Palestine

Barack Obama is like any candidate for president in that he’s opted for the politically expedient at the expense of a higher principle – most notably when he thumbed his nose at the same public financing system that he’d long championed. Not surprisingly, his supporters shrugged that one off and echoed their candidate’s rationalizations. Better to implement real reform as president than to stand on principle and lose an election, he and they both reasoned.

That logic also explains why so many of his supporters on the left have remained silent, save for some grumbling among themselves that occasionally spills into the blogosphere, while Mr.  read more »

The other day at Brandeis, Alan Dershowitz, responding to Jimmy Carter, took a shot at NYU's Tony Judt because of Judt's famous call (in the New York Review of Books) to give up on the idea of a Jewish state.

"Tony Judt is in favor of the complete dissolution of the state of Israel... the total dissolution of the state of Israel," said Dershowitz.

Two comments. First, that Dershowitz should bring this up shows that those who favor a single state in Palestine have gotten the issue on the agenda. Dershowitz's line is is now the talking point. Leon Wieseltier made a similar statement about Judt, with a similarly-angry tone, in the New Republic a few weeks back.

Second, Dershowitz's characterization doesn't seem fair to me; he is using eliminationist rhetoric to suggest that Judt is a kind of Nazi or antisemite, who would sweep Jews into the sea. In fact, if you read Judt's groundbreaking essay, you understand that his position is being caricatured. Yes, Dershowitz is right; Judt's vision would result in the end of the Jewish state. But his tone is pained, realistic, and even idealistic: it is a recovery of the old Judah Magnes/Elmer Berger/Anglo-American Inquiry Commission position that partition is racialist, that Arab and Jew should learn to live together in historic Palestine—because god knows, they haven't done a very good job of living with partition.  read more »

For another point of view on this, read Elik Alhanan's two-state position (near the end of this long post). Meantime, below is an excerpt of Judt's piece:

Brooklyn College's Corey Robin has a fascinating piece in the latest LRB about Hannah Arendt, treating three objections that Arendt, who was sympathetic to Zionism, formed in the '40s to certain currents of Zionist ideology. Now that Israel has elevated to cabinet level a racist who supports expulsion of Arabs, Arendt's prescient critique is worth reviewing, especially as it touches on questions of identity and—my concern—the degree to which American Jewish identity is centered on devotion to Israel.

1. The Arab Question. "By 1944.. she had come to see it as the 'most important' challenge. Without 'Arab-Jewish co-operation,' she wrote in 1948, 'the whole Jewish venture in Palestine is doomed.'"

2. Israel's dependence on super-powers would allow it to show contempt for its neighbors. "Only folly could dictate a policy that trusts distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours,' she wrote. In a 1950 essay, she declared that Zionists simply ignored or failed to understand 'the awakening of colonial peoples and the new nationalist solidarity in the Arab world from Iraq to French Morocco'."

3. Some Zionists' definition of Jewishness, as a people or nationality, was a "volk" concept that recalled the racist German definition of Jewishness. Writes Robin: "In 1948, the leader of Herut, Israel's Revisionist party, travelled to America. Arendt drafted a letter of protest to the New York Times, which was signed by Einstein, Sidney Hook and others. Herut was 'no ordinary political party', she wrote. It was 'closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties'. It used 'terrorism', and its goal was a 'Fuhrer state' based on 'ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority'. The letter also decried those 'Americans of national repute' who 'have lent their names to welcome' the Herut leader, giving 'the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel'. The leader of Herut was Menachem Begin."

The Times mentioned Jimmy Carter twice in yesterday's paper. On the sports age, he was described as "soft-spoken, cautious, reserved, conformist, reliable" (a piece on blood types). But the other article was in Arts, and labelled him a raving lunatic. This was part of the Times' continuing series to give space to (Jewish) defenders of Israel to denounce Carter as misinformed and dotty because he dared to write a book likening the Israeli occupation to apartheid. Two days before, WINEP's David Makovsky told the Times the book is filled with errors, and he's "saddened by it."

Back when Jimmy Carter was young, they used to have literacy tests to keep black people from voting. The black person would go to the polls and have to take a literacy test in order to vote. The pollworkers would ask the black person questions like, "How many bubbles in a bar of soap?" When the black person couldn't answer, they couldn't vote.

The Times is enforcing the literacy test on Israel/Palestine. Jimmy Carter failed. He made too many mistakes so he can't offer his opinion. Only experts can vote, usually centrist-right Jews who have no interest in or idea what's going on in the Occupied Territories. People who are blind to an outrage, people like Ken Pollack who can't even say the word occupation. A president who negotiated a lasting peace deal between Israel and Egypt and who has visited the area countless times: he's not well-informed enough to comment.

The literacy test has worked. It's sharply narrowed the mainstream discourse on Israel/Palestine. Democratic discourse is supposed to be contentious: You get a lot of views, and everyone makes some mistakes. Big deal; it's the ideas that count. But intimidated by the literacy test, a lot of liberals won't go near this issue, people who would be shocked to see what goes on in the Occupied Territories. Tony Kushner first explained this to me months ago. Even if you're sickened by what you see on TV, you're made to feel you're an idiot and not allowed to open your mouth till you know the difference between the Anglo-American commission and the Peel report and U.N. partition and Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration and Transjordan and a ton of other historical debris. How many bubbles in a bar of soap?

It's hurt us. For many years the left had a reasonable position, Palestinian state, that was outside the firewall the Israel lobby created that limited mainstream views. Now mainstream views have finally come around, mostly, to that opinion, Palestinian state, but some on the left are moving on, saying we missed our chance. They're talking about a binational state. At NYU last week Tony Judt said Yes he believes the idea of a Jewish state is "anachronistic," when you consider that as a Jew, he is allowed to move to Israel tomorrow, but a person born in that state and speaking the Hebrew language better than any of us can is not allowed to live there. Because they're Muslim or Christian. An interesting, important idea. The mainstream won't touch it. America's loss.

Leon Wieseltier expresses the Israel-lobby position by saying, Sure, hold an international conference to fix Iraq, but don't bring Palestine into it. It's the same line Kenneth Pollack gave us 4 years ago when he issued his manifesto for disaster (the invasion of Iraq) and said there must be no linkage between reforming Islam and dealing with (nondescript) "troubles" in Israel/Palestine.

They're wrong; but don't listen to me. Ali Eteraz is an important blogger: a liberal humanist Muslim who lives in New York. One of the things Eteraz believes, along with Wieseltier and Pollack, is that the Palestinian issue gets way too much attention in the Islamic world. But that doesn't mean you can dismiss it.

Eteraz sent me a note, explaining his position.

Psychologically I find myself at a precarious position because I have very rarely seen a way of criticising Israel, and its policies, without that criticism simultaneously connected to a latent anti-Semitism. Having often been victimized by blatant Islamophobia, I have very little interest in assisting in having Jews subjected even to a more latent version of prejudice.

[But] from a pragmatic position, [America's] unchecked support of Israel hinders the project that I am most interested in: empowering Muslim reformists. I think it is particularly tragic that Israel/Palestine gets so much more play than the multitude of other human disasters in the world. However, that is reality, and one off-shoot of that reality is that one Palestinian death, or one additional Israeli settlement, or one additional story of exclusionary actions by the IDF, does more to set back the efforts of Muslim reformists (especially in the Arab world), than anything else. It gives to the fundamentalists and extremists a way to keep bringing the discourse to a polarizing dead-end...I wish [your blog] would recognize it explicitly: The vast majority of ills in the Muslim world are due to the profusion of tyrants. The tyrants, if removed, will inevitably be replaced by democratic Islamists. The most likely "wing" of the Islamists which will acquire power will be the hardliners because they have the ability to play the Israel Card.

If American realists and pragmatists take away that card from the hardliners by not treating Israel like the golden calf, we can assure that when (and it is inevitable) the democratic Islamists come to power, it will be the moderate, and one hopes, the reformist element of the community. We need to see more... measured and reality-based non-rhetorical non-polarizing discussions about certain acts of Israeli hubris. A vast majority of the Muslim world a) does not want to push the Jews into the sea, b) doesn't even want the one-state solution, and c) is quite content with the idea of a return to the '67 borders and a bi-state solution. However, if that doesn't happen -- and it can only happen if the United States permits it -- the vast majority of the Muslim world will remain susceptible to the Israel Card. I really wish it was possible to engage in Islamic reform without having at all to deal with the issue of Israel and Palestine, but I am increasingly realizing that it is not so possible. People like me are in need of people like you. I hope that you will talk about Israel in a manner that is so honest and so fair and so humanist that people will be persuaded of your position without the fear of an anti-Jewish backlash. I hope that is not too much pressure.

That's a humbling statement. It shows how much I can improve my own politics by not losing sight of Islamic tyranny. And it shows how vital we are as the new center: American pluralists who do not demonize Arabs and call for evenhandedness across the region.

I caught Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian/American activist and author of a new book calling for a single Arab and Jewish state in Palestine, at Columbia the other night. Abunimah made a few interesting points: 1. Having been to Northern Ireland, Abunimah reports that the two sides hate each other "deeply" but live with each other because they regard their situation as "vastly improved" over the violence of ten years before. The challenge in statecraft is to create mechanisms that allow for equal treatment under the law while giving a lot of space for people to preserve independent ethnic identity and autonomy. So what if they hate each other? At least they're working together to improve one anothers' lives. (The late Milton Friedman endorsed a similar view in a posthumous rerun on Charlie Rose: people who hate each other can still trade with one another.)

2. The "Peace process" is an industry that spends billions of dollars on the same idea over and over again with no clear results. "There is a fantasy of separation, that the other side can be made to disappear, either behind a wall or through the existence of a Palestinian state."  read more »

3. Some Zionists in the 20s and 30s were in favor of a state that was Arab and Jewish.

The idea that there are two narratives about Israel/Palestine in this country, and never the twain shall meet, was reinforced last week by the Times' two-parter on the special relationship of Israel and the U.S., titled "Anatomy of an Alliance." The first part dismissed the claim of an "Israel lobby," arguing in essence that there have been paranoid theories of Jewish influence going back to Truman's day. The next day, part 2 was devoted to the old standby bugaboo: Christian right support for Israel. As if evangelical support for the right of the chosen people to the holy land is why Dem bosses Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean say that we will be by Israel's side now and forever.

Oh, those evangelical Christian Democrats—I guess Rahm Emanuel and Chuck Schumer raise tons of money at private parties in Dallas and Boise!

I'm of course an advocate for the other narrative: that American Jewish support for Israel is a major factor in our foreign policy in that region, and that this support needs to be critically examined (especially by progressives who are appalled by Iraq and trying to undo the damage).

And I'd counter the Times' dismissal of Jewish influence as a canard that goes back to the 40s with the work of a former Timesman, Peter Grose. A gentile, a longtime foreign correspondent for the Times, later associated with the Council on Foreign Relations, Grose in 1983 published a book called Israel in the Mind of America (Knopf) that dissected the political support in the U.S. for the Jewish state, and described the birth of the lobby, which he terms the "Jewish lobby," in the mid-1940s.  read more »

Grose completely contradicts the Times' claim of last week. He shows that in 1945-1947, when the Democratic administrations of the White House were taking a "go-slow" policy with respect to a Jewish state in Palestine out of concern for the effects in the Arab world, and when some moderate Zionists were going along with the presidents, militant Jews around the country organized to fast-track the idea.

Today the Times at last quotes Steve Walt fairly, in an article by Steve Erlanger and David Sanger about why Israel and the U.S. are joined in a war on terror from Gaza to Baghdad, and maybe on to Tehran.

Though, rest assured, the Times is careful to dismiss Walt and Mearsheimer's paper on "The Israel Lobby" as an antisemitic canard:

Former Israeli ambassadors to Washington like Mr. Rabinovich, Mr. Arens and Mr. Shoval all scoff at the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis, which echoes criticisms of Jewish influence as far back as the presidency of Harry S. Truman.

Wait—why stop at Truman? Pro-Israel forces in the U.S. have played a crucial role in the life of the settlement and state, going back to the Wilson administration. Saying so doesn't make you an Israel critic. It might even make you a dispassionate scholar:

1.Albert Lindemann (of UC Santa Barbara) in his book on antisemitism, Esau's Tears:

Leading State Department professionals came to resent bitterly what they considered a Jewish power so great that It was able to contravene completely the established role of the State Department. A most striking case in point was the meeting in Washington, D.C., in May 1917 between [British foreign secretary] Balfour and Justice Brandeis [lately appointed the first Jew among the Supremes]. Although he was close to President Wilson, Brandeis had no official authority to speak on foreign relations. Nevertheless, he communicated to Balfour a strong American support for the ideas of Zionism. Historian Peter Grose has commented that "as an illustration of back-channel diplomacy at its most effective, the Balfour-Brandeis meeting was exceptional. A Foreign Minister seeking understanding on a delicate political issue turned not to his official opposite number, the Secretary of State, or even to the other foreign policy advisers known to be close to the president." [Grose, Israel in the mind of America] Of course Balfour had every right, even obligation, to seek out spokesmen for American Jewry on such an issue. What is remarkable is that State Department officials, including the secretary of state, were totally ignored...

2. Melvin Urofsky and David W. Levy [of Virginia Commonwealth U. and Oklahoma U], in The Family Letters of Louis D. Brandeis:

Following the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, American Zionists pleaded with President Wilson formally to endorse the pledge that there would be a Jewish homeland in Palestine after the war. The State Department, however, adamantly opposed this request, pointing out to Wilson that the United States was not at war with the Ottoman Empire. Wilson finally decided to yield to Jewish requests and, without consulting the State Department, addressed a Jewish New Year's greeting to the Jewish people through [Reform rabbi] Stephen Wise, dated 31 August 1918. In the letter Wilson approved the Zionist program..."

The fascination here is the extent to which the Balfour declaration of 1917 in England, granting a homeland to Jews in Palestine, and Wilson's affirmation of it a year later, grew out of the only thing Jews had going for them then: access to power of highly-successful men of wealth or learning. In England it was the great chemist Chaim Weizmann. Here it was men like Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter (later to be appointed the third Jewish Supreme Court Justice) and Jacob Schiff, the N.Y. banker.

As for Truman, in 1948, C.L. Sulzberger of the Times met with David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv, and the P.M. stated the need for an Israel lobby: The purpose of Israel is to "bring here all those Jews in the world who wish to come. That calls for a partnership between Israel and outside organizations, and all the Jews of the world must help."

Call it a good thing or a bad thing, call it influence, help, a back-channel, requests, or a lobby. Call it anything you like; just don't pretend that it is a fantasy.

I caught Lieberman on Meet the Press today. The guy is an amazing politician. He's always been a great politician, this time he outdid himself. He knows how to talk to people, he knows how to build a coalition, he is creative and synthetic and articulate. Hat's off to him for the political Lazarus job he pulled off since August 8.

He is also intellectually corrupt. When he says that America's biggest job is to reach "hearts and minds" across the Arab world and says that this is to be achieved by imposing democracy in Iraq, he has learned nothing from a bloody and horrifying experiment that has weakened America. He knows better. There's one thing that America can do tomorrow to reach hearts and minds across the Arab world, and that is to listen to what those Arabs say they want: for the U.S. to commit itself to a peace process in Israel/Palestine that will end the humiliation of the Palestinians and end attacks on Palestinians and Israelis. That commitment by American leaders might even help in the eventual stabilization of Iraq, indeed in reforming Islamic dictatorships.

Per Haaretz, the recent election has resulted in there being 13 Jews in Lieberman's club, our nation's most elite club, the Senate. That is 10 times the national percentage of Jews, 1.3 percent. This in spite of dire warnings from Gabriel Schoenfeld and Abraham Foxman about the return of anti-Semitism. These guys are simply wrong. The truth is that Americans like Jews in power, trust them with power. The great challenge to Jews in power is to recognize a reality in the Middle East that goes against the ideology of mainstream American Jewry, the Israel lobby, and most of the money that helped Lieberman rewin his seat: Palestinians have been too long denied the right to self-determination. (And the destruction of their hopes is corrupting Israel's soul...)

Last night in a conference room at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, 20 students gathered to hear a young Palestinian woman and a former Israeli soldier, sitting side by side under the auspices of the peace organization One Voice, tell of the situation in Israel/Palestine. At the end, the two, who had politely disagreed about a number of issues, were asked for a final statement about their hopes. The Palestinian, who had long dark hair and a downward gaze, said, "It's not necessarily about hope. It's about not wanting another best friend to die. It makes me tremble just to think about that. And I decide that I cannot shape a Palestinian identity around violence. So it's really about compromise. It's not about hope."

The former Israeli soldier, blue-eyed, his shirt sleeves pushed up around his biceps, said, "In Hebrew we have a word, Amal. It means, I have nothing to add. I agree with her completely."

(I am sorry not to have these young people's names; I got there late; I will supply them later.)

The news from Israel/Palestine these days is desperate. For the second time in a few months an "errant" Israeli mortar shell has destroyed an innocent Palestinian family in Gaza—  read more »

The Yivo Institute, which is dedicated to the study of Ashkenazi Jews, has lately reprinted an important attack on the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." The attack was written in 1921 by the great English journalist Lucien Wolf, who showed that the Protocols, then circulating in Europe, were plagiarized fictions aimed at persecuting Jews.

Yivo's Board of Overseers, chaired by Marty Peretz, has reprinted the cover of Lucien Wolf's book The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs. And a handsome cover it is. On the back of the reprint, Yivo presumes to tell Wolf's biography. It goes on about what a scholar, reporter, and diplomat he was. It says that at Versailles in 1919, he "supported the 'western' position that the Jews were not in fact a separate nation, but should be protected as minority citizens of their respective resident countries."

This vague statement is a dishonest way of treating Wolf's actual significance in Jewish history: he was an anti-Zionist. For most of his life he fought Chaim Weizmann over the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine—although he demanded equal rights and protection for Jews who emigrated there. Wolf, writes Walter Laquer, in A History of Zionism, looked upon Judaism "as a collection of abstract religious principles, upon east European Jewry as an object of compassion and philanthropy, and upon Zionism as, at best, the empty dream of a few misguided idealists." Wolf himself wrote the entry on Zionism in the (magnificent) 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1911. (Thanks to my book-collecting mom, I have it right here.) He dismissed Zionism as an "error" by laying out his liberal belief in the modern nation state:

"Under the influence of religious toleration and the naturalization laws, nationalities are daily losing more of their religious character... With the passing away of anti-Semitism, Jewish nationalism will disappear. If the Jewish people disappear with it, it will only be because either their religious mission in the world has been accomplished, or they have proved themselves unworthy of it."

Yes, Wolf was writing before the Holocaust. But this is what this great Jew believed. Other progressives hold similar views today, including those like myself who are appalled by what a militaristic state Israel is, and by the apartheid policies that I witnessed in Hebron in the West Bank. Indeed some of Wolf's heirs have called for a binational state in Palestine.

The point here is that those who would insulate Israel from criticism, including Peretz, are misrepresenting Jewish history, in this case to stir up fears of a new antisemitism, and to bash Walt and Mearsheimer while they are at it. If you want to invoke Lucien Wolf's legacy, do so by honoring his views. And by showing that there is a tradition on the left of critiquing the implications of establishing a Jewish state. (Yivo knows better. It holds Wolf's papers. And Yivo's own curators describe Wolf's anti-Zionist efforts more honestly here.) One more wrinkle. Wolf believed that Jewish support for a Zionist state would expose Jews in western societies to the charge of dual loyalty. In essence, an issue that is raised by Walt and Mearsheimer's critique of the Israel lobby, and by the deluded war-fervor of White House neocons like Elliott Abrams, who has written that outside of Israel, Jews "are to stand apart from the nation in which they live." (This guy makes policy!) Walter Lippmann also had this concern (per Ronald Steel's bio), which is one reason he did not become a Zionist.

This is the one good thing about Gabriel Schoenfeld's (vicious) attack on Walt and Mearsheimer in the latest Commentary. Schoenfeld knows, and says, that concerns about dual loyalty were active in the minds of Jews who opposed Zionism, back when. Yivo could honor Lucien Wolf by exploring his concerns—now, when Jews need to recover their progressive tradition.

An important piece in the Forward this week suggests that Bush is at last going to do something about Israel/Palestine so as to try and redeem his failed policies in the Middle East and restore American legitimacy in the world. The Forward quotes Philip Zelikow, an assistant to Condoleezza Rice, speaking at the pro-Israel thinktank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy:

Zelikow said that the Europeans and the moderate Arabs are America's most important allies in confronting Iran and Islamist terrorism, "and some sense of progress and momentum on the Arab-Israeli dispute is the sine qua non for them to cooperate actively with the United States on lots of other things that we care about.

"We can rail against that belief; we can find it completely justifiable. It is a fact. That means an active policy on the Arab-Israeli dispute is an essential ingredient to forging a coalition that deals with the most dangerous problem."

Sine qua non. Nice. The daybreak moment is reflected by MJ Rosenberg on the IPF Forum:

This is something new: the realization by Washington that movement on the Israeli-Palestinian issue is not only right, it is essential if the United States is to achieve progress anywhere in the region.

Under Secy' of State Karen Hughes said the same thing earlier this week (on CNN or MSNBC) before Bush's appearance at the U.N. "Everywhere I go," she said, people talk about Israel/Palestine; we're going to get moving on that one.

One can only hope. Naturally, the Forward's Ori Nir reports that the Israelis are disturbed by the pressure. It means doing something about the hated occupation. But it's worth considering that the uptick in Arab prestige achieved by the Lebanon war may actually further the possibility of a deal.

"[A] central feature of the Arab Israeli conflict [is that] Israel's military victories and the Arabs' humiliating defeat could never be the prelude to peace," Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Foreign Minister, has written. The '67 war, for instance, bolstered Israel's tendency toward unilateralism and suspicion of Arab motives. "It took the recovery of Arab pride and a serious setback for Israel in 1973, as well as the national trauma and collective soul-searching that followed, to make the Israelis and their leaders ripe for compromise."

Maybe that's happening now, maybe Bush, punctured by his Iraqi nightmare, is actually doing some soul-searching. Someone lend him a penlight.

Last week my father gave me a book of the English essayist Isaiah Berlin's portraits. Berlin was a friend of Chaim Weizmann, the moderate Zionist and first president of Israel, whom Berlin often visited in Palestine during the tortuous years under the British mandate, 1945-1947, when Jewish terrorists blew up the King David Hotel, killing 91 people, and captured and executed British soldiers. Berlin says that Weizmann refused to condemn the terrorists. Why?

When Jewish terrorism broke out in Palestine he felt and behaved much as Russian liberals did when reactionary Tsarist ministers were assassinated by idealistic revolutionaries. He did not support it; in private he condemned it very vehemently. But he did not think it morally decent to denounce either the acts or their perpetrators in public. He genuinely detested violence: and he was too civilised and too humane to believe in its efficacy, mistakenly perhaps. But he did not propose to speak out against acts, criminal as he thought them, which sprang from the tormented minds of men driven to desperation, and ready to give up their lives to save their brothers from what, he and they were equally convinced, was a betrayal and a destruction cynically prepared for them by the foreign offices of the western powers...

Noteworthy for a couple of reasons. Palestinian sympathizers are continually called upon to condemn terrorism. Sometimes they comply, sometimes they don't. Many of them, as Weizmann did, understand the desperate and tormented reasons for terrorism, which are not generally religious, per Robert Pape, but utterly mundane: about land and occupation.

On Friday I went to an old friend's book party. Amy Wilentz has just published a book about California, I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen. The party was at Victor and Annie Navasky's on the West Side.

Wilentz welcomed me as I came through the door. She was wearing a spectacular dress, something closefitting in dark brown with a low neckline and an irregular hem, over dark brown heels. It showed off her beautiful skin and hair. She murmured something about the book being her least favorite of her books, or the least serious, I wasn't sure, and then later she gave a toast in which she said that in Los Angeles, where she now lives, the parties are consumed by politics, but in New York the parties are all gossip. "So gossip!" she commanded us, and we did.  read more »

In the latest New Republic, Israeli scholar Benny Morris is given many pages to expound his view that "the West" is now engaged in a battle with Islamists on three fronts: "Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine." He goes on, "For many or most Islamists, Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine are merely Stage 1."

This is the blanket identification of U.S. and Israeli interests that The New Republic and other salients of the Israel lobby have insisted upon since 9/11. No one is helped by this sort of imprecision.  read more »

A Palestinian public health official, speaking at the Palestine Center, discussed problems with Palestinian genetic diseases.

Consanguinity-we have this marriage between relatives, the first cousins. Consanguinity is a major problem because it produces children who are affected and who have genetic diseases. We have done a lot of work on this. For example, in consanguinity there is a disease called thalassemia. Now no one can marry in our country without having a test for thalassemia. We are pioneers in this. You have to have a certificate that says at least that you are not a carrier of this disease; otherwise you cannot marry. Some of these [affected] people will go to other countries and marry there; unfortunately, we cannot prevent this. It is bad for them but it is a good example to show people that yes, this is important.

I can't help remarking that there are also Jewish diseases that inmarriage only creates greater risk for, like Tay-Sachs and Gaucher. When issues of 30-foot walls and Bantustans and demographic purity are in the air, maybe people should talk about hybrid stuff, too. Wouldn't everyone in Israel/Palestine be better off in the end with a little less separation?

One of the great sticking points in the peace process in Israel/Palestine is the issue of the "right of return." The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 (what the Palestinians call the "Nakba," or disaster) resulted in over 700,000 Palestinian refugees. Palestinians have long demanded their right to return to their former properties.

In a talk at the Palestine Center in Washington last week, Michael Fischbach, a professor of history at Randolph-Macon who has long investigated the claims of dispossession, said that financial restitution is the answer. Just because the losses happened 60 years ago doesn't mean there isn't a way to put a value on them.

Giving back property after many, many years has also been shown much more recently in Israeli history, when in the late 1990s it was determined that the Israeli government, Israeli banks, and Israeli land companies were in possession of quite a lot of Holocaust property [belonging to] European Jews who had bought real estate in Palestine who were murdered in the Holocaust. Various banks and other Israeli agencies had been in control of their property for decades. The heirs, when they found out about it, caused a huge stink in Israel. In fact, the State of Israel has close to $30 million in Holocaust securities. Bank Leumi, Israel's main bank, has somewhere between $24 and $96 million dollars in Holocaust securities. The Jewish National Fund has posted on its website the names of deceased Jewish landowners, calling on any of their heirs to come back and reclaim property, which in some instances is worth millions of dollars, such as downtown Tel Aviv property. Clearly, that example shows that Israelis are willing to part with millions of dollars of land and real estate for the sake of justice and equity despite the passage of over six decades. However, that of course is Jewish restitution made to other Jews--not Jews to Arabs. Clearly there is an ethnic dimension. But when people say that the sheer fact of restituting land back to someone after sixty years is impossible, it is not impossible. It is impossible politically, perhaps, and in certain people's minds, but it can be done and the record has shown that.

An exhibit of 17 paintings done by Palestinian children that was mounted in a library at Brandeis University last week was taken down over the weekend by the Brandeis administration. That's from Lior Halperin, a 27-year-old Israeli sophomore at Brandeis, who fought resistance from the school to put on the show in the first place. I'm waiting for a call back from the Brandeis administrator who is said to have taken the show down.

Halperin says that MIT has offered to mount the show, she'll take it there.

The show of pictures from kids in a refugee camp in Bethlehem was (shockingly) an effort by Halperin to bring the humanity of the victims of Israel's occupation to the American Jewish community. "If we are going to find a partner for peace, we have to listen to the other side," Halperin says. "These are voices who are longing for a land and longing for a home, we have to respect that."

Here, for instance, is a painting by 16-year-old Hussam Al-Azza, who says, "I want to tell the world about Palestine, and I ask them to search for the reality about our case."

Let's be clear. The show was provocative: one kid painted a flag of Palestine on Israel, almost all the kids spoke in the accompanying texts of liberating Palestine, ending the occupation, returning to their grandparents' homes in what is now Israel. But, did you notice—the Middle East is a violent mess. We need to do more listening, not less.

One unfortunate aspect of the Jewish community's rigidity on these issues is that it is shutting out evolving ideas about Israel's future from the left; and the left needs to be heard.

These days the political mainstream is all for a two-state solution. Right-wing Israelis are even for it, because of the "demographic" problem: the Arab birthrate in the occupied territories threatens to make Israel responsible for a "state" that is mostly Arab. So Israel wants to withdraw from a lot of the West Bank, and put up that big wall, and wash its hands of the Arabs forever. Can it do that? Probably not. It's just a formula for more mistrust, more violence, more separation. Especially if the border is not negotiated through an international process. And meanwhile, voices on the left—the same voices on the left that were pushing for a two-state solution 25 years ago when the mainstream said they were crazy—are now beginning to push for a one-state solution, a unified land where Palestinians and Jews live in peaceful co-existence, which is what Halperin believes. I know, that's crazy. And everyone else has such reasonable answers.  read more »

I saw the movie Syriana last night. Here are four good things about it: It is a serious effort to examine the roots of the clash between the west and the Middle East. Director Stephen Gaghan did a fine job of research and then translating that research into a dramatic story, showing that the American need for oil has helped to prop up Arab dictatorships. George Clooney is a superb actor in a moral manner. Arab men and boys were portrayed as normal, humorous, profane people.

Now here's what is wrong with it. Gaghan has completely imbibed a modish leftwing materialist take on the Arab world. Everyone on the liberal side says it; he says it, too: These Arab dictatorships were created by western imperial demands, notably the desire to keep oil flowing. Their oil-based hierarchies deny opportunities to their young people for freedom and employment. That's what is fueling terrorism.  read more »

Some time back I was interviewing a prominent academic who was disturbed by American policy in the Middle East but said he didn't want to stick his head up too high on the question. "Who wants to have Dershowitz coming after him?"

Good point. Dershowitz is brilliant and aggressive and intimidating. In their paper on the Israel lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt correctly identify The Dersh as an important part of the lobby. Because when anyone challenges the morality of our one-sided policy in the I/P world (Israel Palestine), Dersh is sure to land with both broad feet, hard and fast.

He's done so again, in responding, on the Kennedy School website, to the Walt-Mearsheimer paper. http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/research/working_papers/dershowitzreply.pdf His attack is emotional and forceful, accusing the authors of distortion and anti-semitism. And it's wrong. He argues in essence, this paper is a neo-Nazi tract that twists evidence out of hatred for Jews and therefore must not be taken seriously. (In fact, as I've said before, Walt-Mearsheimer is a considered, provocative and heretical analysis that must be taken seriously...)

But let's consider one of Dersh's key points: Osama bin Laden couldn't care less about the Palestinians.

Prior to September 11, Israel was barely on bin Laden's radar.

Here he echoes a central claim of the Israel lobby, that the 9/11 attacks were about Saudi Arabia, Arab male social frustration, Arab dictatorship, Arab lack of opportunity-- anything but American policy in I/P. And to some degree, the lobby is right. The hijackers apparently had a wide range of motivations, which historians will be parsing for a long time to come--about as long as they're trying to figure out why the U.S. invaded Iraq!

The lie the lobby and The Dersh spread is that the unbalanced American policy in I/P had nothing to do with the attacks. When Osama bin Laden and his associates clearly were angry about the Palestinians. Here is Max Rodenbeck, in a thorough piece called "Their Master's Voice," about bin Ladenism in the New York Review of Books. (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18750)

... the notion of payback for injustices suffered by the Palestinians is perhaps the most powerfully recurrent in bin Laden's speeches. It has become fashionable to assert that al-Qaeda's attachment to the Palestinian cause is relatively recent, and has been cynical and deliberately manipulative. That is simply not true. As long ago as 1984, witnesses report bin Laden shunning American goods to protest American support of Israel.

Speaking just before the 2004 presidential elections, bin Laden himself voiced amazement that Americans, deceived, he supposed, by their government, had yet to understand that he had struck America because "things just went too far with the American-Israeli alliance's oppression and atrocities against our people." As he goes on to relate in some detail:

The events that made a direct impression on me were during and after 1982, when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon.... I still remember those distressing scenes: blood, torn limbs, women and children massacred.... The whole world heard and saw what happened, but did nothing. In those critical moments, many ideas raged inside me, ideas difficult to describe, but they unleashed a powerful urge to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the aggressors.

Yes bin Laden is evil. No, we don't let a madman dictate our policies. But the point is, when people ask, Why do they hate us? the answer must include the understanding, We've sided almost absolutely with an occupying power in a very morally ambiguous situation, Israel-Palestine.

And that's the strongest evidence of the Israel lobby's power. You cannot make this simple statement in the mainstream. Most significantly, the 9/11 Commission report on the attacks included not one word about Israel as a motivator for the hijackers. That is a true national disgrace: The official response to the most important event of our time, drafted by politicians, and it cannot honestly address a principal sore point in the Clash of Civilizations. Because the commission is afraid to raise questions about the evenhandedness of our policy and the Israel lobby. Afraid to bring down the Wrath of the Dersh. It's time to free ourselves of this bugaboo.

I'm not sure how I feel at present about all the plays this fall wrestling with the tragedy of Sept.  read more »

The Edward Said Reader , edited by Moustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin.  read more »