Challenging Israel to "Handle the Truth"

This morning I read an Opinion piece on the Al Jazeera Web site. I suspect there are readers that know by now that Al Jazeera is a source that is not afraid to deliver news that goes against the grain of some of the more “traditional” news sources. The author is Jeremy Corbyn, currently representing Islington North in the United Kingdom House of Commons. The title of the article says it all: "Israel will never stop me speaking up for Palestine."

Some readers may recall that my first job after receiving my Doctoral Degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). was at the Technion, which proudly proclaimed itself the “Israel Institute of Technology.” This turned out to be a good start to my teaching career, since I had the liberty of creating the plans for all of the computer science classes I taught. (Computer Science was not a Department at MIT. My degree was in Applied Mathematics, and my Advisor was Marvin Minsky, Head of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.)

After teaching computer science in Israel for two years, I now had the credentials to secure on Assistant Professorship teaching Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Towards the end of the spring term, I decided that I wanted to check out Israeli “neighbors” that could not be visited to Israelites. Working with a travel agent, I planned a tour beginning in Cairo and then moving on to Amman. I could then make the move from Amman to Jerusalem through a series of bus rides (which included crossing the Jordan River). As I discovered, the Israeli “world view” was decidedly different from that of its neighbors.

Decades have now passed, but Corbyn’s article makes its clear that the relationship between Israel and its neighbors has not changed very much. If anything, Israeli governance is now more authoritarian than it was at any time during my two-year appointment there. On the other hand, there never seemed to be any tensions at the University of Pennsylvania that would divide Israeli students from those that had moved to the United States from countries such as Jordan and Egypt. Mind you, the United States itself is hardly a country in which we can all “get along;” but I do not think I ever encountered overt hostility on the Penn campus. 

Jack Nicholson’s “truth” outburst in A Few Good Men (from the Wikipedia Web page for the movie)

All this reminds me of the climatic moment in the movie A Few Good Men. Anyone who has seen that movie will probably remember Jack Nicholson’s outburst at the climax: “You can't handle the truth!” To be fair, the truth is often very difficult to handle (which is probably one reason why denial plays such a strong role in political discourse). This reminds me of the Preface to Martin Buber’s book Ten Rungs: Hasidic Sayings. He cites a single line from Deuteronomy: “Justice, justice, shalt thou follow.” He then asks the reader: “Why is the word ‘justice’ repeated?” Buber’s answer is elliptical but meaningful: “injustice as a means to justice renders justice unjust.” 

I am sure that there will be many that will disagree with me; but, as far as I am concerned, "speaking up for Palestine" is an act of justice worthy of attention in these times!

Nationalism: Here and in the Middle East

Some “unkempt thoughts” departing from music:

It was in high school that I first encountered the concept of “nationalism.” My American History teacher distilled it to a single sentence: “My country, right or wrong; but always my country.” I used to think back on those days during the Watergate hearings, wondering if my teacher’s commitment to nationalism was as strong as it was a few decades earlier.

I was reminded about that myopic commitment this morning when I encountered the following headline on a BBC Web page: “Biden says ICC war crimes arrest warrant 'outrageous’.” Apparently, our President’s “right or wrong” commitment to Israel is as strong his commitment to his own country. As the BBC article observes, that commitment isolates our country not only from the International Criminal Court (ICC) but also from a fair number of European countries.

My first job after leaving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with my doctoral degree took me to the Technion in Haifa, whose “secondary” name was “Israel Institute of Technology.” From an academic point of view, it was a smooth move; and I had no trouble preparing material for the classes I taught. (My knowledge of Hebrew never came up to snuff, but none of my students minded my lecturing in English while my teaching assistants provided hand-outs in Hebrew!) Nevertheless, my encounters with both Israelis and ex-pats, not only in Haifa but also in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, were, to put it politely, “mixed.”

The fact is that, even before borders were finalized, Israel would do what Israel wanted to do. Mind you, this a time when (too) many Americans stereotyped Arabs as terrorists, even if they could not support their bias with evidence. Since my own efforts to promote a more balanced view tended to provoke most of the Israelis I worked with and knew socially, I kept my ideas to myself for the two years of my tenure with Technion.

My second job was at the University of Pennsylvania, and it was only then that I bought my first television and started to watch the news, rather than just reading the papers. During the last few decades of the last century, Benjamin Netanyahu was already ingratiating himself with the broadcast media in the United States. Whenever a conflict was being reported from the Middle East, he always seemed to be there to offer his perspective. The American newscasters never seemed to mind whether or not that perspective was consistent with that of Israel itself.

As a result, I am now not surprised that, when I hear Netanyahu, I have no trouble wondering if he is speaking for himself or for his country. Unfortunately, it seems that our President is not given to such wondering. It’s bad enough when an allegiance to nationalism blinds us to hard truths about our own country. However, when it also blinds us to hard truths presented by the ICC, I have to worry about whether we shall ever be capable of a broader perspective that will afford a less pleasant point of view.

Daniel Barenboim Gets Enemies to Agree

Had Daniel Barenboim checked in with Jimmy Carter, he probably would have gotten an earful about how the course of true peacemaking never runs smooth. His plans to bring the Berlin Staastskapelle to Tehran has apparently been met with rejection from both Iran and Israel. Israel felt they had grounds to object because Barenboim is Israeli, conveniently overlooking the fact that he also has Palestinian citizenship. Ironically, Iran is also objecting because Barenboim is Israeli. Carter would probably tell Barenboim to look on the bright side: At least he managed to get Iran and Israel to agree on something.

Is ISIS a Product of the Failed Arab Spring?

I can appreciate the decision of the author of "The Mystery of ISIS," scheduled for the next issue of The New York Review of Books and currently available on their Web site, to remain anonymous. The article is rich with both historical background and analysis, yet it never draws any conclusions as to why ISIS should be recruiting so many followers on such a broad international scale. I would like to suggest that the author may have overlooked the role that may have been played by the Arab Spring, not so much in terms of any immediate impact that happened, fizzled, or backfired but with regard to the motivating forces behind protest. Those forces had so much in common that, as I observed in August of 2011, they could be found in Israel as well as its many Arab neighbors.

The writer that seems to have been most aware of those forces was Fareed Zakaria, whose analysis on the Time.com Web site argued that those who gathered in Tahrir Square were there because, regardless of how much education or training they had, they could not see a future for themselves in Egypt as it was in early 2011. Indeed, such a social context would suggest that the Arab Spring inspired not only Israeli youth but also the subsequent Occupy movement. Perhaps the most important consequence of globalization is that, practically everywhere in the world, there is now a generation of educated young people who see absolutely no prospects for a viable future. That future has been withheld from them by the tyrannical forces of an "economic elite," the top 1% of the tope 1%, if you will, that understands the world only in terms of balance sheets and returns on investment.

In any individual country this would be a desperate situation. On a global scale it is an invitation to catastrophe. Through skillful manipulation of the "consciousness industry," surpassing that of both the Nazis and the economic elite, ISIS has been able to circulate its message to those who feel, rightfully so, that there is nothing they can do to bring any satisfaction into their lives. Moralists can wax indignantly that ISIS should try to deceive so many vulnerable individuals, but do they give any thought as to why those individuals were so vulnerable in the first place?

Think about it. Through globalization the economic elite has create a world in which even the basic premises behind governance have gone onto the rocks, smashed by the domination of marketing over legislation and jurisprudence. "Rational man" may be justified in declaring that the efforts of ISIS to burn down the whole house and replace it with their caliphate are "barbaric;" but are they any more barbaric than they ways in which the "wise men [sic] of Davos" have all but obliterated the middle class in any economic society? The world may ultimately be divided between those who waste away out of their own helplessness and those who rally to ISIS for the simple reason that they have nothing better to do with themselves.

Being a Jew Today

I was glad to see that the DC Dispatches blog for Al Jazeera English ran a post about the fact that the protesters in the anti-Netanyahu rally outside AIPAC, where he was giving his speech, included Jews. I also appreciated that the unnamed author post took the time to interview Jews that were inside listening to Benjamin Netanyahu's speech. One of them was Rabbi Eric Solomon of the Beth Meyer Synagogue in North Carolina. One particular quote from Solomon, however, stuck in my craw: "to be a Jew today - an active, proud Jew - means to be a Zionist."

I have never been a serious practitioner of Judaism. Indeed, I have been calling myself an atheist for several decades. However, since I was born Jewish, I think I have learned a thing or two about what it means "to be a Jew;" and my disagreement with Solomon may be representative of why I no longer with to have anything to do with any organized religion. The bottom line is that "to be a Jew" comes down to living by the precepts of the Old Testament; and, if one is very serious about this, one will take into account the considerable lore of how the text should be interpreted, involving the observations of rabbis going all the way back to the Babylonian Captivity.

Now I suppose that being a Zionist may involve accepting the text from Genesis citing the extent of the land that God granted to Abraham. However, much of the Old Testament involves that old adage, "The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away." Over the historical period covered by the Old Testament, land was gained, and land was lost. Furthermore, there are Old Testament stories that illustrate that battles lost often had to do with God punishing the Israelites for their pride. Apparently, these are portions that Solomon does not spend much time (if any) reading.

As a result, I side with the protestors on the outside, who collectively probably know more about Judaism than all of the AIPAC members on the inside.

Conferring on Extremism

As a refugee from the world of high technology research, I must confess that I have a rather jaundiced view of conferences. It has struck me that such events have always been, first and foremost, an excuse for travel. When the excuse was to parade recent activities, I came to accept it as tolerable and even set the standard that if, over the course of half a week away from my desk, I had encountered one result worthy of attention, then the trip was a good one.

More insidious, however, are those conferences that are concerned more with policy than with results. These are an excuse for little more than jawboning. They may conclude with an agenda of action items, but action rarely emerges from such an agenda. As a result I was far more than a little skeptical when I read about the White House hosting a special conference on terrorism.

Having read Marwan Bishara's editorial this morning on the Al Jazeera English Web site, I was glad to see that I was not alone in my thoughts. Bishara was perceptive enough to look beyond all the usual gratuitous observations that were uttered and turn, instead, to what was not said. Furthermore, I chose to concentrate his enumeration of "sins of omission" on the conference's host, President Barack Obama. Here is the basic summary of that enumeration:

Obama said nothing about how proxy and other western wars have created the fertile grounds for the type of extremism that has been evolving and spreading in the Arab and Muslim world.

How the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan coupled with US/Saudi intervention on the side of the mujahideen led to the creation of al-Qaeda.

Or, how the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, coupled with Iran's interference, prepared the ground for the creation and expansion of ISIL.

Nevertheless, I think there is a broader view, which first came on my radar during the early heady days of the Arab Spring. It is not enough to observe that the world, as a whole, has lapsed into a "forever war" mentality. We need to home in on how that mentality is being sustained.

What we learned from the protests that arose during the Arab Spring (protests that, it is important to observe, extended to include the educated young citizens of Israel) was that the current generation of youth, particularly those who have enjoyed a rich education, is desperately concerned that they have no future in the world as it is being run by its current leaders. While Corita Kent believed that war was not healthy for children and other living beings, that slender minority that controls the lion's share of the world's wealth sees great value in war, particularly as a solution to providing for those of the "other class," condemning them to be little more than "cannon fodder" for the many new generations of cannons that provide a major chuck of revenue to the moneyed class.

In also is amusing to see how, through control of the consciousness industry, that class has tried to cloak its elite status with a smoke screen. The recent report about the top 1% controlling more wealth than the remaining 99% overlooked just how much of that top 1% has almost no control at all. That upper tier needs to be narrowed down to 0.1%, if not 0.01% before we can really appreciate just how unevenly wealth has been distributed.

In my "other life" of writing about music, I have recently been listening to a new recording of the songs composed by Claude Debussy. This last of these songs, for a single unaccompanied voice, is a Christmas carol for homeless children. Debussy wrote this in 1915 when Europe was being torn apart by war. Who speaks for the homeless today?

Is Anyone Talking to Hamas?

It is hard to tell if anything constitutes progress, even when it comes to declaring little more than a temporary ceasefire in Gaza. The latest report on the hostilities posted this morning on Al Jazeera English (a combination of wire sources and Al Jazeera's own reporters) suggests that Secretary of State John Kerry has not communicated directly with Hamas, going instead through his "counterparts" from Qatar and Turkey. That same article also quotes Haaretz, the closest thing to a "fair and balanced" (in the literal, rather than Fox, sense of those words) account of the news to be found in Israel, as saying that Kerry has presented a ceasefire proposal "to both sides," without saying whether this involved direct communication with Hamas or yet another instance of communicating through some third party.

I remember the first time there was a publicly direct meeting between Israeli and Arab leaders. Menachem Begin, regarded at the time as the most hawkish Prime Minster ever elected to that office in Israel, agreed to meet with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. The meeting was hosted by President Jimmy Carter. Carter appreciated that differences can only be settled through face-to-face encounters. Is it worth asking whether Kerry, or any other member of the current Administration, has ever had a face-to-face meeting with a representative of Hamas? How about a telephone call? The BBC seems to have achieved both telephone calls on their radio service and face-to-face appearances on television. Is it the United States or Hamas (or both) that has decided to be averse to such an encounter?

Confidence or Con?

A BBC News report quotes Secretary of State John Kerry on the current round of efforts towards peace in the Middle East as follows:

We have six months ahead of us on the timetable we have set for ourselves and I am confident we have the ability to make progress.

Does Kerry really mean this, or is this just another example of obligatory jawboning. To Kerry's credit, the BBC report also included the following sentence:

Mr Kerry reaffirmed Washington's rejection of Israeli settlement activity as "illegitimate".

I would guess that, in this case, Kerry meant what he said. However, I have to wonder if it will have any effect. It may certainly help in getting the Palestinians to trust him as an "honest broker," which would be a significant improvement over the conditions that I last examined at the end of 2010. The problem is that it is next to impossible to believe that anyone with any power of substance in Israel will take that comment with anything other than a grain of kosher salt.

As "outside observers" we need to recognize that the Executive Branch of our government has little (if any) influence over what happens in Israel. Any influence that does exist at a governmental level derives all of its substance from the American Israel Public Affair Committee (AIPAC). While AIPAC is ostensibly a lobbying organization, we may assume that it can choose to apply its generous budget to objectives other than buying off members of Congress. Indeed, in the spirit of Charlie Wilson, AIPAC could conceivable finance operations in Israel that run contrary to any positions taken by any elected representative of our government.

Meanwhile, public opinion is rallied around the proposition that Israel must be supported because it is the only "real" democracy in the Middle East. (Note the scare quotes.)  Those who continue to embrace this proposition would do well to read Chris Hedges' recent column on Truthdig, a book review of Max Blumenthal's Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel released under the headline "Imploding the Myth of Israel." The bottom line is that what we know about Israel comes entirely from a well-financed propaganda effort and is nothing more than toxic Kool-Aid. Some might even argue that 9/11 was the first serious symptom of its toxicity, but the consciousness industry had thus far been successful in keeping those voices inaudible. Whether or not Hedges' voice suffers the same fate will be up to those of us still willing to read with an open mind.

Putting "Gun Guys" in Perspective

One of the books that David Cole reviews in his article, "Facing the Real Gun Problem," in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books is Gun Guys: A Road Trip by Dan Baum. The portion of his review addressing this book begins with Baum's litany of stereotypes:

Newspaper editorialists called gun owners “a ridiculous minority of airheads,” “a handful of middle-age fat guys with popguns,” and “hicksville cowboys” with “macho” hang-ups. For Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, gun guys were “bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.” Mark Morford of SF Gate called female shooters “bored, under-educated, bitter, terrified, badly dressed, pasty, hate-spewin’ suburban white women from lost Midwestern towns with names like Frankenmuth.”

However, this builds up to a punch line which really caught my attention:

It was impossible to imagine getting away with such cruel dismissals of, say, blacks or gays, yet among a certain set, backhanding gun owners was good sport, even righteous.

In other words, Baum felt it necessary to make is clear that those interested in gun control will only negotiate with gun owners once those gun owners feel they are no longer an object of discrimination that may even count for bigotry. Having endured such discrimination as a Jew (a religious upbringing I share with Baum), I appreciate his point, which we can all still observe in the intransigent stance that Israel takes toward efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East. I would even go so far as to suggest that the National Rifle Association goes to great lengths to aggravate that sense of discrimination, perhaps even using the same techniques that one could find among extreme Zionists, particularly in the early days of Jewish settlement in Israel.

There is no simple solution to draw from this argument. One can only appreciate the complexity of the situation. That includes the complexity of what it will take for either side to take a first step towards closing this "discrimination gap."

Hardware Malfunction Impedes Diplomacy

The following showed up on the BBC News Web site about half an hour ago:

One of Barack Obama's fleet of armoured limousines has broken down in Israel after being filled with the wrong type of fuel, reports say. 

The car had been waiting for the US president's entourage to arrive when it was filled with diesel instead of petrol, Israel's Channel 2 reported.

Needless to say, there is something a bit ludicrous about arranging a state visit without knowledge of the fuel required for a fleet of armored limousines. However, Israel is the only country I know that sustained an accident in which the innards of an IBM mainframe melted; so very little surprises me about hardware-related mistakes over there any more. On the other hand, the next sentence of the story, which describes how the problem was resolved, brought a smile to my face:

A replacement limousine had to be flown in from neighbouring Jordan, Maariv newspaper said.

You never know when a good neighbor will come in handy! Meanwhile, as of the filing of the story, the damaged vehicle is still in a garage in Jerusalem.

Rejecting God’s Choice (again)

Perhaps the most valuable experience I had while I was teaching in Israel came when someone (I can no longer remember whom) recommended that I read the essays of Ahad Ha’am. Fortunately, the first such piece I read turned out to be his interpretation of the concept of a “chosen people.” His thesis was that the Jews had not been chosen to receive the bounties of the land of Canaan. Rather, as I have previously put it, “they were chosen to be role models for all those other cultures that had rejected their One God.” If there is any validity to American support of Israel as a country, it would be through the past examples that country has set through its embrace of democratic principles moderated through the rule of law.

On the basis of a story filed on BBC News about an hour ago, that past validity has now been thoroughly undermined by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Is that too extreme a statement? Draw your own conclusions after reading the opening text:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered the construction of 300 new homes at the Jewish settlement of Beit El in the West Bank. 

The announcement came hours after Israel's parliament rejected a bill to legalise settlement outposts. 

Mr Netanyahu, who opposed the bill, said he would honour a Supreme Court order to demolish homes on private Palestinian land at the Ulpana outpost. 

The issue has been a source of tension between settlers and the government. 

All settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are considered illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this.

The settler outposts are also illegal under Israeli law and the government agreed to remove them under the 2003 Road Map peace plan.

In other words, while Arab Spring protestors try to keep up the good fight against authoritarian rulers that reject their parliaments as duly elected representatives of their citizens, Netanyahu has embraced precisely the sort of authoritarianism that the protestors insist on rejecting. Needless to say, the United States has not been much better at setting a proper example lately. Perhaps that is why our country continues to persist in its right-or-wrong allegiance to Israel (or, perhaps more accurately, to the lobbying power of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which seems to have no room for reflection over their endorsement of Netanyahu).

Ahad Ha’am must be turning in his grave; it is time for Jews around the world to recognize that the philosophical foundations of Judaism count for far more than the political machinations of the state of Israel.

The Shock Doctrine in Israel

In the latest issue of The New York Review, David Shulman, in his article “Israel in Peril,” seems to have hit on a turn of phrase to describe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to government that may well be as accurate as it is disconcerting:

Like many Israelis, he inhabits a world where evil forces are always just about to annihilate the Jews, who must strike back in daring and heroic ways in order to snatch life from the jaws of death. I think that, like many other Israelis, he is in love with such a world and would reinvent it even if there were no serious threat from outside.

This statement triggered two key associative memories.

The first is that it stands as a characterization of just about any religious fundamentalism, regardless of the faith providing the foundation, and thus reflects the extent to which the strong religious convictions of those determined to build settlements in occupied territory factor in Netanyahu holding any sort of political office at all.

More generally, it reflects beyond prevailing opinions in Israel to Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” thesis, formulated to explain the irrationalities of the policies of the Bush Administration, whether they involved foreign affairs (including military adventurism), the economy, and the environment. At the risk to being a bit too reductive, the basic thesis that that shouting loud enough that the sky is falling tends to be an excellent method for establishing and holding political power. I then realized that the arrow of influence actually points the other way. The very concept of government-by-shock-doctrine may have come about by members of the Bush Administrating examining conditions in Israeli and liking so much that they figured they could appropriate the playbook!

From this point of view, we may to well to face the coming Presidential election armed with the combined wisdom of Slavoj Žižek’s book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce and Karl Marx' thought about how history repeats itself (which inspired Žižek’s title). Barack Obama believed that the American people were smart enough to overcome the shock doctrine once they saw it for what it was. However, the way things are shaping up, there is a good chance that the shock doctrine will find its way into the Republican Party platform for the November election. From this point of view, that election may amount to a test of whether or not the electorate can, indeed, be fooled a second time.

Swords for Rattling, not Ploughshares

The Old Testament prophet Isaiah may have spoken of a time when nations would “beat their swords into plowshares;”  but Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu seems to be paying as much attention to these words as Isaiah’s contemporaries did.  He is apparently more interested in saber-rattling, particularly when it comes to standing firm against any objections President Barack Obama may have towards Israeli domestic and foreign policy.  Netanyahu is in town for the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC);  and, while Obama’s address last night tried to focus on diplomatic channels to address the possible nuclear threat from Iran, all that seemed to matter to Netanyahu is that he read Obama the riot act over Israel’s “right” to act unilaterally against Iran.

It is worth noting the timing of the AIPAC event.  The 2008 meeting provided a platform for Presidential candidates to woo this lobby for its support.  Sure enough, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum are all scheduled to address the convention this year.  It is a bit ironic that they will be doing so on Super Tuesday, right after each candidate has taken his last shot at winning over those who will vote on that day.  Since Romney has now gone on record with the statement that “if Barack Obama is re-elected, Iran will have a nuclear weapon,” one can imagine that he is a prime candidate for Netanyahu’s blessing;  but whether that will transfer to AIPAC support remains to be seen.

Life Imitates Art (ironically)

Of the many amusements I encountered while reading Gabriel García Márquez’ The Autumn of the Patriarch, the funniest was the bit about how the protagonist (who is a rotting corpse for the duration of the novel) had opened a retirement community for deposed dictators.  I was reminded of this particular comic twist while reading Al Jazeera English this morning.  They ran a story, apparently taken from their wire services, which featured a statement by Israeli Lieutenant-General Benny Gantz, delivered to a parliamentary committee on foreign affairs and defense:

On the day the Assad regime falls, it is expected to harm the Alawite clan. We are preparing to receive Alawite refugees on the Golan Heights.

Bashar al-Assad and his family are, as may be guessed, members of this clan.

Al Jazeera’s efforts to get any comments on this statement had come to nought when this report was filed.  Thus, for now at least, we have no way of knowing whether Gantz was making a policy statement on behalf of the Israeli Defense Forces or whether he was speaking as an individual with the authority to follow through on his proposal.  (Gantz is currently Chief of Staff for the Army.)  This is not quite a “retirement community” scenario.  More likely it reflects a better-the-devil-you-know approach to foreign policy.  Nevertheless, the “family resemblance” to Márquez vision is striking, not to mention ironic!

Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Men?

This morning BBC News reported an alternative take on the spirit of Christmas:

Scuffles have broken out between rival groups of Greek Orthodox and Armenian Christian clerics over a turf war in Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity.

Around a hundred priests fought with brooms as they cleaned the church in preparation for Orthodox Christmas.

Yes, that’s right:  They were fighting over who got to clear which sections of the church (and, for those who get off on such things, the Web page at the above hyperlink includes video).  If ever there were a need for the what-would-Jesus-do question, this would have to be it!

I am glad I remembered to include that parenthetical “more or less” when writing yesterday about accommodation among practitioners of different faiths in the Holy Land!

The Right Word in the Right Language

This may just be politics as usual in Israel, but it is interesting to see just how the leading opposition party there is using today’s mass protest against “gender segregation” (as one report put it) by the ultra-Orthodox extremists of Beit Shemesh for political capital.  An article about the protest filed late this morning on the BBC News Web site quoted opposition leader Tzipi Livni describing the ultra-Orthodox of Beit Shemesh as “the extremist elements that are rearing their heads and are trying to impose their world view on us.”  Presumably, Livni made her remarks in Hebrew;  but my guess is that she deliberately chose the same noun form that has been applied to violent acts by extreme fundamentalists of other faiths (that need not be enumerated).

I am also struck by the use of words sharing the stem for segregation.  I believe I heard a television report (which I have to confess I have been unable to trace), which claimed that there are Orthodox communities that force women to ride in the back of the bus.  I would guess I heard this on the BBC, because I would find it hard to imagine an American report of such activities that would refrain from a reference to Rosa Parks.  In other words Israel may be facing a civil rights movement that it had not dreamed would arise in a country of Jews.

I would also like to consider a remark that showed up in the same Al Jazeera English report that included the phrase “gender segregation.”  The source is Professor Emeritus Menachem Friedman of Bar Ilan University.  This is what he has to say about the current tension between ultra-Orthodox communities and the predominantly secular majority of Israeli citizens:

It is clear that Israeli society is faced with a challenge that I am not sure it can handle.  A challenge that is no less and no more than an existential challenge,

I agree that “existential” is the right adjective, but I wonder if Friedman had bothered to explain why this is the case.  As I see it, Israel may be forced to decide whether it is a “Jewish state” or a “state that guarantees freedom from persecution to all Jews.”  That is the critical existential distinction;  and it may be that how it is resolved will determine whether the current dispute between Israelis and Palestinians is best resolved with a one-state or two-state solution.  Clearly, the Palestinians would have every reason to reject a one-state solution if that one-state were a “Jewish state.”  Just as clearly, no Jew living in Israel would want to sacrifice the motive for settling there in the first place.  However, a single state that would guarantee freedom of religion to all Jews might satisfy enough of the currently secularized population to make for a viable resolution of the problem.  If the walls of Old Jerusalem can accommodate practitioners of any number of different faiths (more or less), why can’t that accommodation be escalated to the scale of a single country governed by a representative democracy?

Educated for War?

The most striking sentence in Patricia Storace’s review of David Grossman’s novel To the End of the Land for the October 13 issue of The New York Review of Books and now available for all to read online comes at the very end of her analysis:

Yet from toy soldiers and paratrooper dolls, model tanks, displays of the emblems of Israeli army corps, pop songs from the armed forces radio station, school visits from soldiers, and picture books about army adventures, to teenagers taking state-sponsored trips to concentration camp sites in Poland, Israeli childhood educates for war.

To be fair, it would not surprise me to find a similar (or analogous) assertion made about the Palestinians;  but that is not the critical point.  That point can be found in one of the analyses of the Old Testament.  That analysis suggests that the reason that Moses led the Jews freed from Egyptian bondage around in the desert for forty years was to allow a new generation to mature.  Put another way, a population that has always been in slavery is not ready for freedom.  The Children of Israel could not enter the Promised Land until they had leaders who had not known slavery.

Whether or not this is a valid Biblical interpretation, it suggests the hypothesis that a population that has only known war may not be capable of living in peace.  The history of Israel has been a narrative of one conflict after another, and things are not that different in the chronicles of the displaced Palestinians.  Peace may not be able to come with any stability until both sides have grown up knowing what it means to live in peace.  Needless to say, this does not make the prospects for peace in the near future particularly promising.

Abbas Upsets the Apple Cart

I suspect that many would not agree, but one way to read yesterday’s application for recognition submitted by Mahmoud Abbas to the United Nations is as a sign of just how long his patience has endured.  In a way he spent decades playing the role of Charlie Brown while everyone else, not only Israel but also Tony Blair and the Quartet of the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia that Blair represented kept preventing him from connecting with the football of peace in the Middle East.  Even if his application is vetoed by the Security Council, the source of that veto will be a matter of public record.  All Abbas could do was risk the discontent of his own electorate by playing the game by the rules and letting the chips fall where they may.

Another way to read yesterday’s events is that Abbas has embraced the role of the unreasonable man.  In doing so he has found sympathy in at least one Western voice, that of George Bernard Shaw:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Abbas has made the unreasonable man’s play for progress.  Now we wait to see how all those who proclaim themselves reasonable by their own standards decide how to react.

Prospects for the Middle East

After doing a bit of browsing, I discovered that I wrote the following in November of 2007:

Perhaps we should recall the wisdom of Georges Clemenceau ("La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires.") and recognize that peace in the Middle East is too serious to be entrusted to political leaders.

The fact is that the only motive behind Barack Obama’s speech yesterday at the State Department was political, not only with respect to the American electorate but also as a head-on confrontation with those who lobby on behalf of Israel, timed the eve of a visit from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  There is no question that Netanyahu’s reaction to Obama’s “redistricting” proposal to address Palestinian needs was more predictable than assuming that the sun will rise tomorrow.  (Wait a minute, aren’t there folks out there convinced that this will not happen?)  The more important question is whether either Obama’s speech or Netanyahu’s reaction is in any way relevant.

To some extent this was a recurring theme in the survey of reactions released on the BBC News Web site, all from countries currently contending with the consequences of the Arab Spring, each in its own way.  Far more relevant is likely to be a piece by Lucy Ash profiling grass roots efforts towards peace originating with an individual Palestinian and an individual Israeli, respectively.  For people like these, the predictability of the rising of the sun is far less important that whether or not you will live to see that next sunrise.  Without peace one cannot plan for a future, because one is far too uncertain about whether or not there will be a future.

In this respect I find it a bit ironic that medici.tv, a French Web site that streams videos of classical music performances, should schedule an event particularly relevant to those who strive to pursue the cause of peace without carrying any political baggage.  This Saturday at 10 AM San Francisco time, there will be a live webcast of a performance by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, originating from the Salle Pleyel in Paris.  The ensemble will be conducted by its founder, Daniel Barenboim, based only on the premise that young Arab and Israeli musicians should have the opportunity to come together in the interest of making music.

Not only does Barenboim believe in peace, but also he believes that he can further it through the resources he has at his disposal.  On the basis of his success in working with the young, at the beginning of this month he challenged the Israeli ban on traveling to Gaza.  His goal was to have a small string orchestra give a concert of the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart there.  He had to jump through any number of bureaucratic hoops, but I felt that his ultimate success deserved a report on my Examiner.com national site.

Barenboim’s successes with both young and professional musicians reinforce my trope on Clemenceau.  “Peace in our time” is a shallow piece of political rhetoric, neither better nor worse than “the audacity of hope.”  The real question is whether we can have “peace without politics.”  When Bob Dylan sang about an “old road” that is “Rapidly agin’,” did he not have the political institutions of his time in mind?  Obama, Netanyahu, and just about everyone trying to manipulate foreign policy decisions through the machinations if AIPAC should think about Dylan’s punch line:

Please get out of the new one

If you can’t lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin’.

If an “old school” conductor like Barenboim can get it, why can’t the rest of us?

"Bad Faith" among the Faith-Based

The current state of play in negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians has now become blatantly pathetic.  The week began with Israel successfully pressuring the United States to give up on pressuring Israel to cease settlement-building;  and, while Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been trying to be diplomatic about this mess, prevailing Palestinian opinion seems to agree that the United States has now forfeited any credibility that it can serve as an honest broker in mediating talks between Israel and the Palestinians.  Now a group of former leaders of European Union (EU) countries is trying to enter the discourse by establishing more acceptable “honest broker credentials.”

These leaders have distributed a letter that recognizes settlement-building as a violation of international law to which Israel should be held accountable.  In other words they have composed a “frank and open” statement of what needs to be done as a precondition for meaningful peace negotiations.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that it does not look like the current EU Administration is going to buy this message and will probably hold to the United States party line.  Meanwhile, the reaction from the Israeli foreign ministry has been to declare this attempt at straightening out the rules of engagement for peace negotiations as “a giant leap of bad faith.”

No words could better capture the extent to which the peace process has deteriorated to name-calling between black pots and kettles.  It is because the United States has continued to support Israel in the face of Israeli intransigence to show any sign of good faith that our own country has contaminated its honest-broker reputation.  Now it appears that the contamination has spread to EU policy.

It thus seems fair to acknowledge those who have tried so hard to find a better way.  The initiative appears to have come from Javier Solana, former EU Minister for Foreign Affairs.  According to the BBC report on his action, those who have signed on with him include “Romano Prodi and Giuliano Amato of Italy, Richard von Weizsaecker and Helmut Schmidt of Germany, Mary Robinson of Ireland, Felipe Gonzalez of Spain and Norway's Thorvald Stoltenberg.”  This is not a case of partisan politics, as it is in the United States, where it is virtually impossible to hold any significant office without a nod of approval from the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC).  Now we see the extent to which the partisanship of the United States can interfere with clear-headed deliberations at the EU level of governance.

Israel is clearly pursuing a strategy of exhaustion.  They figure that all they have to do is hold their hard line until everyone else gets tired of trying to break it.  They are far from the first to have engaged this strategy.  Nevertheless, someone should be asking just what consequences are likely to ensue if they succeed.