Israel Boycott Strikes at Academic Freedom. By Pierre Atlas.

Israeli Boycott Strikes at Academic Freedom. By Pierre Atlas. Real Clear World, January 9, 2014. Also at the Indianapolis Star.

Florida-Georgia Line: Get Your Shine On.

Florida-Georgia Line: Get Your Shine On. Video. FlaGeorgiaLineVEVO, February 25, 2013. YouTube.

Pharaoh and the Palestinians. By Stewart Weiss.

Pharaoh and the Palestinians. By Stewart Weiss. Jerusalem Post, January 9, 2014.

Weiss:

There are two axioms that I believe help to guide Jewish history along its twisting and tumultuous path. The first is that the more things change, the more they remain the same. The second is that nothing significant ever occurs in our national life that cannot be found in the Torah portion we read that week.

 

We are now smack-dab in the middle of the story of the Jewish experience in Egypt, which culminates in the Exodus (read about it this Shabbat in Parshat Beshalah) and the giving of the Ten Commandments (read it next Shabbat in Parshat Yitro). These events, recorded for posterity so long ago, remain to this day a road map for our struggle to overcome our adversaries and become a nation.

 

Pharaoh is the archetypal anti-Semite, the dictatorial and despicable poster boy for all the Jew-haters of future generations.

 

Ignoring the fact that Joseph brought immense wealth and prestige to Egypt, he rewrites history and accuses the Hebrews of being an alien, divisive “fifth column” that must be dealt with mercilessly. To divert attention from the real problems of his society, and to unite the populace by appealing to its basest instincts, he tells his people that the “Nation of Israel” (ironically Pharaoh is the first person ever to use that phrase) is “great and mighty from us!” In other words, the Jews are parasites; they take the land that is rightfully ours, and they suck the very life-blood out of it.

 

This approach to demonizing the Jews is exactly the course that the Palestinians and their many sympathizers have taken. They begin by denying any historical legitimacy to the Jewish residents of the land, maintaining that we have no ongoing connection whatsoever to Israel. There never was a Temple in Jerusalem; kings David and Solomon, the Prophets and the Maccabees never inhabited this part of the world; the Twelve Tribes – if they existed at all – lived somewhere in Europe.

 

And as for what to do with the mountain of archeological evidence, the accounts of the Bible, and the overwhelming opinion of historians that this truly is our ancestral land? That is cavalierly dismissed as “Jewish propaganda” and disregarded by the Pharaohs “who knew not Joseph.”

 

Their national mantra, one of which their pharaonic predecessor would surely be proud, is repeated so long and so intensely that even normally level-headed people begin to believe it: “The Jews stole the land and usurped its rightful owners.” From this canard flows all the evil that our neighbors perversely perpetrate upon us, what I call the “10 Plagues of the Palestinians”: the boycotts, the car thefts, the home invasions, the deadly rock-throwing at our vehicles, the suicide bombings, the drive-by shootings, the firing of rockets on civilians, the glorification of child-killers, the education to terror, the turning of so many beautiful Israeli families into blood.

 

All of these atrocities and more are blithely justified among the Palestinians as the rightful reward for those who took what was theirs.

 

OF COURSE, the greatest victims of all in this drama are the Palestinians themselves.

 

Their lives could be infinitely more rewarding and more productive if only they chose compromise over conflict.

 

They know that they – like their Israeli Arab brothers – would enjoy an immensely higher standard of living and quality of life if they ceased their extremism and met us halfway. But like Pharaoh, who remained impervious to the pleas of his own people to release the Israelites – “Do you not know that Egypt is lost?” the Egyptians said to him after the eighth plague – the Palestinian leadership is supremely steadfast in its stubbornness.

 

The secret to success in international relations – no less than in personal ones – is knowing when to let go and when to hang on. Just as Pharaoh could, theoretically, have saved himself and his nation from untold amounts of suffering if only he had acquiesced to Moses’s initial demand – “Let us depart for three days into the wilderness to serve our God” – so the Arab world, by consistently squandering its manifold opportunities for a peaceful settlement, has “upped the ante” and brought disaster upon itself. From their rejection of the 1947 partition plan to their “Three Noes of Khartoum” (“no peace, no recognition, no negotiation” with Israel) following the Six Day War, to the present- day refusal to accept Israel as a Jewish state, the Palestinians have always taken – to their detriment – the most hard-line positions, and this, above all, has created the self-inflicted “Nakba” that they so often moan about.

 

ONE OF the more celebrated aspects of the Exodus story is God’s “hardening of Pharaoh’s heart.” While this clearly creates certain theological difficulties – the denial of free choice being primary among them – it also serves to highlight the Almighty’s active part in the equation, and His determination to see His people achieve their goal of becoming one nation, under God, in their own land. At some point, God “allows” Pharaoh to fall victim to his own obstinacy, resulting in his demise and our redemption.

 

In like fashion, the Palestinians, too, suffer from a case of “hardening of the heart.” Just when reconciliation appears to be possible, they make sure to thwart it by coming up with some new demand that they know we can never meet. It might be a return to 1949 “Auschwitz borders,” or an insistence on reclaiming the Kinneret, or a demand for the “right of return” or the redivision of Jerusalem.

 

Whatever it is, it brings us back to our senses as we realize just how far this Arab entity actually is from desiring a true and lasting peace with its neighbors.

 

As Jordan learned when it stubbornly refused Israel’s peace overtures in 1967 and belatedly entered the war, resulting in the Jordanians’ loss – and our gain – of Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria; and as Pharaoh learned when he reneged on his freeing of the Israelites and attacked us at the Reed Sea, resulting in the destruction of his army and the end of Egypt forever as a world power, there is a high price to be paid for making the wrong choices and for trying to block Jewish destiny.

 

Despite Israel’s readiness to bend – indeed, often to a fault – we will never abdicate our God-given right to recreate our eternal homeland. And it is this steely resolve that will win out in the final analysis. The end result of the Passover story, quite remarkably, is that “the man Moses was great in the land of Egypt, and great in the eyes of every Egyptian” (Exodus 11:3). Those who remain humble yet steadfast in their mission and who believe in the justice of their cause will not only see their efforts prevail; they will gain the grudging respect of even their bitterest enemies.

Israeli Official Points to “Incitement” by Palestinians. By Jodi Rudoren.

Israeli Official Points to “Incitement” by Palestinians. By Jodi Rudoren. New York Times, January 6, 2014.

Israelis Document Incitement by the Palestinian Authority. New York Times, January 6, 2014. Also here.

NYT casts Israelis as victims of Palestinians who complain bitterly about oppression. By Philip Weiss and Donald Johnson. Mondoweiss, January 7, 2014.

Palestinian Children: When we die as martyrs. Video. noterrorhere, June 15, 2010. YouTube.

What If Israel Were a Jewish State? By Daniel Gordis.

What If Israel Were a Jewish State? By Daniel Gordis. Jerusalem Post, January 9, 2014. Also at DanielGordis.org.

Movement on the Right. By David Brooks.

Movement on the Right. By David Brooks. New York Times, January 9, 2014.

A Kind of Racism We’re Not Used To. By Masha Gessen.

A Kind of Racism We’re Not Used To. By Masha Gessen. New York Times, January 9, 2014.

Israel in the Eye of the Hurricane. By Ofir Haivry.

Israel in the Eye of the Hurricane. By Ofir Haivry. Mosaic, January 2014.

The Middle East is imploding. America is pulling back. Time for a new regional strategy.


Map of Middle East Ethnic Groups. By Michael Izady. The Gulf/2000 Project.

The Culture of Rebellion in Syria. By Faysal Itani.

The Culture of Rebellion in Syria. By Faysal Itani. Atlantic Council, January 7, 2014.

The Women of Pussy Riot Fight On. By Masha Gessen.

Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (R) and Mariya Alekhina in a cafe in downtown Moscow, January 3, 2014.

Nadezhda Tolokonnikova: “I Was My Own Person Again.” By Masha Gessen. Slate, January 9, 2014.

Pussy Riot’s Next Act: Exclusive Photos of Life After Prison. By Simon Shuster and Yuri Kozyrev. Time, January 9, 2014.

Russia’s Riot Girls, All Grown Up. By Cathy Young. Real Clear Politics, January 13, 2014.


Gessen:

The women of Pussy Riot made meaning out of a horrific experience in prison. Now, they’re launching another protest movement in Russia.


But prison is an object of almost universal fear and interest in Russia. The country has one of the world’s highest percentages of its population behind bars—not as high as the United States, but a key difference is that in Russia the risk of landing in prison cuts across class lines. No one knows the exact figures, but human rights advocates estimate that more than 15,000 and possibly more than 100,000 of Russia’s roughly 700,000 inmates are entrepreneurs sent to jail by competitors or extortionists. And then there are the political prisoners, a population that is growing despite recent high-profile pardons. Opposition activists are arrested seemingly at random; many of them are not leaders but ordinary grassroots activists or even one-time participants in a demonstration.

 

The goal of this tried-and-true Soviet tactic is to frighten people away from any and all opposition activity. It’s effective, but its flip side is that when Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova speak about the abuse of prisoners, they grab the attention of millions of Russians who fear winding up behind bars themselves. Since leaving prison, they have appeared in public wearing borrowed or donated clothes, all of them unfailingly trendy because the donors are their fans in the media and fashion industries. This sends a stark message: When two young, well-turned-out women talk about being subjected to what amounts to torture, they really call attention to the fact that it can happen to anyone.

 

Their high profile afforded some protection in prison—Alyokhina was not forced to work the extremely long hours of other inmates—but it also drew much unwanted attention. Prison authorities tried to ensure they were both isolated and scared; they threatened other inmates with retribution for associating with the women, whom they perceived as potential troublemakers, and rewarded them for harassing the Pussy Riot convicts. Alyokhina was threatened with bodily harm within days of landing in her dorm at a penal colony in the Urals in December 2012; she asked to be placed in protective solitary confinement.

 

Protective solitary differs from punitive solitary in name only—it is the same place, so cold that no amount of warm clothing can remove the chill. The fight for warmth is one of many battles for a semblance of physical comfort and human dignity that inmates face on a daily basis. Tolokonnikova and her lawyers battled the authorities for several long winter months before she was allowed to wear a warm kerchief instead of a chintz one; she fought a similar battle to wear warm boots in winter and light shoes in summer instead of the prison-issue shapeless plastic footwear, in which feet either freeze or swelter. The privilege of wearing what are known as “civilian” shoes was regularly revoked as punishment, not only for Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova themselves but for other inmates, with the clear purpose of pitting the larger prison population against the activists.

 

Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova try to talk about other inmates more than they do about themselves, in part because they are now free, and in part because they feel they were ultimately in a privileged position in prison. What they have disclosed of their experience opens the window on the hell that is the life of a Russian inmate. Prison stories are stories of humiliation, dehumanization, and constant physical hardship. While in solitary, for example, Alyokhina was subjected to gynecological searches whenever she left her cell to meet with her lawyer and again when she returned. She filed a series of complaints and eventually declared victory in a letter to a friend: “This went on for a month, and now I have finally managed to get this canceled. It was painful and disgusting, and anyway, no one can stand being subjected to ‘the chair’ 4 times a week.”

 

But Alyokhina’s first major battle behind bars concerned the most basic, most pervasive, and perhaps most pernicious practice of Russian prisons: the systematic denial of the right to wash. While the members of Pussy Riot were in pretrial detention in Moscow in the spring and summer of 2012, supporters paid the facility to allow the women to take more than one shower weekly. Once Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova arrived at the penal colonies, though, that option was no longer available. Like the other inmates, they were reduced to risking lice and other afflictions of dirt, and to feeling like the filth in which they were forced to live.

 

An official letter from the regional prison authority, stating that female inmates could wash their hair more than once a week, was the first of Alyokhina’s many wins on the personal hygiene front. Another was increasing the number of toilets and sinks in the dorms from two to eight, for a unit of 50 to 100 people—and, as important, getting the facility to put up partitions between toilets. Once Alyokhina, who was a journalism student at the time of her arrest, had fought and won her first battles, she became a full-fledged—and hyperactive—jailhouse lawyer. She challenged procedural violations in reviewing inmate infractions, helped inmates write numerous complaints, and collected bulging folders of information on working conditions in the colony.

 

* * *

For her part, Tolokonnikova had no intention of taking up prisoners’ rights. A philosophy student at Moscow State University at the time of her arrest, she thought of herself as a philosopher and an artist more than an activist, and in jail she planned to keep a low profile. “For a long time, I wanted to try to blend in, to be like everyone else,” she says. This was both a survival strategy and an existential approach: “I wanted to live a universal experience. I wanted this to have been not just Nadya Tolokonnikova's experience of prison but a human being’s experience of prison.” She was dispatched to work on the grounds, which can take many forms—often puzzling in their futility but effective as tools of intimidation and control. Mostly, inmates lug stuff around: anything from flour to dug-up dirt to rocks packed into giant black bags. As what seems to be a matter of policy, penal colonies do not have wheelbarrows or trolleys.

 

Tolokonnikova, too, came up against the facility’s hygiene rules. Once a week at Correctional Colony No. 14 (IK-14) in Mordovia, inmates were marched to a small common washroom, where about 100 naked women would use their elbows and fists to gain access to faucets from which water may or may not flow on any given day. Tolokonnikova sneaked about, secreting a towel and a plastic ladle beneath her uniform jacket and going to a washroom on a different floor, where the duty watchwoman was somewhat more relaxed. On “bath days,” Tolokonnikova hid from the guard who escorted the inmates to the common washroom. The young inmate tried to make herself invisible to spare herself the humiliation of fighting and failing to keep herself clean.

 

Yet Tolokonnikova, unlike Alyokhina, did not want to enter into constant confrontation with the prison authorities. Even the potential to leave the colony for occasional court hearings did not appeal to her. “I just want the time to pass quickly,” she said when I visited her in prison in June last year. “Anything that breaks up the monotony slows time down.”

 

Alyokhina would have had no way of knowing her friend felt this way at the time—inmates are not allowed to correspond with one another—but this attitude is exactly what she wants to take on as a prisoners' rights activist. “Many inmates say, ‘I just want my 14-hour workday and to be allowed to sleep the rest of the time so the days pass faster,’” she says. “This is the most terrible thing that happens to a person in prison: She refuses to live, she refuses to see that she is more than a body that is shuttled between the dorm and the factory. And it turns out not to be so difficult to give up thinking for yourself—suddenly it seems like not such a big sacrifice to make. The denial of freedom as a legal concept becomes a metaphysical denial of freedom.”

 

Tolokonnikova, the student of metaphysics, discovered this empirically: Her strategy of trying to live the life of a regular inmate forced her into a corner. Last summer conditions at IK-14 began deteriorating rapidly as the administration took on more and more orders for sewing police uniforms. Work hours expanded, as did the output requirements, and the hours allotted for sleep shrank. Inmates who failed to meet their production goals were beaten and denied access to food sent by friends and family—the only way to stay nourished in a Russian prison. When Tolokonnikova so much as tried to raise the issue with the warden, she was penalized too. For days she was locked out of her dormitory after work: She would have to remain outside, in a small fenced-in area, until lights out. This punishment was supplemented by so-called work in the woodshop; though the shop was equipped with a gas rotary saw, Tolokonnikova would be given a manual saw and required to stay in the shop until she had cut a thick log.

 

But the worst of the pressure was exerted through other inmates: as soon as Tolokonnikova so much as raised her voice in protest, others’ work hours would grow longer, too, and their access to food would be curtailed. It wasn’t just the responsibility for making fellow inmates' lives hell that weighed on Tolokonnikova—it was the knowledge that eventually they would not only blame her but kill her. The deputy warden told Tolokonnikova as much when she got up the nerve to ask him to cut work hours back to the legal maximum. “He said he would make sure I’d be all right for eternity, ‘because in the afterlife, everyone is all right.’” This was a death threat, hardly veiled. It was this that finally got Tolokonnikova to act—this and the inspiration she drew from a friend, a doll-maker jailed on drug charges.

 

“Every once in a while, the administration would do a sweep of my friends,” Tolokonnikova says. “People who had been seen talking to me would be told there would be trouble if they kept on, and they’d suddenly distance themselves.” At some points Tolokonnikova could not even ask a work-related question at the factory; other inmates would hiss at her to step away from their stations. But not the doll-maker—she was defiant in every way. For one thing, she continued to practice her art, carving her dolls even while standing in formation in the quad, or getting up in the middle of the night to paint; for another, she never abandoned her friend. Nor did she seem deterred by the physical hardships of colony life—not even on the regular occasions that the plumbing backed up, sending fecal matter flying into the living quarters, when she would be the one trying to unclog the pipes using a stick.

 

“For months I struggled with the idea of how to resist in these conditions, where anything I did would have negative consequences for other inmates,” Tolokonnikova says. “Finally I figured out that I needed to engineer my total isolation from other inmates.” A hunger strike would be her ticket, because an inmate who refuses food is automatically transferred to solitary. Tolokonnikova set about composing an open letter, though getting it out to the public would be extremely difficult. She passed paragraphs scribbled on scraps of paper surreptitiously to her husband and fellow activist, Petr (Petya) Verzilov, during his visits, and dictated other parts to him while prison staff were out of earshot.

 

The resulting letter was probably the most detailed and searing expose of Russian prison conditions since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. Verzilov released it to the public on Sept. 23, the day Tolokonnikova declared her hunger strike.

 

Solitary confinement followed. In the cold, without food, and following a summer of sleep deprivation and poor nutrition, Tolokonnikova became very weak very fast. She was taken to a hospital that served several Mordovian penal colonies at once, which marked a final turning point in her evolution as an activist. At the hospital she met women from a women’s facility for repeat offenders, Correctional Colony No. 2 (IK-2). The stories they told—and the condition many of them were in—made the abuses Tolokonnikova had witnessed at IK-14 seem almost harmless in comparison. One woman from IK-2 said that for writing a complaint to a human rights commission, she had been punished by a year in punitive solitary, where the door to the street had been propped open in the dead of winter while the woman wore only “an orange dress and a pair of panties.” After she was seen talking to Tolokonnikova, this inmate was transferred out of the hospital back to IK-2.

 

Tolokonnikova made up her mind to use her skills and her access to the media to speak up for these women. She and Alyokhina began communicating secretly—passing messages through the lawyers they shared—to hatch a plan for a prisoners' rights NGO that they would launch as soon as they were released.

 

Before Tolokonnikova was released, though, she was transferred back to IK-14. Her friend the doll-maker was now in solitary for having spoken to a human rights inspector, who had come to the prison because of Tolokonnikova’s hunger strike. Tolokonnikova now had even more reason to fear for her own safety, but she was no longer allowed to see her lawyer or have any telephone contact with the outside world. She declared another hunger strike, demanding a transfer. She was finally transferred to a penal colony in Siberia, in a grueling three-week-long transport in an unheated train car with painted-over windows and only a hard bench to sleep on. Inmates dread these transports, during which they are cut off from contact with lawyers, friends, and family and consequently, from any source of food other than the prisoner's scant ration. Another hardship specific to the transport is the number of bathroom breaks—no more than three and often two a day, at a time chosen by the convoy. “I took a plastic bucket with me,” says Tolokonnikova, by that time a seasoned inmate. “I made sure not to drink much water. And it was fine.”

 

Tolokonnikova had made a breakthrough: Not only had she escaped IK-14, but she had also found her mission, making the entire prison experience meaningful. “I felt euphoric. During the transport, I was held over at some of the harshest pretrial detention centers in the country, and yet I felt I had been halfway released. I was my own person again.”

The Death of a Mideast Theory. By Greg Scoblete.

The Death of a Mideast Theory. By Greg Scoblete. Real Clear World, January 8, 2014.

Scoblete:

Anyone paying even modest attention to the news knows that the Middle East is convulsed with violence. Iraq is battling a resurgent al-Qaeda, Syria is mired in a brutal civil war that is creeping steadily into Lebanon, Egypt is perched on the brink of violent instability. All the while, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry busies himself trying to broker a “framework agreement” between the Israelis and Palestinians. (Actually, this is what Kerry says he's doing: “We are working on a framework for negotiations that will guide and create the clear, detailed, accepted road map for the guidelines for the permanent-status negotiations and can help those negotiations move faster and more effectively.” Got it?)

 

There was a time, not so long ago, when many in Washington could argue with a straight face that solving the Israeli-Palestinian crisis was central to a more peaceful Middle East. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute was “linked” to regional unrest. If the U.S. would just untangle that stubborn knot, we've been told, it would set the Middle East on a more peaceful track.

 

If nothing else comes from the Mideast’s current orgy of violence, it should at least discredit the notion of linkage. The disparate strands of violence convulsing the region won’t end or even conceivably slow down should the Israelis and Palestinians bury the hatchet. None of the groups currently picking up arms in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, et al., are doing so on behalf of the Palestinians, though undoubtedly many would turn their guns on Israel if and when they get the chance. Secretary Kerry is, by all accounts, expending enormous amounts of time, effort and diplomatic capital on reaching his “framework for negotiations toward a roadmap for talks” – and for what?

 

Meanwhile, Japan – a country which the U.S. has an unambiguous stake in defending -- is inching perilously close to a confrontation with China and driving a wedge between itself and South Korea. The Middle East, for all its oil and violence, is beyond the reach of U.S. power and mediation. The kinds of state-building required to pacify the region is too costly and difficult (something you would think Washington would comprehend by now).

 

But Asia remains an arena where U.S. power and statecraft may actually be effective, given that the challenges are between states and not within them. At a minimum, it would be certainly be time better spent than trying to determine who lives where in the West Bank.

Insights on Peace from Avigdor Lieberman. By Jonathan S. Tobin.

Insights on Peace from Avigdor Lieberman. By Jonathan S. Tobin. Commentary, January 6, 2014.

Tobin:

Since he returned to his post as Israel’s foreign minister after a break to fend off failed attempts to prosecute him on corruption charges, Avigdor Lieberman has been treated with the same disdain by the international media and many of Israel’s foreign friends as he got before he was finally acquitted after a decade-long prosecution. Even in Israel’s roughhouse political scene, Lieberman is the proverbial bull in a china shop. The general assumption is that Lieberman, who does not speak fluent English and has a tough-guy political fixer image dating back to his origins in the former Soviet Union, can’t be trusted to deal with nuanced issues. Prime Minister Netanyahu stripped him of any responsibility for relations with the United States as well as the peace process with the Palestinians since he first assumed this crucial Cabinet post. But though Lieberman’s significance has more to do with domestic Israeli politics, occasionally he utters statements that show us he has a better grasp of the situation than the wise guys who often put him down as being out of his depth.

 

That happened yesterday when Lieberman addressed a conference of Israeli diplomats in Jerusalem and said something that you wouldn’t have expected from someone associated (at least in the view of many of his country’s critics) with something quite so sensible. As Barak Ravid wrote in Haaretz:

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Sunday that Israel must accept U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s proposal for a framework agreement with the Palestinians since “any other proposal from the international community won’t be as good.”

Though that is not what much of the Israeli right—with whose views he is usually associated and for whose votes he will be seeking in the next election when his Yisrael Beitenu Party competes against Netanyahu’s Likud rather than running as its partner as it did in the last two Knesset elections—wants to hear, Lieberman is correct. This does not mean, however, that he is drifting to the left. The minister also noted that although he supports Kerry’s efforts to achieve a comprehensive peace, he and his party will never support an agreement that does not involve an Israeli surrender of territory inside the 1967 lines where Arabs predominate, a position that has been called racist by his opponents. But rather than dismissing this as a poison pill that will, like the Palestinian claim to the “right of return” for the descendants of the 1948 refugees, ensure that peace will never be achieved, Lieberman’s critics should listen closely to what he says.

 

Lieberman has repeatedly dismissed the Palestinian Authority and its leadership as not being a peace partner, yet he praised the secretary of state for his work in trying to get them to recognize Israel as a Jewish state—a formulation that is synonymous with accepting the end of the conflict. Kerry’s pursuit of an agreement is a mistake at this point because of the division between the Fatah-controlled West Bank and Hamas-controlled Gaza. It’s also foolish to think that any group of Palestinian leaders can sell their people on genuine peace on any terms in the absence of a sea change in opinion that will enable them to let go of an existential conflict that is integral to their identity as a people. Nor should Israelis regard the Obama administration’s clear tilt toward the Palestinians on the issues of territory and Jerusalem with complacency.

 

Peace process enthusiasts who prefer to ignore the truth about the Palestinians consider such views intemperate. Yet Lieberman is correct when he notes that Kerry’s acceptance of Israel’s demand that the PA accept Israel as a Jewish state—something that its leader Mahmoud Abbas has sworn he will never do—is a victory of sorts. That is something Israel cannot expect to hear, as Lieberman notes, from anyone else in the international community.

 

Yet it is likely that Lieberman’s resurrection of his party’s proposal for trading the “triangle” of Arab towns adjacent to the “green line” in Israel’s central region will cause his usual detractors to dismiss him as someone seeking to sabotage chances for peace. But while it is difficult to imagine this ever happening, it is possible that this seemingly radical idea may not be as unreasonable as some think.

 

After all, if it is a given that peace requires some Israelis to be turned out of their homes in communities in the West Bank and that other such settlements in blocs close to the pre-1967 lines should be incorporated into the Jewish state in exchange for other Israeli territory, why should that swap involve areas where people who now call themselves Palestinians rather than “Israeli Arabs” predominate?

 

There are two reasons that explain why the Palestinians refuse even to consider, must less to discuss this proposal.

 

One is that their notion of swaps—a concept specifically endorsed by President Obama—is so minimal as to be insignificant. Even if one assumes that the PA is serious about wanting peace—something that its ongoing policy of honoring terrorists who have murdered Israeli civilians and fomenting hatred against Israel and Jews renders not credible—it has shown little willingness to accept a map based more on demographic reality than a rigid insistence on the 1967 lines.

 

The other is that their goal is not to have two states for two peoples—the concept that Obama, Kerry, and the Israelis have discussed—but a Jew-free Palestinian Arab state on one side of the border and a mixed Jewish-Arab nation on the other whose balance would be altered by an influx of millions of Arabs, vastly overwhelming the Jewish majority and, in the bargain, expunging the explicitly Jewish state the United Nations voted to establish in 1947. While some Israelis have spoken of accepting a token number of these so-called refugees, Lieberman is right to refuse a single one, a stance justified by the international community’s unwillingness to recognize the fact that an equal number of Jewish refugees from the Arab and Muslim world lost their homes after 1948.

 

Of course, it is understandable that the Arab citizens of the triangle would prefer to stay inside Israel where, despite their complaints and alienation from the Jewish state, they enjoy its democracy and equal rights that no Palestinian enjoys under the rule of either Fatah or Hamas. But the very fact that Arabs would prefer to live in a majority Jewish state than to be incorporated into the putative Palestinian one tells us a lot about what kind of country that would be.

 

No one should expect Netanyahu, let alone Kerry, to start listening to Lieberman. But rather than dismissing him, perhaps the secretary should be listening closely to the foreign minister’s insights. Until he can convince the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and negotiate a deal that would truly be a solution of two states for two peoples, Kerry’s peace efforts will remain a fool’s errand.

A Post-Everything Moment in the Mideast. By Rami G. Khouri.

A post-everything moment in the Mideast. By Rami G. Khouri. The Daily Star (Lebanon), January 8, 2014.

Khouri:

With daily car bombs, suicide bombers, assassinations, kidnappings, ethnic warfare and collapsing government control across the Middle East, we are moving into the post-everything moment of our modern history: post-colonial, post-nationalist, post-statehood, post-imperial, post-Islamist, post-revolutionary, post-developmental and post-modern. The immediate focus of most analysts is on Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, where Salafist-takfiri militants, some allied with Al-Qaeda, control bits of territory and have clashed with others to expand their footholds. Constantly changing combinations of groups work together, coexist uneasily, coalesce into greater coalitions and “fronts,” or actively fight each other and ruling regimes. Leading examples include the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), the Nusra Front, the Tawhid Brigade, the Army of Islam, the Islamic Front, the Syrian Revolutionaries Front, the Free Syrian Army, the Mujahedeen Army and many others.

 

The chaotic situation reflects several different but simultaneous nationalist and state dynamics, as old orders fray (the Sykes-Picot frontiers, post-World War II secular and nationalist states, the post-1970 modern Arab security state) and new organizations and movements emerge that reflect older nonstate identities (religion, tribe, ethnicity).

 

In some places, such as Syria, Islamists and secular nationalists battle to overthrow the incumbent regime and establish a more pluralistic and democratic governance system, while some also fight each other. In others, such as Iraq, Libya or Yemen, tribal and Islamist forces challenge the government to redress oppressive government policies or try to take over the government. In yet others, militants such as ISIS aim to control territory and establish “emirates” where fundamentalist Islamist rules rule, while also battling everyone else – Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Israelis, Kurds and any available foreigners.

 

As these hard-line Islamist militants battle for control of towns in western Iraq and northern Syria, such as Fallujah, Aleppo and Raqqa, six major groups of main actors seem to dominate the scene: hard-line Salafists such as ISIS, others such as Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham, Arab-backed mainstream Islamists such as the Islamic Front, the Free Syrian Army and its mostly non-Islamist allies, various Kurdish groups in northeastern Syria, and tribal forces across the Syrian-Iraqi desert regions.

 

Syria and Iraq are the most extreme but not the only examples of chronic conflicts in Arab countries, as we can also see in Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and parts of Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt and Tunisia. The ordinary citizens who pay the price of conflict are mostly helpless to do anything in the face of tens of thousands of armed fighters, most of whom are supported by foreign governments or financiers. The role of regional or foreign powers that have often shaped the political configuration of the modern Middle East is a hotly debated issue today.

 

An intriguing front page article in the New York Times on Jan. 4, titled “Power Vacuum in Middle East Lifts Militants,” noted: “For all its echoes, the bloodshed that has engulfed Iraq, Lebanon and Syria in the past two weeks exposes something new and destabilizing: the emergence of a post-American Middle East in which no broker has the power, or the will, to contain the region’s sectarian hatreds.”

 

I was startled by this presumptuous attitude that exploding sectarian hatreds would worsen in a post-American Middle East, because my own impression from living through the last 45 years of American involvement in the region is precisely the opposite: that American foreign policies contributed deeply to the injustices and distortions that led to the destabilizing emergence of regional sectarian tensions, religious extremism and widespread citizen discontent. These sentiments manifest themselves today in different forms, including ISIS and similar militancy, popular revolutions to overthrow dictatorial regimes, and the patient writing of new constitutions and civil codes in countries such as Tunisia and Egypt.

 

The deadly combination of Washington’s decades of strong support for Arab dictators and its profound pro-Israeli bias combined with the criminal and incompetent legacy of Arab autocrats to create a situation from the 1960s to the 1990s that gnawed away at the foundations and integrity of modern Arab statehood. The Anglo-American assault on Iraq and the wiping away of its state structures created an environment that allowed the birth or spread of contemporary Islamist extremists such as Al-Qaeda in Iraq and then ISIS. However, Washington is not the only miscreant; for instance Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 helped spark the birth of Al-Qaeda in the first place.

 

Today’s mayhem and chaos in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon result from many causes, including the impact of criminal American and British policies in Iraq in 2003 and beyond. These policies have persisted in the form of American drone assassinations that have killed Islamist fighters and many civilians, but have simultaneously led to the mobilization of many, many more militants.

 

It’s bad enough to have chaos, confusion and criminality in Arab political movements. We should try to avoid these things in serious journalistic analyses of the facts of history.

The Need for Pluralism in the Arab World. By Thomas L. Friedman.

Not Just About Us. By Thomas L. Friedman. New York Times, January 7, 2014.

Pluralism Key to Real Change in Arab World. By Barbara Slavin. Voice of America, December 31, 2013.


Friedman:

Every day the headlines from the Arab world get worse: An Al Qaeda affiliate group, aided by foreign fighters, battles with seven different homegrown Syrian rebel groups for control of the region around Aleppo, Syria. The Iranian Embassy in Beirut is bombed. Mohamad Chatah, an enormously decent former Lebanese finance minister, is blown up after criticizing Hezbollah’s brutish tactics. Another pro-Al Qaeda group takes control of Fallujah, Iraq. Explosions rock Egypt, where the army is now jailing Islamists and secular activists. Libya is a mess of competing militias.

 

What’s going on? Some say it’s all because of the “power vacuum” — America has absented itself from the region. But this is not just about us. There’s also a huge “values vacuum.” The Middle East is a highly pluralistic region — Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, Druze and various tribes — that for centuries was held together from above by iron-fisted colonial powers, kings and dictators. But now that vertical control has broken down, before this pluralistic region has developed any true bottom-up pluralism — a broad ethic of tolerance — that might enable its people to live together as equal citizens, without an iron fist from above.

 

For the Arab awakening to have any future, the ideology that is most needed now is the one being promoted least: Pluralism. Until that changes, argues Marwan Muasher, in his extremely relevant new book — The Second Arab Awakening and the Battle for Pluralism — none of the Arab uprisings will succeed.

 

Again, President Obama could have done more to restrain leaders in Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran or Syria from going to extremes. But, ultimately, argues Muasher, this is the Arabs’ fight for their political future. If 500,000 American troops in Iraq, and $1 trillion, could not implant lasting pluralism in the cultural soil there, no outsider can, said Muasher. There also has to be a will from within. Why is it that some 15,000 Arabs and Muslims have flocked to Syria to fight and die for jihadism and zero have flocked to Syria to fight and die for pluralism? Is it only because we didn’t give the “good guys” big enough guns?

 

As Muasher, a former Jordanian foreign minister and now a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, put it in an interview: “Three years of the Arab uprising have shown the bankruptcy of all the old political forces in the Arab world.” The corrupt secular autocrats who failed to give their young people the tools to thrive — and, as a result, triggered these uprisings — are still locked in a struggle with Islamists, who also have no clue how to deliver jobs, services, security and economic growth. (Tunisia may be an exception.) “As long as we’re in the this zero-sum game, the sum will be zero,” says Muasher.

 

No sustainable progress will be possible, argues Muasher, without the ethic of pluralism permeating all aspects of Arab society — pluralism of thought, pluralism in gender opportunities, pluralism in respect to other religions, pluralism in education, pluralism toward minorities, pluralism of political parties rotating in power and pluralism in the sense of everyone’s right to think differently from the collective.

 

The first Arab awakening in the 20th century was a fight for independence from colonial powers, says Muasher. It never continued as a fight for democracy and pluralism. That war of ideas, he insists, is what “the second Arab awakening” has to be about. Neither the autocrats nor the Islamists can deliver progress. “Pluralism is the operating system we need to solve all our problems, and as long as that operating system is not in place, we will not get there. This is an internal battle. Let’s stop hoping for delivery from the outside.” This will take time.

 

Naïve? No. Naïve is thinking that everything is about the absence or presence of American power, and that the people of the region have no agency. That’s wrong: Iraq is splintering because Prime Minister Maliki behaved like a Shiite militiaman, not an Iraqi Mandela. Arab youths took their future in their own hands, motivated largely by pluralistic impulses. But the old order proved to be too stubborn, yet these youth aspirations have not gone away, and will not.

 

“The Arab world will go through a period of turmoil in which exclusionist forces will attempt to dominate the landscape with absolute truths and new dictatorships,” writes Muasher. But “these forces will also fade, because, in the end, the exclusionist, authoritarian discourses cannot answer the people’s needs for better quality of life. ...  As history has demonstrated overwhelmingly, where there is respect for diversity, there is prosperity. Contrary to what Arab societies have been taught for decades by their governments to believe — that tolerance, acceptance of different points of view, and critical thinking are destructive to national unity and economic growth — experience proves that societies cannot keep renewing themselves and thereby thrive except through diversity.”

 

Muasher, who is returning to Jordan to participate in this struggle for diversity, dedicated his book to: “The youth of the Arab World — who revolted, not against their parents, but on their behalf.”


Comment by Jared:

Tom – I find it ironic that on one hand you see the picture clearly about the Arab world and how messed up things are, but on the other hand you continue to imagine that Israel can make peace with the Arabs within the context of this craziness. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be seen as an island, but rather a subset of the entire picture you paint in this article. Israel cannot and should not be expected to make agreements that will certainly end up being worthless, until the Arab world gets its house in order. When they get their house in order, and it becomes a pluralistic society not ruled by Islamists, then maybe there is a chance for a resolution to the Israeli-Arab question.

Syria and the Transition to Democracy. By Wim Roffel.

Syria and the transition to Democracy. By Wim Roffel. Conflict and Compromise, January 8, 2014.

Peace in Syria starts with building trust. By Wim Roffel. Conflict and Compromise, February 19, 2013.

Conflict and Compromise: Thoughts on ethnic and international conflicts and the democratic ideal. Blog by Wim Roffel.

Jason Riley: MSNBC Has a “Pattern” of “Hiring Black Mediocrities” to “Race-Bait.” By Noah Rothman.

WSJ Columnist: MSNBC Has a “Pattern” of “Hiring Black Mediocrities” to “Race-Bait. By Noah Rothman. Mediaite, January 7, 2014.

MSNBC, Mitt Romney, and Race. By Mary Kissel and Jason Riley. Video. WSJ Live, January 7, 2014.

Dave Alvin: You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive.

Dave Alvin: You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive. Video. davealvinofficial, April 2, 2013. YouTube. From the Justified Season 4 finale.

Kentucky Songs: You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive. By Jim Owston. Reading Between the Grooves, May 13, 2013.




Patty Loveless: You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive. By Jim Owston. Reading Between the Grooves, February 9, 2010. Video at YouTube. Live version at MerleFest 2002.







Darrell Scott: You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive. Video. Rain DogZg, April 3, 2013. YouTube.




Gangstagrass: Long Hard Times to Come (Justified Theme). Video. Garrus Vikarian, December 11, 2012. YouTube.




Justified: A compilation tribute of season 4. Video. joeyclauk, April 16, 2013. YouTube.




Timothy Olyphant and Walton Goggins: Funny Justified talk. Video. Ioanna ThinkNice, December 9, 2013. YouTube.

Cheering Up Frank Luntz, and Ourselves. By Jim Geraghty.

Cheering Up Frank Luntz, and Ourselves. By Jim Geraghty. National Review Online, January 8, 2014.

Geraghty:

Assume for a moment, that the conclusions that have driven pollster Frank Luntz into deep depression and angst are true:

“I spend more time with voters than anybody else,” Luntz says. “I do more focus groups than anybody else. I do more dial sessions than anybody else. I don’t know [squat] about anything, with the exception of what the American people think.”

 

It was what Luntz heard from the American people that scared him. They were contentious and argumentative. They didn’t listen to each other as they once had. They weren’t interested in hearing other points of view. They were divided one against the other, black vs. white, men vs. women, young vs. old, rich vs. poor. “They want to impose their opinions rather than express them,” is the way he describes what he saw. “And they’re picking up their leads from here in Washington.” Haven’t political disagreements always been contentious, I ask? “Not like this,” he says. “Not like this.”

 

Luntz knew that he, a maker of political messages and attacks and advertisements, had helped create this negativity, and it haunted him. But it was Obama he principally blamed. The people in his focus groups, he perceived, had absorbed the president’s message of class divisions, haves and have-nots, of redistribution.

Before we go any further, let’s look a little closer at the phenomenon Luntz describes, and how the trend probably predates the president and is driven by a lot more than just who’s sitting in the Oval Office. Let’s start with those “class divisions, haves and have-nots, of redistribution.”

 

Imagine if the most bland and milquetoast president had been in office since January 20, 2009. Instead of electing uber-celebrity Munificent Sun-King Barack Obama, we elected President Boring Center-Left Conventional Wisdom – the genetic hybrid of David Gergen, David Brooks, Tom Friedman and Cokie Roberts.

 

America would still have endured Wall Street crash of late 2008 and the Great Recession. This recession (still ongoing, in the minds and experiences of millions of Americans) was driven by many factors but largely from the bursting of the housing bubble and the mortgage securities and asset-backed derivatives that came out of that. We can argue that better policies would have generated a more significant recovery from 2009 to 2012, but indisputably, America’s economy fell far and fast, and climbing back up to say, 2007 levels of employment and average household retirement savings was destined to be a long, slow, tough slog. All those folks employed in the housing bubble – the home builders, the construction guys, the suppliers, the realtors, the house-flippers, all that real estate advertising revenue, etc. – had to find some other work. And with the exception of the energy sector, there hasn’t been much of a boom in the U.S. economy in the past five years.

 

At the same time, we spent most of 2001 to 2009 absorbing millions of illegal immigrants, a wave of unskilled labor flooding the market for the few unskilled labor jobs out there. The multi-decade decline of American manufacturing hasn’t abated much, schools and universities continued to pump out new American workers who are only partially prepared for the reality of the modern job market, and new technology continues to wreak havoc in established industries (ask Newsweek).  Competition from cheaper labor overseas continues unabated. The era of spending your career at one company is gone. The era of traditional defined-benefit pension plans is gone. The era of a college degree automatically providing a ticket to a white-collar job and middle class lifestyle is gone.

 

Economic anxiety is baked in the cake in American life right now. It’s not that surprising that a lot of our fellow countrymen are receptive to a message seeking scapegoats. In other words, even under President Cokie Gergen Friedman Brooks, Luntz would be seeing a similar cranky, resentful, demanding mood in the electorate. This president may be particularly skilled at opportunistically exploiting that anxiety to further his agenda – in fact, it may be the only thing he’s really good at – but it’s not like he invented it, nor like he’s the only one to ever practice it (Remember Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich calling Mitt Romney a ‘vulture capitalist’?), nor like he’ll be the last to try it.

 

If Luntz’s is right that a large chunk of the American electorate has turned angry, entitled, resentful and spiteful – and I’ll bet a lot of us have suspected this in the past year or five – then it is indeed ominous for the next few elections, and suggests American life will get worse before it gets better.

 

But there’s also an upside to this, at least for us. Because it means large numbers of our fellow countrymen are embracing a philosophy and attitude that is destined to fail them and leave them miserable. Anybody who sits and waits for the government to improve his life is going to get stuck in endless circles of disappointment, anger, self-destructive rage and despair.

 

We would be foolish if we told ourselves that being conservative means we’ve got life all figured out.  We all have our flaws, our foibles, our sins, and our moments of not practicing what we preach. But if you’re conservative, you’ll probably manage to avoid certain mistakes and pitfalls on this journey called life.

 

If you’re conservative, you’ve probably learned that there’s no substitute for hard work. Even great talent can only get you so far, particularly if you don’t apply yourself. Yes, luck is a factor, but we also acknowledge that old saying, “the harder I work, the luckier I get.”

 

If you’re conservative, you probably at least try to embrace individual responsibility – meaning you realize the quality of your life is primarily up to you – and there’s no point in blaming mommy or daddy, no point in blaming the boss, no point in blaming society at large, no point in complaining that life isn’t fair. It isn’t. We can’t control a lot of things. The only thing we can control is how we react to things.

 

If you’re conservative, you hopefully don’t spend much time worrying about or grumbling about somebody else who’s doing well for themselves. You want to figure out how to join them! Or at least “do well” enough for yourself and your family, and maybe have a little something left over to help out somebody who really needs it.

 

If you’re conservative, you may or may not believe in a higher power, but you probably believe in right and wrong and you’re wary of people who talk about the world as a murky blur of grey and endorse a moral relativism. You know doing the wrong thing catches up with you sooner or later. You know the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and life’s bad guys are always insisting that the ends justify the means.

 

If you’re conservative, you believe there’s evil in the world, and we’re not likely to successfully sweet-talk with it, negotiate with it, ignore it, or reason with it. Confronting it, on terms most beneficial to us, or containing it seem to be the best options.

 

If you’re conservative, you may or may not have the level of impulse control you wish – I sure as heck don’t at mealtimes — but you at least seem to recognize the consequences. Completely embracing “If it feels good, do it” will leave you in a dark alley, hung over and going through withdrawal, and perhaps with a venereal disease.

 

Individual responsibility, hard work, gratitude and appreciation, a conscience, fortitude – these things will never go out of style, no matter how cranky the electorate gets. What Luntz is witnessing is a lot of people embracing ideas that are going to fail them. At another point in that interview:

The entitlement he now hears from the focus groups he convenes amounts, in his view, to a permanent poisoning of the electorate—one that cannot be undone. “We have now created a sense of dependency and a sense of entitlement that is so great that you had, on the day that he was elected, women thinking that Obama was going to pay their mortgage payment, and that’s why they voted for him,” he says. “And that, to me, is the end of what made this country so great.”

I wonder if Luntz is referring to the oft-quoted Peggy Joseph, declaring in 2008, “I don’t have to worry about putting gas in my car, I don’t have to worry about my mortgage! If I help him, he’s going to help me.” 

Except Barack Obama never paid for Peggy Joseph’s gas or mortgage. At least on that front, she’s probably found Obama’s presidency to be deeply disappointing, presuming she never found a way to serve on the board of Solyndra. 

Both liberals and conservatives were appalled by the administration’s management and handling of Obamacare rollout, but only the liberals were surprised. (Well, maybe we were surprised at just how epic the failure was.) We don’t expect government to do a lot of things right. We don’t count on it to immanentize the eschaton – to build God’s Kingdom, or utopia, on earth. But year in and year out, the Left always convinces itself anew that government can do it – even after it completely botches a web site and fails to tell the president before the unveiling.

 

One final note:

Luntz lives alone. Never married, he tells me he is straight (and that no reporter has ever asked him about his sexual orientation before), just unable to sustain a romantic relationship because of all the time he spends on the road. “My parents were married for 47 years. I’m never in the same place more than 47 minutes,” he says. When I point out he’s chosen that lifestyle, he says, “You sound like my relatives.”

Marriage is a useful indicator of voting patterns. More Republicans are married than Democrats – and the benefits of marriage are enormous.

 

Maybe we need to set up Luntz with some nice woman, and maybe his outlook on life will brighten.