 

This is a bitter pill that Israel must swallow. Refusal to do so, either through denial of the serious dangers that would result from the absence of a serious peace effort or fanatic attachment to futile utopian visions, are very likely to result in decline and may endanger our very future.

The Resurgent Progressives. By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

The Resurgent Progressives. By E.J. Dionne, Jr. Washington Post, January 1, 2014. Also here.

Re-Branding the GOP. By John Fonte.

Re-Branding the GOP. By John Fonte. National Review Online, December 16, 2013.

Middle-Class Heroes? By Andrew Stiles. National Review Online, December 31, 2013.


Fonte:

From the party of big business to the party of the little guy.

 

As Sean Trende and others have noted, middle- and working-class voters did not turn out for Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential election in the numbers that Republican leaders had expected. In the eyes of many of these once-Republican-leaning voters (including former Reagan Democrats), the GOP appears to be too closely linked to “big business.” In response, many conservative thinkers have called for a more populist GOP, oriented toward the middle and working classes and distant from corporate elites.

 

It is time to reexamine the relationship between big business and the American center-right. While corporate America has a close relationship with the Republican party generally, its engagement with American conservatism is fraught with complications. Business leaders and conservatives often join forces for pragmatic gain on significant issues such as Obamacare, taxes, trade policy, cap-and-trade proposals, and other environmental and government regulations. This issue-by-issue alliance is tactically useful to both groups and no doubt will (and should) continue.

 

Republicans as a party, however, and conservatives specifically, should not be subservient to corporate interests on core issues. The American electorate must come to view Republicans as the party of the middle class rather than the courtiers of big business. The GOP “brand” must change. While conservatives and business will remain part of a broad center-right coalition, the key question is: On what terms, and who calls the shots?

 

Let’s review some history. In 1980, as conservatives rallied to Ronald Reagan, many corporate leaders were enthusiastic supporters of former Texas governor John Connolly for the GOP presidential nomination; Connolly was a former conservative Democratic politician who looked and talked like a CEO. Others liked Senator Howard Baker and George H. W. Bush. Mindful of the Goldwater defeat, all these business leaders saw Reagan as too conservative to win. Most CEOs were more comfortable with a mainstream candidate closer to the political center.

 

One of the big internal fights in the Reagan administration pitted business interests against national-security conservatives. In the 1970s, hundreds of major corporations as well as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers had joined to form a private pro-trade group, the U.S.-USSR Trade and Economic Council (USTEC). While conservative hawks wanted to curb the flow of military-use items to Communist countries, USTEC lobbied to remove barriers to Soviet trade. The group opposed, for example, the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which placed trade limits on certain Communist-bloc countries that restricted emigration, as the USSR did with Jews and Evangelical Christians.

 

Cold War ancient history, you say? Okay, let’s go back to this summer and look at a crucial domestic- and constitutional-policy issue. In July 2013, House Republicans voted to remove some federal mandates in the No Child Left Behind Act and empower the states to formulate their own accountability systems and curricular standards. Strong opposition to this federalism-affirming legislation came from every Democrat in the House, the Obama administration, an array of leftist groups (including the ACLU, the Children’s Defense Fund, the National Education Association, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and the Southern Poverty Law Center) and also from business interests led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable. Former Reagan education official Chester Finn Jr. rebuked the two business groups for their stance: “Both . . . joined the left . . . in savaging the Kline [House Republican] bill and demanding more federal regulation and control of education. . . . I suppose this is yet another sad example of corporate America succumbing to big-government-itis.”

 

In fact, since the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Progressive theorist Herbert Croly over a hundred years ago, business has done well enough working with the regulatory forces of the administrative state. As Milton Friedman often remarked, corporate executives are not fans of the free market. They are often involved in “rent-seeking” behavior, lobbying the federal government for special privileges at the expense of others.

 

Not only will corporate America readily depart from conservatives on a matter such as state control of education, it also appears to have little use for the various other constituencies within the conservative coalition. Social conservatives advocating life, pro-family policy, and religious freedom; national-security conservatives defending American sovereignty, arguing for a strong military, and working to meet the challenges of China and radical Islam; national-cohesion conservatives aiming to curb racial, ethnic, and gender preferences and the pernicious ideology of multiculturalism; and free-market conservatives fighting statist measures – all these find that business leaders are often either indifferent to their concerns or lined up on the other side of the barricades, alongside the forces of the leftist establishment. Better to shun supposedly extreme right-wing ideologues than challenge liberal orthodoxy.

 

A major weapon in the Left’s continuing campaign to “fundamentally transform America,” as Candidate Obama so memorably promised to do, is what I call the coercive diversity project. This is the ongoing effort to use federal power to impose proportional representation along race, gender, and ethnic lines in all aspects of American life. If women, for instance, constitute 50 percent of the work force, then 50 percent of engineers, doctors, accountants, etc., should be women. Ensuring that each group is represented in each endeavor in the correct demographic proportion would require a degree of government coercion incompatible with a free society. Yet, with strong support from the business community, the coercive diversity project has advanced steadily for decades. Little by little, race- and gender-based preferences and quotas have replaced the original affirmative-action goal of achieving colorblind and gender-neutral equality of opportunity.

 

Corporate America was present at the creation of the coercive diversity project. Business executives provided funds and political support and collaborated with activists in promoting “diversity.” Most significantly, they helped blunt opposition from principled conservatives.

 

In The Diversity Machine, sociologist Fred Lynch details how corporations teamed up with progressives to fight the Reagan Justice Department’s attempt to end group preferences based on race, ethnicity, and gender. Attorney General Edwin Meese met strong resistance from the business community. The Reagan administration surveyed 127 chief executives of large corporations and found that 95 percent “planned to use numerical objectives to track the progress of women and minorities . . . regardless of government requirements.”

 

When Ward Connerly led a series of successful statewide referenda opposing the use of group preferences in education and employment, business interests fought him at every turn and poured money into the leftist campaigns to stop his efforts. After his successful initiative in the State of Washington in 1998, Connerly wrote: “The most significant obstacle we faced in the Washington campaign was not the media . . . but the corporate world. . . . Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, Starbucks, Costco, Microsoft, and Eddie Bauer all made huge donations to the [opposition]. . . . The fundraising was spearheaded by Bill Gates’ father, Bill Gates, Sr., a regent at the University of Washington whose famous name seemed to suggest that the whole of the high-tech world was solemnly shaking its head at us.”

 

In the most significant Supreme Court case on the coercive diversity project, Grutter v. Bollinger, in 2003, corporate America weighed in heavily on the side of mandated proportional representation and racial preferences. Sixty-five Fortune 500 companies (including Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Eli Lilly, Intel, Johnson and Johnson, Procter and Gamble, Sara Lee, Texaco, Microsoft, Eastman Kodak, Pfizer, and United Airlines) submitted an amicus curiae brief in support of the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative-action admissions program, which was being challenged by Barbara Grutter, a white woman whose law-school application the school had denied. The majority (5–4) decision, written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, cited the Fortune 500 brief as evidence that major American businesses had made it clear that they supported the diversity project.

 

I have been using the term “corporate America,” but this moniker is something of a misnomer in an age when executives are increasingly “post-American” and major businesses almost always identify themselves as global ventures. Not untypical are comments from the vice president of Coca-Cola, who said in a speech in 2005, “We are not an American company,” and from a top Colgate-Palmolive executive, who in 1989 said, “There is no mindset [at Colgate] that puts this country [the United States] first.”

 

Speaking to Atlantic reporter Chrystia Freeland in 2011, a U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds described an internal debate at his company. One of his senior colleagues had suggested that the “hollowing out of the American middle class didn’t really matter,” the CEO told Freeland, adding: “His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and [that] meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade.” Almost a decade ago, Samuel Huntington identified this trend as the “de-nationalization” of American corporate elites. The new “economic transnationals,” he said, are the “nucleus of an emerging global superclass.”

 

Not surprisingly, the Chamber of Commerce and leading corporations are currently supporting the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a treaty strongly opposed by Senate conservatives, who argue that UNCLOS would undermine American sovereignty and establish a global regulatory system in which the U.N. would receive direct tax revenues for the first time. Corporate elites approve the global regulations in the treaty because these regulations, they believe, would be good for business.

 

All too often, the interests of corporate elites overlap with those of high-profile Republican donors and lawmakers. The foremost example of this connection is Carlos Gutierrez, George W. Bush’s former secretary of commerce and the ex-CEO of the Kellogg Company. With fundraiser Charlie Spies, Gutierrez has founded a super PAC, Republicans for Immigration Reform, and through TV appearances and op-eds he has become a major spokesman for the push for amnesty and low-skilled mass immigration. Gutierrez fits Huntington’s “economic transnational” profile rather well. As Bush 43’s commerce secretary, he was the major proponent of the North American Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), which sought to increase “economic integration” between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. The SPP also called for the “harmonization” of security and customs regulations “in all three countries” in order to speed up border crossings – which would have made American border security dependent on Mexican and Canadian personnel and practices.

 

Today, Carlos Gutierrez is vigorously campaigning for the mass immigration of low-skilled workers. A few years ago, however, his goal was equally globalist: a transnational labor force for North America. Under Gutierrez’s leadership, the SPP in March 2006 included in its list of priorities the effort “to formalize a transnational technical labor force that could work in any North American country on a temporary basis.” Understanding the effect this would have on the standard of living of American blue-collar and white-collar workers was not then, and is not now, on the high-priority list set by Gutierrez and his colleagues in the corporate–Republican alliance.

 

American conservatism has in the past few decades become an ever more robust coalition of populist “non-conformist dissenters”: free marketers, social conservatives, national-security hawks, national-cohesion conservatives, patriotic libertarians, etc. Analogous to 18th-century British Whigs, these dissenters are united in their non-conformity to the “established church” of 21st-century America and its prevailing progressive orthodoxy. On the other hand, American business and its GOP allies who do not look beyond “economic man” either silently accept or actively approve the dogmas of progressive orthodoxy – the diversity project, multiculturalism, radical feminism, globalism, mass immigration, environmentalism, and all of the progressive social issues.

 

Immigration politics is at the heart of the divide between conservative populist groups, on one side, and corporate elites within the GOP on the other. Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama wrote a memo in July to his fellow Republican lawmakers, calling on them to “flip the immigration debate on its head.” At National Review Online, Sessions urged the GOP to “adopt a humble and honest populism” and distance itself from “the corporate titans who believe the immigration policy for our entire country should be modeled to pad their bottom line.”

 

The GOP lost the 2012 election, Sessions said, “because it hemorrhaged support from middle and low-income Americans of all backgrounds,” and the party must now mount an “unapologetic defense of working Americans.” He noted that Americans oppose by a two-to-one margin increasing low-skilled immigration and also strongly oppose any legalization of illegal immigrants before border security is in place. Sessions made the key political point that Republicans have a golden opportunity to appeal once again to Reagan Democrats, who are, as John O’Sullivan put it in a statement lauding Sessions, an “electoral bloc that dwarfs any other in numerical terms.”

 

Two preconditions of populist ascendancy are already emerging in embryonic form: first, a Sister Souljah–style rebuke of corporate elites and, second, the development of policy measures aimed specifically at supporting the middle and working classes. To the first point, Sessions on Labor Day chided pro-immigration-reform business groups and pointedly raised the issue of American patriotism, asking, “What is the loyalty a nation owes to its own citizens?” On the second point, conservative policy intellectuals as well as elected officials such as Senator Mike Lee of Utah are beginning to formulate policy initiatives focused on strengthening the middle and working classes.

Barack Obama’s most effective campaign argument in 2012 was that Romney represented corporate America while the president and his party were fighting for ordinary Americans. Immigration is the first issue on which to turn this accusation back against Democrats and seize the moral high ground by speaking up for the real underdog, the American worker. Let us begin the re-branding, as Jeff Sessions suggests, with conservatives and the GOP vigorously and unapologetically opposing all legislation that increases low-skilled immigration and denouncing “comprehensive immigration reform” for what it is: class warfare waged by an unholy alliance of Obama, progressive elites, and big business against the well-being and way of life of the American middle and working classes.