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August 31st, 2007

Mearsheimer, Walt and the Erudite Hysteria of David Remnick

First, an illustrative anecdote: A little over a year ago, Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Washington and addressed Congress. The event was supposed to be a booster for the elected Iraqi leadership, showing U.S. support for the new government. But at the time, Israel was pummeling Beirut in response to Hizballah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers, so U.S. legislators naively tried — and failed — to get Maliki to condemn Hizballah. And, revealing the extent to which Washington is encased in a bubble when it comes to matters involving Israel in the Middle East, Senators Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Dick Durbin wrote Maliki a letter saying the following: “Your failure to condemn Hezbollah’s aggression and recognize Israel’s right to defend itself raise serious questions about whether Iraq under your leadership can play a constructive role in resolving the current crisis and bringing stability to the Middle East.”

To cut bluntly to the chase, there is scarcely a single politician in the Arab world willing to endorse Washington’s definitions of the problems or the solutions when it comes to Israel’s impact on the region — and that even among the autocrats with whom the U.S. prefers to work, much less that rare breed that Maliki represents, i.e. a democratically elected leader. It is the U.S. leadership that is in denial about what is needed to create security in the region.

Indeed, the grownups in Washington know this better than anyone. In response to the same crisis in Lebanon, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft wrote:

Hezbollah is not the source of the problem; it is a derivative of the cause, which is the tragic conflict over Palestine that began in 1948.

The eastern shore of the Mediterranean is in turmoil from end to end, a repetition of continuing conflicts in one part or another since the abortive attempts of the United Nations to create separate Israeli and Palestinian states in 1948.

But nobody in power listens to Brent Scowcroft any more. Washington’s Israel bubble so detaches it from an objective view of the Middle East that Howard Dean’s 2003 call for the U.S. to adopt an “even-handed” position between Israel and the Palestinians has longsince entered the U.S. political playbook as an example of foot-in-mouth campaigning. (See my earlier entry on how well Barack Obama has learned this lesson.)

Like the tech-bubble and real estate-bubble, Washington’s “Israel bubble” is unhealthy and dangerous — in fact, it not only jeopardizes U.S. interests throughout the region and beyond (by serving as Exhibit A for any anti-American element anywhere in the Islamic world to win the political contest with America’s friends), but it is also exceedingly bad for Israel: Particularly over the past decade, the U.S. has essentially enabled Israeli behavior so self-destructive that it may have already precluded any chance of it being able to live at peace with its neighbors.

It is the lancing of this Israel bubble — in the best interests of the United States, the Arab world, and Israel’s own prospects for peaceful coexistence with its neighbors — that John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt have dedicated themselves, first in last year’s London Review of Books essay and now in a new book, titled “The Israel Lobby.”

They argue, firstly, that the absolute bias hardwired into U.S. policy towards Israel is neither a rational foreign policy for the U.S. or even particularly helpful to Israel. And they further make the case that this policy has been maintained and extended with increasingly destructive effect by the interventions and activities of a network of groupings they broadly define as the Israel lobby, which actively puts Israel positions (rather than American ones) at the forefront of U.S. policy (on issues ranging from the Palestinians to Iran), and which uses its considerable reach in the political process in Washington to ensure that challenging the U.S. bias towards Israel, as Dean did, is considered political suicide for a politician with presidential ambitions.

Their book is a comprehensive scholarly work, but its purpose is unashamedly political. The book has a number of weaknesses — I find its analytical approach often static and institutional; insufficiently dynamic and, dare I say it, insufficiently dialectical. On the nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship in last summer’s disastrous war in Lebanon, for example, I disagree with their denial of responsibility on Washington’s part — the original impulse to take some form of action may have come from the Israeli leadership, but as I made clear at the time, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the scale and objectives of the operation became defined by Washington, and they were plainly goals for which Israel had not prepared its forces.

Also, the process of skewing U.S. bias towards Israel may reveal the machinations of a lobby, but they have also become deeply-entrenched tropes in U.S. political and civil society — tropes which now function quite independently of the lobby’s interventions.

But regardless of a number of specific instances that I might analyse somewhat differently, I have no quarrel with its central argument that U.S. policy on Israel and its neighbors is grotesquely biased in favor not only of Israel, but of Israel’s most self-destructive impulses. As such, it is a policy dangerous to U.S. interests and ultimately to those of Israel itself. This biased is maintained and policed in substantial part by an aggressive lobbying effort by an elaborate pro-Israel political infrastructure. Despite its analytical weaknesses, it is a refreshingly candid and courageous (given the all too common fate of those who tackle this taboo — just take a look at the important logging of this stuff at Muzzlewatch) embrace of what has long been the “third rail” of American foreign policy, insisting that a debate be conducted where none has been tolerated until now.

And, its significance may be measured in part by the response it has elicted. Not so much the predictable fulminations of Abe Foxman in his prebuttal of Mearsheimer and Walt, The Deadliest Lies, or the manic chatter of Haaretz’s resident arbiter of all things Hebrew Nationalist in America, Shmuel Rosner — all of that may be par for the course. But M&W share with Jimmy Carter that ability to call forth a rather unfortunate habit among sections of America’s liberal punditocracy, in which sharp and fundamental criticisms of Israel must be discredited and squashed, even at the cost of the cool reason for which the pundits in question are usually known. To put it unkindly, when Israel is under the spotlight, many liberal commentators feel compelled to embarrass themselves in its defense.

I noticed this phenomenon last year when Jimmy Carter made the entirely valid comparison between Israel’s West Bank regime and the apartheid system that prevailed in South Africa until 1994. That prompted Michael Kinsley — a well-known and generally smart liberal pundit — to denounce Carter’s comparison in an op-ed that only served to show how little he knew about either the Middle East or apartheid South Africa. Clearly, though, the idea that Israel was committing crimes equivalent to apartheid clearly made Kinsley so uncomfortable that he felt compelled to blurt out something — anything, really, to negate Carter, and make the discomfort he caused go away. (I critiqued his lame response to Carter in an earlier post.)

This phenomenon is reflective of a trend that has been confirmed to me anecdotally dozens of times, both in the U.S. and at home in South Africa, where some Jewish liberals of faultlessly progressive politics on every other issue turn into raving tribal belligerents of the Ariel Sharon hue when the conversation turns to Israel. We’ve all seen it, dozens of times, I’m sure — although I’m pleased to say I know a lot more whose politics are consistent, and are not prone to being possessed by Zionist Mr. Hydes.

David Remnick is not among them, unfortunately. In response to Mearsheimer and Walt, New Yorker editor Remnick offers a fresh specimen of the denial pathology.

What is most strking about his piece, however, is that it is more of a kvetch, designed to discredit M&W in the eyes of New Yorker readers, than a serious engagement with their argument. For example, Remnick notes that M&W are realists, i.e. they make their case for a foreign policy based on national interests. Remnick writes:

“There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence,” [M&W] write, but they deny that Israel is of critical strategic value to the United States. The disappearance of Israel, in their view, would jeopardize neither America’s geopolitical interests nor its core values. Such is their “realism.”

The latter line seems to be dropped in with a note of bitter irony, as if it somehow damns the authors, who repeatedly make clear their belief that the U.S. should support Israel where it’s right to exist is threatened, but note that its existence is not actually under threat, right now — instead, the U.S. is being called upon to underwrite its brutal occupation policies. But the argument that Israel’s disappearance would not substantially harm U.S. national interests is a perfectly legitimate one in the realist framework, bereft of emotion: Israel safeguards no vital national interests of the United States, and is more of a liability than an asset in the broad U.S. strategic approach to the Middle East. Those who argue that Israel has value as a U.S. ally can point only to tactical advantages, e.g. Israel’s intelligence services can better infiltrate radical groups than can their American allies. No doubt. But on the strategic plane, such advantages are negated by the fact that by unconditionally backing Israel and its regime of occupation over the Palestinians, it becomes virtually impossible for any Arab leader to openly associate with U.S. goals.

It was precisely this recognition of Israel’s limited strategic value to the U.S. in a post-Cold War world that led Yitzhak Rabin, a longtime hawk, to embrace the Oslo deal presented to him by Shimon Peres. Like the leaders of apartheid South Africa in the late 80s, Rabin had come to recognize (particularly in the era of the first Bush administration) that Israel could no longer count on unconditional U.S. backing given Washington’s interests elsewhere in the region. As a result, it was compelled to seek an accomodation with the Palestinian national leadership. Of course, this was an exceedingly good thing. Unfortunately, Rabin needn’t have worried, because the changing domestic political atmosphere in the U.S. — the success of the Israel lobby beyond its wildest dreams, particularly as a result of the backing of perhaps its latterly most important constituent, the Evangelical Christian Zionists, had meant that Israel could count on U.S. backing regardless of its behavior in relation to the Palestinians. M&W are simply pointing out that this does not accord with an accurate reading of U.S. national interests.

Remnick notes that M&W “are right to describe the moral violation in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. (In this, most Israelis and most American Jews agree with them.)” But then he complains that they reveal a nefarious agenda in blaming Israel for all ills in its relationship with the Palestinians, and the Arab more broadly.

The narrative rightly points out the destructiveness of the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and America’s reluctance to do much to curtail them, but there is scant mention of Palestinian violence or diplomatic bungling, only a recitation of the claim that, in 2000, Israel offered “a disarmed set of Bantustans under de-facto Israeli control.” (Strange that, at the time, the Saudi Prince Bandar told Yasir Arafat, “If we lose this opportunity, it is not going to be a tragedy. This is going to be a crime.”)

But while Remnick may satisfy his liberal conscience by conceding the idea that the occupation is bad, what he’s not answering is M&W’s case that it is bizarre to the point of inexplicable that the U.S. no longer bothers to even threaten to take steps to restrain Israel from this “moral violation.” U.S. support for Israel is unconditional, settlements and all. The sad fact, for the likes of Remnick, is that the occupation is not some aberration on Israel’s part; there really is no longer any real distinction, in practice on the ground, between Israel and its occupation of the lands it captured in 1967. As Henry Siegman recently explained in an excellent piece in the London Review of Books, Israel quite simply has no inclination to withdraw from the occupied territories, and its ideas of a “peace process” are essentially limited to the pursuit of Palestinian surrender.

As for evoking the authority of Prince Bandar, oy. Remnick himself had suggested that debate on U.S. Middle East policy was welcome, and that it should include questions such as “whether we should be supplying arms to the Saudis.” Uh, Dave, those deals are typically negotiated by Bandar. And by the way, since when did this Bush-Cheney acolyte become a voice of Arab authority? How many Arab leaders were willing to publicly endorse the deal offered at Camp David? (Bandar himself wouldn’t, you can be sure. And nor would Mahmoud Abbas.)

Remnick is entirely correct that most American Jews would agree with M&W about the occupation, but that simply underlines a point they make throughout the book — that the positions and interventions of the Israel lobby are not representative of mainstream American Jewish opinion; they’re way to the right of it. It’s not a “Jewish lobby,” it’s a lobby of people — many of them Evangelical Christians — supporting the positions of the hardline nationalist right in Israel.

Remnick also attempts the rather silly argument that U.S. support for Israel has little impact on the appeal of Osama bin Laden and other radicals in the Arab world, because Bin Laden’s objective is to overthrow Arab autocracies backed by the U.S. Yes, of course it is, but the point is that Bin Laden hardly needs to break a sweat in “proving” American malfeasance to any Muslim audience — he simply needs to point for Washington’s unswerving support of Israel, and the argument is over. And that precludes U.S. allies in the Arab world from attaining any popular legitimacy.

While denying that M&W are anti-Semites, Remnick nonetheless questions the bona fides of their intervention. His message to his readers is, don’t worry about what these guys are saying, they’re just grinding an axe. Wink. “Taming the influence of lobbies, if that is what Mearsheimer and Walt desire, is a matter of reforming the lobbying and campaign-finance laws,” but he suggests that, intead, the authors are a product of a polarized political moment, reducing all ills to a single cause — the Israel lobby. But Remnick hasn’t honestly engaged with their arguments aside from clucking over the settlements: Does Remnick agree, for example, that the U.S. should leave Israel no choice but to withdraw its West Bank settlements, by threatening to cut off the spigot if it doesn’t stop and reverse its colonization of the West Bank? Should the U.S. not use its considerable power over Israel to march it back to its 1967 borders? That, really, is what’s at issue here.

Remnick’s own Israel bubble has been taking a bit of a battering of late: Just three weeks ago, he found himelf compelled to write a subtle smear of Avrum Burg, largely attributing the former Knesset speaker’s renunciation of Zionism to his supposed personality defects! Plainly, Remnick has little appetite for engaging with Burg’s notion that, as he put it, he had always considered himself a human being, a Jew and a Zionist until he began to recognize that his Zionism negated the other two aspects of his identity.

Burg, like Mearsheimer and Walt, had clearly made Remnick uncomfortable. But he’s substantially correct in challenging the M&W idea that the lobby is singularly responsible for policing America’s public discourse on Israel. After all, nobody asked Remnick to write these pieces. Nor did anyone tell Kinsley to try and shoot down Jimmy Carter’s apartheid argument. Just as important as challenging the Israel lobby is drawing attention to the deep-rooted tropes of knee-jerk defensiveness in sections of the liberal-Jewish intelligentsia that allows them to avert their eyes and cling to fantasy when Israel is an agent of oppression.

Posted by Tony at 7:49 pm | Link | Tags: Could Die Laughing, Situation Report, Unholy War

151 Responses to “Mearsheimer, Walt and the Erudite Hysteria of David Remnick”

[...] Wimbledon Mearshimer, Walt and the Erudite Hysteria of David Remnick » This Summary is from an article posted at Rootless Cosmopolitan on Friday, August 31, 2007 First, an illustrative anecdote: A little over a year ago, Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Washington and addressed Congress. The event was supposed to be a booster for the elected Iraqi leadership, showing U.S. support for the new government Summary Provided by Technorati.comView Original Article at Rootless Cosmopolitan » 10 Most Recent News Articles About WWE [...]

Posted by University Update - WWE - Mearshimer, Walt and the Erudite Hysteria of David Remnick | August 31st, 2007 at 9:02 pm
There is nothing more amusing in America than seeing how seemingly intelligent people become complete moronic cretins when the issue of Israel comes up. Remnick is the perfect illustration of this.

Not only does he lash out with these moronic editorials, but he also hires criminal racists like Jeffrey Goldberg to preach to the world how great Israel’s occupation is and how all of the world’s problems are because of Palestinian extremists.

Once this bubble of Israeli worship erodes in America, morons like Remnick, Kinsley and Goldberg will be laughed at like we laugh at segregationists from the South.

Posted by Jimbo | September 1st, 2007 at 12:40 am
The USA may be captive, if not prisoner to the Israeli lobby, but not most of the globe sees APIAC, the Defammation League and equivalent and its reciprocity in returning American taxpayer’s dollars, by bribing congress men and women, as immoral/unethical. And as Tony Karon makes clear, abundantly dangerous, for USA foreign policy.

The Palestinian situation encapsulates this circular funding in purusuit of deterrming foreign policy, but it comes with a price. And that price is becoming inordinantly expensive as is evident by the drum beats of the Israeli led neocons, preparing for an attack on Iran, Hizbollah and consolidation of their current scorched earth ,on Hamas.

The blowback on America will be much more than 9/11 and 3754 fatalities by American military in Iraq, but do obsessed Zionist idelogues care. Not a bit.

Mersheimer and Walt do the world a favour to expose this poisonous relationship. Can’t wait to get their book.

Posted by Richard Mayson | September 1st, 2007 at 12:58 am
Funny, I read the Remnick profile of Avram Berg (Sp?) and had a different take on it. I thought it was revolutionary that the New Yorker was airing Berg’s views at all. Such ideas have never been seen in a mainstream US publication that’s not The Nation or something even farther to the left.

I perceived Remnick’s attempts to discredit Burg as a rhetorical move meant to pacify all the hysterics who would have conniptions over Burg’s ideas on Zionism and the state of Israel today.

If you think like a Communist Party newspaper editor or reporter, the maneuver becomes clear. You want to present an idea that the ruling party cannot bear to have published. You present it by first saying “look at this crazy idea, look at how insane or unreliable this person is. Isn’t it terrible what a perverse person he has become?” Then you present the whole idea in great detail. People get to read it. If the ruling party apparatchik or the loyalist readers complain, you can say - but I think the public has a right to know about this terrible person. I just wanted to expose his wrong ideas.

Few New Yorker readers would have given a hoot about Avram Burg without this article. He is not exactly on the radar in America. Why profile him then? If Remnick really wanted to smear him or take him down a peg or three, couldn’t he just have ignored him? Why give him the New Yorker’s attention?

No, I posit that the Burg article, at least, was Remnick’s way of getting the ideas out in front of the American public despite the incredible atmosphere of censorship that prevails on the topic of Israel.

On the M&W article, however, I am not as sure of my theory. The piece does seem more like an attempt to reassure those who are worried. But on the other hand, how many New Yorker readers were following Mearshimer and Walt, anyway? What if once again this were Remnick bringing attention to an issue that was percolating under the surface, and he has to poopoo the ideas in order to slip them past the censor?

OK I don’t understand how Remnick can hire Jeffrey Goldberg. I have some speculations but they start to sound too conspiratorial to discuss in public. Why does that guy Michael Gordon get his pieces on the front page of the Times when experts in the field claim he’s making stuff up about Iran?

The way the US media operates these days, you are best off approaching it as if it were similar to the Soviet media of the USSR years. Look for byzantine conspiracies, propaganda, and signs of factions jockeying for position. Assume that everything is a lie or a cover-up or a feint to distract the public’s attention from real news. Etc.

Posted by Leila | September 1st, 2007 at 1:06 am
In the end, Israel will probably succeed in its campaign of deception, but it will be a pyrrhic victory. As Henry Siegman notes in his essay referenced above, Israel has created enough “facts on the ground,” and scared enough people about the “great Arab menace,” that they should be able to keep the status quo for a few more years. BUT, since the conditions are so unstable, I fully expect that within 25 years Israel will cease to exist. That is, the Jews in the so-called Holy Land will either leave or die. In addition to the destruction of Israel, the US will suffer who knows what horror.

This is the real problem with Israel successfully shutting down debate, most people will never understand the likely consequences to the US, Israel and the rest of the world as a result of Israel’s actions. Nothing every gets debated. This is good for Israel which would not like the results of such a debate in the short term but will be tragic to everyone in the long term.

To anyone that understands the flow of history it is obvious that the whole situation is unstable and in a logical world would never have been allowed to even get started. Israel should NOT exist because for Israel to exist requires the ethnic cleansing of huge amounts of land. The western countries should never have allowed the Jews into the ME, but they did, because of guilt over the Holocaust, unwillingness to accept Jewish refugees (antisemitism) after WW2, and willingness to treat the Arabs like second-class world citizens (since the early 1800s the Arabs had warned repeatedly to keep the Jews out of the ME). As a result, the Arabs in the ME have been punished for the sins of the Nazis.

In the end, as world power shifts away frorm the US to China and to a lesser extent Russia, the Arabs will eventually have the means to destroy Israel and since they are still upset about the Crusades there is no reason to expect they will not take advantage of the opportunity. I expect that the world will causally watch in amusement.

This is what the folks in Israel can not seem to internalize. They can not hold off the Arab anger forever. They do not have enough financial, people or technology resources to do this.

It is tragic to see a group of people on the path to destruction and not be able to persuade them of the danger they are in. Every conversation I have with Israelis about the future has them confident that they can control everything forever but the lesson of history is they can not.

Oh well, some people have to learn the hard way. Unfortunately i suspect the people in the US will pay a very heavy price for letting Israel suck the US into the black hole Israel has created. I suspect also that the people of the US will wrongly blame the Arabs instead of placing the blame on the Israelis where it should be, causing additional problems for the US.

Posted by Spyguy | September 1st, 2007 at 4:44 am
“Mearsheimer”, I believe.

Apart from that quibble, cracking piece.

Posted by assisi asobie | September 1st, 2007 at 12:08 pm
I subscribe to the New Yorker and I have strong views about its writers (some are supremely gifted; others should be writing greeting cards for Hallmark). Like Leila, therefore, I really wonder how they do their recruiting.

But my comment is about Tony’s point regarding the lobby’s power. Perhaps more than AIPAC and the Christian fundies,
history itself helps explain some of the reflexive pro-Israel
bias in the public discourse.

And no, I don’t mean the Promised Land status of
both countries in their respective mythologies.

1967 was a watershed year for Israel and the European Left. Prior to 67, Israel was a plucky little country that embodied much of the progressive values of the Left: fairness, social justice, embrace of ethnic diversity, etc. Among Jews and non-Jews alike, it was the height of coolness to go visit a kibbutz in the late 60s.

1967 changed all that. The occupation exposed the increased militarization of Israeli society and its colonial outlook. Economically, meanwhile, Israel slowly but surely came to embrace the dog-eat-dog brand of American capitalism. (Israel has never been richer than today yet one child out of three lives in poverty. Sound familiar?)

Israel moved from Athens to Sparta. And Americans loved
every bit of it. The late 60s is when Civil Rights made
it increasingly impossible to spew out racist hate openly
in America. It’s when the Democrats lost their majority
in the South (which, you’ll recall, they had won when Southerners suddently noticed that Lincoln was a Republican).

Israel isn’t that whitey white really, but Americans like to believe it is. Arabs are not that dark really, but Americans like to believe they are. So the analogy works: Arabs are the new Blacks and Israelis are the new Americans. Bibi Netanyahu is more American than George Bush (he can actually speak English), and Nasrallah
is Malcolm X, a dark, threatening figure.

Americans identify with Israelis. Now that Israelis
are getting into the American habit of losing their wars,
the identification –and insecurity — will grow even stronger as time goes by.

Americans and Israelis also share a common paranoia. No other nations believe they are so hated by everyone else.
(OK, maybe that’s because no other nation is).

Israel and America are the only two Western countries still fighting the natives. That’s a tie that binds.

Posted by Bernard Chazelle | September 2nd, 2007 at 12:44 am
I think that In 2000, when the Second Intifadah was just getting started, there far more debate over Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. Then came Al Queda’s attacks on 9/11, and subsequent images of Palestinians dancing in the streets of East Jerusalem. In the months following the attacks, I watched in horror as public opinion ossifying around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and as Likudnik Zionists triumphantly exclaimed “NOW America understands!”

Then came the War on Terror, which was basically a global application of American Israel policy. At one point, Bush explicitly used the term “Crusade” in reference to the War. He later apologized, but one could see his true intent. The War on Terror is an apocalyptic vision of a Clash of Civilizations, a Christian-Moslem conflict modelled on and reinforcing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since then, I can barely recognize either America or Israel, the two countries I call home.

In 2003, America launched an unprovoked and unecessary attack against Iraq that ruined the country. In 2006, Israel with minimal provocation launched an unecessary attack against Lebanon that ruined the country. I am convinced the 2nd Lebanon War would not have been possible without the political cover provided by the War on Terror. When I argue with my conservative Zionist friends about the Lebanon War, they say Israel is not to be blamed because its actions were fine within the context of the War on Terror.

Today, the road to Ramallah runs through Washington; there is zero chance of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until the War on Terror is repudiated. If the War is not ended, we will see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict repeat itself on a global scale. Israel/Palestine itself will be a living vision of apocalypse: probably, one side will completely exterminate the other, but neither side will win.

I evaluate a politician almost entirely based on his ideas toward the War on Terror. The Republicans are completely out of control, with Giuliani holding the “moderate” opinion that a Palestinian state is a terrorist state. Hillary Clinton truly is Bush-Cheney lite, with no objections to this hopeless War itself, only to “incompetence” and “irresponsibility” in its execution. Edwards has explicitly denounced the War on Terror as no more than a “bumper sticker”, and is the only major candidate to do so.

Obama is not as hawkish as he seems. I truly believe that he is against the War on Terror. He does not say so openly because this would alienate conservatives, and he prides himself on bridging political gaps. But look at his positions, which in many cases go further than Edwards: no unconditional support for Musharraf (as bad for Pakistanis as unconditional aid to Israel is to Israelis), a big antipoverty initiative, negotiations with “evil dictators”, and a new dialogue with Islam.

America never really recovered from 9/11. Our political discourse has been dead since then. To revive this country, and then Israel, the 2008 Presidential Election must exact a searing defeat against the basic principles of the War on Terror. Otherwise, the American and Zionist dreams both may perish.

Posted by Shlomo | September 2nd, 2007 at 1:27 am
More than 20 years ago I was invited to Israel to participate at a seminary for journalists. Avraham Burg, who was at the time leading the Jewish Agency gave us a very Zionist speech. He was not a youngster anymore. His sudden change is not one of Saulus to Paulus. Change came because he was unsuccessful in his political career. The moment a prominent Israeli decides to lash out at Zionism, he can be sure to get plenty of invitations to Europe, where in complete contradiction to the USA such people are welcome to speak and write.

Lets imagine for one moment there is no more State of Israel. Would then Saudi-Arabia turn democratic, would be less poverty in Egypt, less stoning and hanging of homosexuals and women who had illicit sexual relations in Iran? Would the rape of young boys in Pakistans religious schools stop? Would Palestinians stop killing each other and be able to form a democratic society?

Posted by Eli in Austria | September 2nd, 2007 at 4:59 am
Abolishing the state of Israel probably wouldn’t end global warming either, so what?

Posted by Bill | September 2nd, 2007 at 6:56 am
Israel is in no danger of being “terminated” by anyone. That’s a right-wing talking point that has no basis in reality.

Israel is in danger of becoming a pariah state where no sane person would want to live. That’s the issue Israelis and friends of Israel should worry about instead of conjuring up imaginary existential threats.

Posted by Bernard Chazelle | September 2nd, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Long before M&W and Carter, I came to my own conclusions about the Lobby and Israel through close observation of the pattern of events in Israel-Palestine and the US congress over the past decades.

It doesn’t even need to be “debated”, it needs to end.

I have written my congressman and senator and the heads of both parites to say I, my extended family, and everyone else I have contact and influence will not support or vote for any candidate for any office who pledges alliegence to Israel and continues this corruption of American values and government. Instead we will actively work against them and name the reason we are doing so

Anyone who isn’t wiling to notify their elected representives that they won’t support this perversion is just pontificating and wasting their time.

Only when congress fears American voters more than they fear groups like AIPAC will it end.

Posted by Julia | September 2nd, 2007 at 2:25 pm
Julia,

The main issue is not that the candidate “pledges allegiance” to Israel. If we exclude the West Bank, Israel proper is one of the only democracies in the Middle East, and one that gives nearly equal rights to Israeli Arabs. I view this not as a corruption of American values, but as an embodyment of the best of American values. All men are created equal. Everyone’s voice matters. Of course, Israeli laws will have a Jewish flavor–that is to be expected in a state with the highest concentration of Jews in the world.

The problem is that Israel was founded on contradictory principles: a Jewish democracy. As Jews will eventually be in the minority, they will eventually have to choose between a majority-Arab democracy with a Jewish flavor, and a Jewish apartheid state. The former is far superior from a ZIONIST perspective, because Israel can be majority Arab and retain a Jewish character, but can not possibly be apartheidal while retaining its democratic character.

So the problem is not that American politicians pledge their support for Israel. The problem is that they don’t mean it, and are as insincere about Zionism as the American neocons are about American patriotism. By essentially promoting the aparheidal solution, the so-called “friends” of Israel are in fact destroying the country–just as American “patriots” here, with their War on Terror, are bombing the American dream.

I am a Zionist. I am an American patriot. It is not in spite of this but because of this that I criticize both my home countries; the fundamental principle of democracy is loyal dissent. Take that away, democracy dies.

Posted by Shlomo | September 2nd, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Shlomon — you’re in a fantasy world when you say “if we exclude the West Bank” — the West Bank has been part of the Israeli regime for the past 40 years, and Israel is not planning to end that regime for the foreseeable future. The West Bank settlements, walls, checkpoints etc. are as much part of Israel today as the beaches of Tel Aviv…

Posted by Tony | September 2nd, 2007 at 4:27 pm
There is a dreariness to all this. We are faced with a complex, fast-changing world and we have politicians chanting meaningless “verities” about Israel and Arabs. (Cue: Bill Cutty.)

Instead of an Armaggedon, we are watching the tide go out on American power. Most of our Fundies and Fox News watchers speak to so few foreigners, they don’t understand that the American brand is tarnished; the American dream is a self-reinforcing myth, and American ingenuity involves importing brains from Europe, India, and China. Has anyone looked at origin of almost every American Chess Grandmaster? (Okay, not the best example….)

Considering the overt religiousity of our current public square, why should we expect our foreign policy to have less obscurantism? Simple question: Would John Hagee have been a national figure 20 years ago? Would any self-respecting Jew have invited him to address AIPAC 20 years ago?

Posted by Matthew | September 2nd, 2007 at 8:10 pm
The Armageddon is already here (it’s called the MIddle East), and politics is diverted by what a flunkey Senator did in a public toilet rather than whose interests he has been pandering to during his long sojourn on the public tit.
1. Bernard Chazelle is as perceptive as ever, and the Athens/Sparta analogy with pre and post 1967 Israel is appealing. Yet that divide reflects the accepted wisdom rather than the reality. After all, Athens was not merely sweetness and light but rose to power as an exploitative imperial machine. So also pre-1967 Israel is the parent of post-1967 Israel. Born in sin and continues in sin. The 1956 outrage is symptomatic. Pre-1967 Israel as utopia is just so much blather.
2. It would seem to me that one can’t be a Zionist without becoming an Israeli citizen. This practice of, as in the old days, doing time on a kibbutz, or, as now, herbing over for a break while cavorting on a Tel Aviv beach or staying in an upmarket apartment in Ma’aleh Adumim and doing the Souccah with not an indigene in sight is basically Sicko.
3. So what is this other phenomenon of rooting for Israel from the benches, in comfortable American (name your country) suburbia? Tribalism. As one would root for a football team, except that this particular team specialises in ethnic cleansing. The cost of membership in the rooting club is the loss of one’s intelligence and education and the loss of one’s humanity - vide the post by ‘Eli of Austria’, for whom the A-rabs are essentially sub-human.
A tribalism that has thus acquired pathological dimensions. As TK notes:
‘This phenomenon is reflective of a trend that has been confirmed to me anecdotally dozens of times, both in the U.S. and at home in South Africa, where some Jewish liberals of faultlessly progressive politics on every other issue turn into raving tribal belligerents of the Ariel Sharon hue when the conversation turns to Israel.’
Can one then take such people seriously on anything?
The layers - Israel’s criminality, and a pathological tribalism that ensures the former’s continuity. The latter demands explicit redress before the former can be confronted (note Elliott Abrams’ undermining of Quartet and UN initiatives in Gaza, with Wolfensohn and de Soto, for example, both with long experience and detachment, quitting in disgust) .
And the pathological tribalism demands attention for its own sake - centuries of contibution by Jewry to the Englightenment and centuries of suffering by Jewry debased by the socialised obeiscance to institutionalised barbarism.
Frankly, the israel lobby is the ‘West’s numero uno moral problem.

Posted by evanj | September 2nd, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Shlomo — “Israel proper is one of the only democracies in the Middle East, and one that gives nearly equal rights to Israeli Arabs.”

“gives NEARLY equal rights to Israeli Arabs?” Then it’s not a democracy. Quit fooling yourself or us.

“Of course, Israeli laws will have a Jewish flavor–that is to be expected in a state with the highest concentration of Jews in the world.”

You mean Russian emigres, who claim Jewish as their religion whether observant or not, dont you? Israel’s population is around 6 million. 4.8 million of them are Russian. Eighty percent (80%). The US paid for them to emigrate since 1970. Israel is a Russian satellite now.

Posted by Janie | September 2nd, 2007 at 11:17 pm
[...] Tony Karon, Rootless Cosmopolitan, August 31: [...]

Posted by Let the onslaught begin at Antony Loewenstein | September 2nd, 2007 at 11:27 pm
600 000 of those russians have left for the u s & europe
the countdown has already started
geo graphical time bomb
350 000 000 arabs in 2025

Posted by feroze | September 3rd, 2007 at 2:28 am
Actually Israel is an Israeli-Russian Mafia satellite now.

But I digress from my main point.

Based on Tony’s reference to Burg, I looked up this interview with him in Haaretz.:

Leaving the Zionist ghetto
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/868385.html

Amazingly, the man sounds like me - if I were Jewish and disgusted with the Zionist program. He does everything I’ve done (and been castigated for, and banned from Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall for, and called “anti-Semitic” for): comparing the Israeli regime with the Nazi regime, declaring that the concept of a “Jewish state” is not workable, accepting the Diaspora as the best thing that ever happened to Judaism, suggesting that Israelis would be smart to move, etc,, etc.) And this guy is not only Jewish, he’s a former Zionist, and a former member of the Israeli government!

Guess he, as Josh Marshall likes to accuse me of, “despises Jews”…

Sounds to me, however, that he loves Jews and despises what Zionism has become.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | September 3rd, 2007 at 4:00 am
See Noam Chomsky’s comments on this issue (link below).

The basic idea, quoting Stephen Zunes,

“there are far more powerful interests that have a stake in what happens in the Persian Gulf region than does AIPAC [or the Lobby generally], such as the oil companies, the arms industry and other special interests whose lobbying influence and campaign contributions far surpass that of the much-vaunted Zionist lobby and its allied donors to congressional races.”

Noam concludes, “Convenient, but not too convincing. In either case.”

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20060328.htm

Posted by Adamchik | September 3rd, 2007 at 4:42 am
Excellent rebuttal to a piece which I think I found more disturbing. I wrote this to editor Remnick a few days ago:

I read with astonishment your curiously untimely comments about Palestine and Israel, and the putative “symptomatic” essay that prompted your ravings. That will do it; no more subscription, ever, for me. There are many issues of global importance, from economic inequality to US militarization to worldwide poverty and climate change, yet when one
piece is such fascist journalism, I must register my complaint about your support of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. There are many good and honorable people in Israel and here who do not promote the
on-going violence against the refugees in Palestine; it is in their name, and most specifically that of Norman Finkelstein, upon whose momentous case you have been silent, that I ask that my association with your
magazine be terminated.

I’m just one reader, one no-account like everybody else, but I got incensed when a Princeton boomer with a million readers gets on his high horse…

Posted by Mjosef | September 3rd, 2007 at 6:49 am
After reading the above comments,as well as the review itself, it is increasingly apparent that M&W have succeeded in bringing this subject to the fore,one of their stated objectives. The placement of Remnick’s review in the NYer’s “editorials” section (first!) is in direct relation to this topic’s currency and weight. Though the conversation will inevitably include all forms of whackos,haters,denyers and everything in between,at least there IS discussion and this is good for all.

Posted by Giulio | September 3rd, 2007 at 7:36 am
@ Adamchik

While there may be other interests involved, I don’t believe the arms or oil industries could or would bring the total unanimity of praise for Israel among the U.S. political class. Do you really believe Exxon would attack a congressman for expressing mild sympathy for the Palestinians? Would General Dynamics lobby congress AGAINST arms sails to Saudi Arabia? Seems unlikely to me.

Posted by Ziad | September 3rd, 2007 at 7:59 am
I’m 61 years of age and hope that I live long enough to read- “All Israelies have left M.E. and settled in America “. Try this tid bit,never talked about–Hitler’s Germany was trying hard to settle Palestine as a Jewish state—WHY ?

Posted by JoJo | September 3rd, 2007 at 8:54 am
The irony of this Israel’s American lobby is that they are fueling a rising tide of American anti-semitism. It is a tide that continues to accellerate. Israel and its lobby are hastening the coming crisis for itself and American Jews.

Posted by J Wittenmyer | September 3rd, 2007 at 8:58 am
Excellent piece as usual. A few points:

“Israel’s intelligence services can better infiltrate radical groups than can their American allies. No doubt.”

Leaving aside the whole issue over whether laypeople can ever have a clue about what goes on in the neccessarily secretive world of intelligence gathering, but should we really have no doubt that Israel’s intellignces services are all that great? Insiders such as Bob Baer and Michael Scheuer contend that the only department in which Mossad excels is that of PR. Other experts also claim that the US would be far better off cultivating the Iranian or Syrian intelligence agencies, which are far better equipped to deal with Middle Eastern “extremists”. So you could definetely make the argument that America’s entanglement with Israel results in a net intelligence loss (pun intended!)

“the moral violation in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. (In this, most Israelis and most American Jews agree with them.)”

I would never claim any expertise on Israeli or American Jewish society, but surely, if there was a genuine anti-occupation groundswell in Israel, we would know about it? IF ‘most’ Israelis are against the occupation, they certainly don’t show it on election day, or when they urge their governments to ‘hit the terrorists hard’. Surely, if the majority of Israelis wanted to end the occupation, opposition to it wouldn’t only be voiced by fringe organisations?

Posted by Murphy | September 3rd, 2007 at 10:44 am
No, Israel does not give “nearly equal” rights to its Palestinian citizens. They are Palestinians or Palestinian Arabs, not Arabs. The way people who support Israel ignore their Palestinian identity is purposeful, because it recalls that Palestinian Arabs are the indigenous people. Also, calling them “Arabs” without any mention of their Palestinian identity ignores their connections, historical, familial, sociological and political with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

Israel is a democracy for Jews. It is not a democracy for Palestinian citizens of Israel who have nothing like “near equal rights” to Jewish citizens. Israel is an ethnic state with a definition of statehood right out of the 19th century. It’s an anachronism, albeit a powerful one.

Posted by deborah | September 3rd, 2007 at 11:03 am
There’s an interview with Stephen Walt done last year (after the publication of the paper “The Israel Lobby & U.S. Foreign Policy”) on the I.N.N. World report website:

http://www.innworldreport.net

The Walt interview is well worth a listen.

Beyond that, I started calling Congress in protest when I first discovered the existence and power of the pro-Israel lobbies, which was between the September 11 attacks and the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Congress is not listening to us on this topic, as evidenced by the August 2007 recess trip to Israel of 80 members of the U.S. House. Some of these House members were led by Steny Hoyer (DEMOCRATIC House Majority Leader) himself.

That’s close to 20% of the U.S. House visiting another country during time designated for them to be in their home districts listening to their constituents’ complaints.

What’s even more creepy is that Hoyer’s office won’t even say who went on the trip to Israel.

This is yet another example of who the U.S. Congress IS listening to and who it is not, the latter being the people of the U.S.

Past that, Remnick in a July New Yorker article called “The Apostate” (the one about Burg) repeated the lie that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” when in fact Ahmadinejad said that Israel would “vanish from the pages of time” much like the Soviet Union had done, a victim of its own hubris and corruption.

I have become increasingly disgusted with the New Yorker and its subtle and not so subtle pro-Israel propaganda. I tried to cancel my subscription in protest but for some reason they refuse to stop sending me the magazine.

For another example of subtle pro-Israel propaganda, Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine casually mentions that we should worry about Iran’s quest for a bomb, in an article that had nothing to do with Iran or nuclear weapons.

There’s all kind of things wrong with that casual mention — for one thing, as I’m sure everyone here knows, Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and is allowed peaceful nuclear development. IAEA inspectors are regularly in Iran.

The second would be that Israel is not a signatory, has more than 200 nuclear weapons AND delivery systems, and has never allowed inspections

Both the New Yorker and Portfolio are exhibits of Hasbara (pro-Israel) propaganda at its best — plant that little seed in the minds of the reading classes and watch it grow into carte blanche support for what in my opinion is a racist, rogue, apartheid state.

With the British papers reporting imminent U.S. air strikes on Iran — a “three day blitz” with more than 1200 targets, I feel that the worst is yet to come, and we can blame our non-ally, Israel for it. We do not have a Senate ratified defense treaty with Israel, by her choice, yet we get fed this “ally” baloney all the time by our congressional whores.

BTW: both Zunes and Chomsky are Zionist propagandists, but in such a subtle way that many on the “left” are snowed. For them it’s all about oil and empire. My fingers are too tired to type a rebuttal but I would have to suggest that oil companies like stability, and a fair rate for the oil would be preferable to paying $12 billion a month to NOT secure it in Iraq.

Posted by TruePatriot | September 3rd, 2007 at 11:24 am
It’s been many years since I read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” but as I recall, the disproportional power of the German Jewish community in their press, their financial institutions, their elected governments and their businesses in general was a factor in the rise to power of Hitler. Again in the early 2000’s, the USA is being manouvered by the whims of a powerful Jewish minority (less that 3%), something that most average Americans don’t even understand or recognize. When this lobby has egged the USA into successive wars with Iraq, Iran and Pakistan for the sake of protecting Israel and created national debts for these exercises of 15-20 trilliion dollars, American taxpayers might take note and elect a strong opposing leader. Can another holocaust be far behind?

Posted by JDonald | September 3rd, 2007 at 11:35 am
Tony: I wonder how many Zionists (maybe excluding Shlomo) are really troubled by the fact that Zionism, by definition leads to ethnic cleansing, at least, or extermination, at worst. And that is not because Zionism is a nihilist ideology like National Socialism. It is because it is a negation of the real world. If God wanted the Jews to reeem the ‘promised land” [I've been there--it's just about the least promising real estate in the world], He did a sorry job communicating this message to his other children, i.e., the descendants of Ismail.

Like the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, and Apartheid South Africa, Zionism requires the negation of facts on the ground. Palestinians are inconvenient, so they don’t exist. They have no real identity and separate history. They will eventually just disappear, etc. If you starve them enough, they will admit they are really Egyptians and Hashemites. Sigh. I used to work out with an uber-Likudite who peddled this piffle.

The problem is that whatever virtues Zionism holds for the Jewish People will be utterly lost if they take the “necessary ” steps to make it “succeed.” (Ethnic cleansing or extermination. Look at the American example of the “Winning of the West.” )

I believe most countries and cultures have a suicide impulse. What else is the Occupation?

Posted by Matthew | September 3rd, 2007 at 11:45 am
Israel’s problem is that it is America’s “ally”. Israelis will wake up one day and find that it is dangerous to be America’s ” ally”. I have said it before and I will repeat it: The Arabs do NOT pose a threat to Israel’s existence. That comes from a combination of Israeli arrogance and American idiocy. Toxic combination, indeed.

Posted by Martin | September 3rd, 2007 at 1:08 pm
There really will never be any peace in the Middle East until the US un-glues itself from Israel. As simple as that. Israel has nukes. Let it defend itself. It doesn’t need US protection. And let us hope Iran gets nukes too, so Israel and Iran can have a peace of mutually assured destruction, a la the US and USSR during the cold war.

Posted by Hal | September 3rd, 2007 at 1:10 pm
M & W, whatever minor faults might lie in their book, have provoked the rage of such “luminaries” as Abe Foxman of the ADL (who, as you recall, wanted hysterically to invoke the PATRIOT Act against Mel Gibson for his rather sadistic movie, The Passion fo the Christ.
The roots of the problem are, of course, the Jewish-dominated media which have conditioned America into a Weltanschauung which cannot tolerate the thought that Israel is basically a criminal enterprise and that the Arabs, whatever their actions, are merely reacting to Israeli ethnic cleansing (executed, as I discovered for myself on a visit to the West Bank) in a manner which is unspeakably brutal.
M & W therefore have a Sysiphean task.
One can but hope that they have the stamina.

Posted by peter kirsch | September 3rd, 2007 at 3:34 pm
When Zionists tell us that any adjustment, any change in policy would mean the death of Israel and all the Jews in it, they make me wonder if the anti-zionists, who insist Israel could not exist without the ethnic cleansing ond oppression of the existing peoples, are right.

Any time you suggest any amelioration of the condition of the people in the Occupied Terrortories, or suggest an equitable system of laws, or even suggest a concession by Israel, the Zionists scream: “They’ll kill us all”

Also, don’t anyone suggest any course of action for Israel unless you have a concurrent proposal to cure every other ill in the world.

The hasbara is becoming tiresome.

Posted by Mooser | September 3rd, 2007 at 5:04 pm
TruePatriot, I totally aagree with everything in your response. I come here for Tony, and always feel that his posting, combined with the brilliant replies, nourishes the mind. More than any other site.

Posted by lolaone | September 3rd, 2007 at 5:51 pm
Can’t agree with you regarding Remnick’s “hysteria”. His piece in the “New Yorker was steady and evenhanded. Set against the larger background of pro-Israel thought control, it seems “biased” in favor of fact and reality.

I call your attention to Remnick’s closing comment:

“Finally, the Israeli government has to confront its own crazies and create a national consensus on democratic ideals, enact a secular constitution, and really confront the settlers. So far, the government is only willing to say that it is making ‘painful’ moves. We are told that we have to grieve with the settlers, think about making deals, but quietly let on that we actually think these are the real Israeli pioneers. Bullshit. Avrum Burg might not express the need to change in the most effective way, but at least he has the courage to insist on it.”

Posted by jeff davis | September 3rd, 2007 at 6:38 pm
[...] Monday, September 3rd, 2007 in politics, foreign policy by Daniel Larison On the nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship in last summer’s disastrous war in Lebanon, for example, I disagree with their denial of responsibility on Washington’s part — the original impulse to take some form of action may have come from the Israeli leadership, but as I made clear at the time, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the scale and objectives of the operation became defined by Washington, and they were plainly goals for which Israel had not prepared its forces. ~Tony Karon [...]

Posted by Eunomia · The Lobby And Lebanon | September 3rd, 2007 at 6:50 pm
It now appears that the evidence used to convict Libyan agents of the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing was tampered with.The circuit board of the timing device used to explode the bomb on board the plane was examined by the manufacturer of the device before the trial.The color of the board was brown but the color of the circuit boards of the timing devices shipped to Libya were green.When the fragments of the board were introduced in the trial they had been burnt,or carbonized to the point that the original color was no longer recognizable.If the Libyans didn’t carry out this attack,then who did?It was way before bin Laden’s time but it occurred within the time span of an attempt to create a terrorist attack by Israel to blame on the Egyptian government,an incident well documented with Israel caught red handed.The Guardian newspaper of Britian is handling this story.

Posted by Ricardo | September 3rd, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Tony,
As recently as two years ago withdrawal from the West Bank was within sight. The Lebanon War has set the country back, and driven the electorate rightward, but the pendulum can swing back. Also, just because West Bank has been under the “Israeli regime” for forty years does not mean the territories are inseparable. India was under the “British regime” for longer, but could still be forced out by Gandhi’s blistering and brilliant nonviolent resistance. An independent and separate Palestinian state is still possible, in spite of the Israeli electorate and the Hamas-Fatah rivalry. It also remains the best option, and I would not be so quick to abandon it.

Janie,
When I said “Gives nearly equal rights”, I was referring to economic discrimination of the type Black America faces today. Arab students study and live Israeli University beside their Jewish friends. Israeli Arabs/Palestinians can order a drink at the same lunch counters Jews can, and sit on the same buses that Jews can, and live in the same apartments that Jews can. The Israeli government could provide more social services for Palestinian Israelis, but you could say the same about the U.S. government and African-Americans.

And I don’t see how it matters what the internal demographics of Israeli Jews are. Judaism is both a religion and a race. You might like to know, however, that all those Russian Jews faced severe repression under the Soviet leadership, which happened to be a REAL mortal threat to America. That’s why the U.S. helped them get out, and Israel is no more a Russian satellite today than Denmark was a German satellite for protecting Holocaust refugees.

Deborah,
Your comment is very timely. The pendulum is already, finally, beginning to swing back on the issue of Palestinian identity. All textbooks for Israeli Arabs now include reference to the Nakhba, despite Netanyahu’s and Lieberman’s indignant outcries that this “teaches treachery”.
See the above comments to Jamie about the rights of Palestinian Israelis. Treatment of Israeli Arabs in VERY different than West Bank Palestinians. Only the latter includes increasingly apartheidal practices.

Matthew,
I don’t agree that Zionism necessarily leads to ethnic cleansing. Zionism was primarily a SECULAR nationalist movement, like the German, Polish, and Italian nationalist movements. I agree with you that Zionism should not be about “redeeming the promised land”—that’s not supposed to happen until Messiah comes. Unfortunately, the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza continues, largely due to the Messianic Zionism neither one of us likes. I also agree that this Messianic Zionism is a suicidal impulse. In fact, here’s a fascinating thought. If you are an ultra-Orthodox Jew, you’re either overtly anti-Zionist or gung-ho for settlements. Should tell you something.

Listen, if I were alive in the 1940’s, and had avoided the gas chambers, I would have had some things to say to the thugs of Irgun and other similar groups. But I’m not. It is 2007 not 1947, and as horrible and tragic as the Nakhba was, it can not be reversed. The best we can do now is ensure maximum happiness for the grandchildren of Nakhba and Holocaust survivors. I believe the best way for this is to recognize both Jewish and Palestinian claims to the land. The Palestinian Territories are the only place of refuge for Palestinians, who face persecution in virtually every place they are exiled to. That sounds so familiar to me, it is almost painful. At the same time, two whole generations of Israeli Jews have grown up in Israel. Their grandparents, who are now mostly in their 70’s or 80’s, remember what it was like to be a minority, reviled even in their home countries, and with no country to truly call home. In the future, neither group should have a repeat of the exile and persecution they’ve gone through. Both deserve separate states, and a homeland that is uniquely theirs.

Posted by Shlomo | September 3rd, 2007 at 10:13 pm
Mr Karon has written a generally thoughtful piece, especially in his suggestion that the mass-marketed hyper-pro-Zionist idiom that pervades American political discourse functions “quite independently of the lobby’s interventions.” (The word “trope” understates how deep and wide Israeli bias has penetrated our speech.)

Two points, however. First, there is nothing evanescent–”bubble”-like– about the Israeli bias that plagues US policy. It is not some out of control fad or hip phenomenon. It is baked into both formal and informal structures of politics, government and media. After decades of brainwashing through repeated message of Israeli moral superiority–contrasted with repetitive negative racist imagery of Arabs–the Israeli-first bias has become an organic part of our culture. The notion that this
bubble may burst like the stock market and real estate bubbles cannot be taken seriously. I am afraid it will likely take a lot more than a sudden “correction” of perspective to re-align US foreign policy to Anerican rather than Israeli interests. For example, the economic and social upheaval to the US that inevitably will follow the forthcoming war on Iran….

Second, why should it concern Americans in the least whether policies undertaken for the sake of Israel are actually bad for Israel in the long term? Time and again, the US’s Israeli-first policies show themselves to be suicidal. At most, the impact of American policy on Israel must be a matter of indifference to American policy makers (except to the narrow and likely trivial extent that any impact affects American interests). Indeed, it is somewhat obvious that America’s best interests would be served by entirely severing the Israeli albatross from its neck. That would not bode well for the survivability of the “only democracy in the Midle East”–short or long term–but so what?

deeply-entrenched tropes in U.S. political and civil society — tropes which now function

Like the tech-bubble and real estate-bubble, Washington’s “Israel bubble” is unhealthy and dangerous — in fact, it not only jeopardizes U.S. interests throughout the region and beyond (by serving as Exhibit A for any anti-American element anywhere in the Islamic world to win the political contest with America’s friends), but it is also exceedingly bad for Israel:

Posted by JP Zinger | September 3rd, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Great article, we badly need more Jews with guts to stand up to the suicidal megalomanic policies of Israel. (I am an Israeli, by the way)

Posted by Victoria Buch | September 4th, 2007 at 5:02 am
Wonderful blog, as always. I think the problem people like Remnick find themselves in is that once you accept the premises of Zionism, or at least Zionism as expressed in the creation of the Israel, you find yourself in a place that is implicitely illiberal. So, either you ignore these premises, turn a blind eye to the history and pretend that the status of the West Bank is the only issue that can legitimately be debated, or you get dragged down into a very dark place. The obvious example is the once-liberal Zionist historian Benny Morris. To Morris’ credit, he remains honest, but that honesty when combined with his Zionism, has taken him in a horrible direction, one where he talks of Palestinians as ‘barbarians’ and says they should be put in ’something like a cage’. The premises I am talking about relate to the facts about the creation of the Jewish state. Morris states that “the whole Zionist project is apocalyptic”. and that “in a certain sense its (Israel’s) existence is unreasonable.” And yet he defends it. He says establishing a Jewish state in a country where Jews were the minority (one third of the population of Palestine in 1947, he acknowledges) was the right thing to do, and that “there are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing” and “without the uprooting of the Palestinians a Jewish state would not have arisen here” and “there are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.” He even says, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” To me, this is the morality of fascism. It is proufoundly immoral. It is in Morris’s favour that he recognises that without this egg-breaking, the Zionist project would have failed. It seems to me that to be an honest and informed Zionist you have to reach this point: either you ditch your Zionism or you accept the ethnic cleansing and massacres that were necessary for it to succeed. But if you do reach that point you should no longer pretend to be a liberal, in any sense. My own view is the opposite of Morris’s: that it what happened in Palestine in 1948 was a tragedy which will run and run and run. http://www.gavinevans.net

Posted by Gavin Evans | September 4th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Shlomo: As a secularist, I oppose any solution that states “let’s move some people….” You are quite right that two generations of Jews have grown up in Israel and Israel is their home. All I’m suggesting is that we treat this like a boundry dispute, end all discussion that God mandates the proper borders of Israel or any other country, and focus on building a healthy Palestinian society, which will be a benefit to the Jewish society next door. I only argued that Zionism is dangerous to the extent, like Manifest Destiny, it defines itself as “owning” what is actually lived on by another.

Posted by Matthew | September 4th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Thanks Gavin, and you’re right: What Morris makes clear is that to be a Zionist, you basically have to concede to the morality and perspective of the Likud; there really is no “progressive” Zionism that can absolve itself of the crimes and violations of Israel on the basis of the “purity” of its vision. When I was in Habonim, we used to call them — the Likud — “fascists,” imagining our side (the Zionist left) innocent of everything from teh ethnic cleansing of 1948 to the settlements. But in reality, that’s a self-serving evasion. The Likudniks used to laugh at us — “Do you seriously believe there would have been a Jewish state if things like the massacre at Deir Yassin hadn’t happened and the Palestinians had stayed in their homes?” This is why I think Burg recognized the conflict between his Zionism on the one hand and his Judaism and humanity on the other.

Posted by Tony | September 4th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Tony,

The Likudniks have a vested interest in ramming all opinions into one of two boxes: anti-Zionist, or anti-Palestinian. In fact, anti-Zionists have the same interest. Therefore, anyone who says “Boo!” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will immediately face ferocious criticism from these two parties.

One favors returning Jews to a perpetual state of exile, the other favors keeping Palestinians in a perpetual state of exile. Neither of these parties have a solution to the conflict. All they can offer is a chance to drown in the blood-soaked history of Judeo-Arabic relations.

One sentence in your last post revealed how absurd the all-or-nothing advocates truly are:
“there really is no ‘progressive’ Zionism that can absolve itself of the crimes and violations of Israel on the basis of the ‘purity’ of its vision.”

The problem with this sentence is how you deal with purity and absolution. When you talk of the “purity” of the Zionist vision, it seems to me you are sharply criticizing the ethnic cleansing of 1948–as you should. But just before that, you write that progressive Zionism can not “absolve” itself of its crimes. Does this mean that Zionist absolution should be a goal? Abolution is a process of purification!

All this emphasis on “atoning” for past crimes makes peace impossible. Hamas seeks to “cleanse” Israel of Zionists because fifty years ago Zionists “cleansed” their grandparents. Therefore, Hamas uses mass murder as a negotiating tool, and attempts to bomb pizzerias and kill children on the playground. But after the terrorist attack, the IDF can not sit idly. It has to make Hamas “pay” for what happened, which is basically synonymous with forcing Hamas to “atone”.

No, the goal should not be “atonement”, the goal should be to build a brighter future. Immersing oneself in a pool of blood only leads to greater defilement.

Posted by Shlomo | September 4th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
Shlomo, dude, you’re trying my patience here: Firstly, the majority of Jews have actually chosen what you describe as “exile” — we have no interest in “returning,” we’re not Israelis, nor do we intend to become such. So we’re not in “exile” any more than fifth-generation Irish-Americans are. It’s only in the fevered nationalist imagination of the Zionists that we’re somehow deficient for living wherever we choose. The Palestinians, by contrast, have not chosen their exile — although I know one or two (maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands, really) who would be quite happy to remain in their place of exile. Doesn’t change the reality.

As for the “blood-soaked history of Judeo-Arabic relations,” this is another Zionist construction. For the Jews of the Arab world, the terms “Jew” and “Arab” were in no way antonyms; Arab Jews considered themselves Arabs. Jews may have suffered the disadvantages of being a non-Muslim minority in the Arab world, but that was nothing like the violent persecution of Christian Europe. There is no “blood soaked” history of relations between Jews and Arabs before the advent of modern Zionism, which, as we both know, came entirely from Europe and had negligible presence among Arab Jews.

As for atoning, actually, I believe the key to resolving the conflict begins with Israel accepting moral responsibility for creating the Palestinian refugee problem. We all know it’s true, yet Israel can’t bring itself to acknowledge this…

But my point is that this business of liberal Zionists like Remnick clucking sympathetically about how terrible the settlements are before going on to denounce and negate all fundamental criticism of Israel is simply being in denial — the settlements have become an integral part of the Zionist enterprise, as was the ethnic cleansing of ‘48.

Posted by Tony | September 4th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Tony, your comment on “exiles” is well-taken. Our local paper recently published a piece about Indian and Jewish cooperation on the setting-up of community centers in which the reporter intoned that Jews and Indians had much in common as “:they are both far from their homeland”.

In light of the fact that our local Jewish community is mostly composed of 3rd, 4th and 5th generation Americans, many of whom have never set foot in Israel , the statement was ludicrous but it did serve to illustrate the sentimental mindset that brooks no criticism of Israel.

Neither Israelis and Indians who live here are exiles since they are here of their own volition and can return to their “homelands” at will.

Posted by Marjorie | September 4th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
1. The ‘blood-soaked history of Judeo-Arabic relations’. As Tony notes, Hello? tell that to the Iberian Jews who ended up in Salonica, courtesy of the Ottomans. Thrived, until the Ottoman empire decays, and that Salonican community, under Greek passive patronage, is wiped out by Hitler’s minions.
2. TK is right about Remnick. His touch of honesty in the first part of the editorial is overwhelmed by the felt need ot Remnick to bend the knee in the second half. Blame the victims. To borrow a marvellous label from the political scientist Arnold Wolfers, this is ‘auto-abnegation’ at work.
3. As for Shlomo’s ravings, apart from the usual bullshit re Hamas, this notion of return from exile is the greatest lurk of the whole Hasbarian palaver. Hey, some of my antecedents are Welsh. Some of that Welsh real estate looks mighty attractive, especially those bits currently occupied by Jewish families who fled to Britain following Tsarist pogroms. I think that it’s time I exercised my inalienable right of return. And it doesn’t matter whether I’m really Welsh at all; I can just fudge it, like so many ersatz ‘Jewish’ Israelis. This right of return lurk is the ultimate racket; one can’t believe that anybody could make it up, leave alone seek to implement it.

Posted by evanj | September 4th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
1. “Blood-soaked history”

You know, history did not end right before Zionism started. It actually continued onward (unlike some people’s interpretations of it!), and saw a steady deterioration of Jews’ status in Islamic lands. Antisemitism was a cultural transmission from Europeans to Arabs. At the height of imperialism, suddenly Arab cities had blood libels for the first time, and it took off from there. This culminated with mass expulsions, some at the hands of Hitler, others at the hands of ARABS.

2. “Exile”. Tony, please: patience. Read more carefully. I never said Jews were in exile now. What I said was that Jews have seen enough of exile not to want a repeat, and that therefore they deserve their own state. As do Palestinians. The human cost of Palestinian exile is clear for all to see, just as the human cost of Jewish exile was clear in 1948.

3. “Atoning”. Just because Jews admit they did the Nakhba does not mean help is on the way. As you yourself stated before, Likudniks practically revel in Deir Yassin. It would be nice if the Israeli government admitted Zionist culpability, but that’s besides the point. I think the goal is to just take practical steps to solve the problems, not for each party to dish out the maximum blame possible. Especially when said” blame” implies liscense for both sides to commit war crimes.

4, Settlements. Tony, you’ve offered virtually no evidence that settlements are “an intergral part of the Zionist enterprise”. Israel and the Palestinian Territories are geographically and politically distinct entities. One is democracy, the other is imperialism. One is the essence of Zionism, one flies in the face of it.

I deny nothing. Israel cleansed the Palestinians. Or it didn’t. I could care less. I’m more worried about the Palestinian kid who will die tomorrow than the one who died sixty years ago. Tell me, does what happened sixty years ago have any bearing on modern events, save for the purposes of revenge? I’d like to hear.

5. Right of return. Evanj, you hit the nail on the head about how crazy the logic behind a “Right of Return” is. That’s exactly why it’s absurd to be talking of the “inalienable Palestinian right of return” sixty years later. It has no bearing on today’s events, except for revenge. Am I wrong? Would someone care to convince me otherwise?

Posted by Shlomo | September 4th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
Shlomo

Even if your point 1) were true, and I’m not sure that it is except in a marginal sense, “cultural transmissions from Europe” of the type of which you talk would only have happened in the modern era, i.e. in the late 19th century. Hardly supporting a claim that Jews and Arabs share a blood soaked history when, in fact, for hundreds of years we were a lot safer in the Arab world than in Europe. Moreover, how do you explain the fact that the majority of the Arab Jews had no interest in Zionism? Many, even in Israel, are still resentful of Zionism for the fact that they had to move to Israel.

2) Shlomo, sorry, this is a sentimental notion that for most Jews has meaning only in a spiritual sense. Most Jews have shown no interest in living in a Jewish state.

3) It starts with defining what the problem is, and your evasion here simply reinforces what I’m saying about the fact that even the Zionist “peace camp” struggles to acknowledge the human rights violations that occurred not as a by product but as an essential condition for the founding of a Jewish state in a territory in which Jews were a minority.

4) Don’t make me laugh. You want evidence? Israel has been in control of all the territories west of the Jordan River for two thirds of its own history, and it has shown no serious intent to relinquish that control — not talking about withdrawals here and there but ceding sovereign control of territory. Apartheid South Africa was a democracy, too. For white people. A state based on law, institutions, democratic elections etc. And yet it maintained a colonial regime over those to whom it denied citizenship. “one is the essence of Zionism; the other flies in the face of it”? I don’t think so; the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinians is the very condition of the realization of the Zionist project. “Does what happened sixty years ago have any bearing on modern events”? You don’t seriously expect an answer, do you?

5. Revenge? No, Shlomo, it’s actually about justice. Wherever Palestinians from Haifa end up living, addressing their inalienable right to justice begins with frankly acknowledging what was done to them, something you yourself aren’t really prepared to do. You’ll acknowledge it, but then dismiss it as ancient history from which the Palestinians really need to move on, learn to love their Gaza hovels and be grateful to Israel for its “generous offers”… Zionism, Shlomo, is the iron wall. I know you aspire to a progressive world view, but sooner or later you’re going to find yourself torn between the path of Avram Burg and the path of Benny Morris…

Posted by Tony | September 4th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
1. You’re right that for the vast majority of the history in question, Jewish Arabs were better off. Unfortunately, we’re not there now. It’s been the other way around ever since the fall of Nazi Germany.
Your next point is just twisted logic. “Majority” of Jewish Arabs were “resentful of Zionism” because they “had to move to Israel”? First, where on earth did you come up with that figure? Was it 55% opposed or 98% opposed? Or did you just make it up?
Second, your claim that Zionism in some way forced Jewish Arabs to emigrate is beyond belief. Do you think my grandmother left her hometown of Aleppo because she was afraid of what the Zionists would do to her? Or was it that the Syrian government was enacting antisemitic legislation, right after the Holocaust, and she saw the writing on the wall? Or was the Zionist lobby so powerful even then, that it somehow forced Arab governments across the Middle East to enact antisemitic legislation, as a way to force Mideastern Jews to make Aliya?

2. Maybe you’re right, althought once again, I’m wondering where you pulled those numbers from. “Most Jews” is incredibly vague, and it is extremely hard to measure someone’s “interest”. You certainly have a point about the when it comes to American Jews buying West Bank property.
Clearly, some Jews still have an interest in living in a Jewish state: the ones living there! That should count for something. It shouldn’t count for everything, to the extent that more Palestinians are displaced, but it should count for something.

3. I deny nothing. Everything you said is correct. I just don’t think it has any bearing on current events. I don’t think the answer is to turn back time sixty years. Also, I hope you realize that while perhaps the Nakhba was an essential condition, the main goal of Zionism was to establish a Jewish homeland that was democratic–not to kill Arabs. It remains so today, despite Yisrael Beiteinu’s claims otherwise.

4. I’d like to return to the example of British India. Britain had a colonial empire on the Indian subcontinent, and there were also Indians in Great Britain. Does this mean that Britain should have legislated itself out of existence, and established a new, hybrid “Britindian” state? If not, how is this situation different? It, too, “maintained a colonial regime over those to whom it denied citizenship”. But somehow, Britain and India managed to come up with a “Two-State Solution”. Why not here?

5. Honestly, I’m not a big fan of justice. If “justice” is to be the guiding principle, here’s what we have to look forward to: In 1994, Rwandan Hutus slaughtered the Tutsi minority in a vicious genocide. Eventually, however, the Tutsi rebels chased the Hutu genocidaires across the border into Congo. Genocide over? Nope. The Tutsis decided that warlordism and revenge was better than peace, and they kept chasing the Tutsis to the Congo River, then killed them all in a “counter-genocide”. Oh yeah, and they also enflamed Hutu-Tutsi tensions within Congo, sparking a devastating civil war that killed millions.

I’ve acknowledged what was done to Palestinians a hundred times. I do think they need to move on, and that Israelis need to move on from the suicide bombings. But you never actually addressed the question I posed. All you did is put words in my mouth (”learn to love…’generous offers’”), then tell me I’d understand when I’m older (”sooner or later…”). So I’d like to pose the question again. Yes, I’d actually like an answer, if you don’t mind.

Posted by Shlomo | September 5th, 2007 at 2:23 am
Tony & Shlomo: I find that the application of the White Man Rule cuts through all cant. Simply stated, the rule judges every proposition by how it would be viewed if it were applied to a white man. For example, imagine if the Cherokee stated that the Wind and the Moon gods required them to return to their ancestral homes and “redeem” the land. Do you think any White American would vindidate this “national liberation” theology?

Like Manifest Destiny, Zionism is only benign if you utterly discount the other side. The reason that the Benny Morris’s conclusion is necessary because Morris–unlike the silver- tongued Abba Eban–know that Zionism, like Manifest Destiny, can only succeed by brutalizing the natives. And the violence is intrinsic, not extrinsic, to its success. And if I’m wrong, question this: the followers of Hertzl tried buying Palestine. If purchasing it would have worked, don’t you think they would have continued?

Posted by Matthew | September 5th, 2007 at 8:38 am
Shlomo is wrong when he says Palestinians residing in Israel have (nearly) equal economic rights. They cannot legally live in the same apartments, except some of the time, in some places. Every year, racist (look at any given year and their polled attitudes - seriously, among the most racist people on Earth) Israelis spend an inordinate amount of time dreaming up new laws to Jim Crow the Palestinians further. Shlomo is a cracker. Americans heard the same lies from his ilk in the Deep South, and they still hear them.

Posted by Marion Delgado | September 5th, 2007 at 9:18 am
[...] First, an illustrative anecdote: A little over a year ago, Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Washington and addressed Congress. The event was supposed to be a booster for the elected Iraqi leadership, showing U.S. support for the new… …more [...]

Posted by Court: Israel must re-route barrier (AP via Yahoo! News) | September 5th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
I have to laugh at the hypocrisy of the Zionists here. They validate their inhumane treatment of the Palestinians while talking about Nazi brutality. Sure, Zionists “cleansed” the Palestinians. And Hitler “cleansed” the Jews. The only difference is that it’s ok to treat Palestinians as sub-human. However, if you dare to criticize a Jew or Israel policies, you’re labeled “anti-Semetic.” What rubbish!

If the Palestinians have no right of return, or any other claim on their property that was taken from them from Israeli Zionists, then the Jews should have no claim on any property that was lost or taken from them in WW2.
After all, it has no bearing on today’s events, except for revenge. (Sound familiar?)

Some people might not like my post, but I just changed a few groups to show certain people here the hypocrisy of their own posts.

Any Jew anywhere in the world has NO right to use the Holocaust to justify any position, if they then turn around and sanction Zionism and it’s consequences to the Palestinian people. If I’d had my property taken, forced to live in a ghetto under severe economic deprivation for years and years, seen my kids and grandkids grow up in extreme poverty and discrimination, have the Israeli government send in tanks and the army to “search”, I’d be apt to fight back, too. The Jews in the Warsaw ghetto fought back, too.

Posted by obie | September 5th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Shlomo,
“Second, your claim that Zionism in some way forced Jewish Arabs to emigrate is beyond belief. ”
I have pasted a link to a testimonial from an Iraqi Jew. He states that in l951 the Zionists threw the bombs that started the panic and mass immigration of Jews to Israel. I am no expert on this history, but I found the piece compelling. I hope you find time to read the article. It is a fascinating and complex picture of the cross currents of history in the Middle East.
http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/zionism/impact/iraqijews.cfm

Posted by bob k | September 5th, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Bob, there are many more like that about Iraq specifically. But also what Shlomo doesn’t seem to understand is that many Jews from the Arab world recognized that the arrival of Zionism on the back of European colonialism in the Middle East stirred up the antagonisms and backlash that forced them out of their homes in the Arab world where many families had lived for centuries.

Posted by Tony | September 5th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
I am a Zionist. I am an American patriot. It is not in spite of this but because of this that I criticize both my home countries; the fundamental principle of democracy is loyal dissent. Take that away, democracy dies.

Posted by Shlomo | September 2nd, 2007 3:14 pm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

“No man can serve two mistress”…this is a “truism.” Truisms are called truisms specifically because they have proved to be true through out all the centuries
of both ancient and modern man.

In all kindness I must suggest you are self deluded by your desire to believe the US Zionist propaganda that the US and Israel are one in the same, or culturally similar, or share similar values, or have the same interest .

We aren’t and we don’t.

And this “exceptionalism” that Jews claim entitle them to have the right to equal loyalty to two countries and for some Jews an even higher loyalty to their foreign “homeland” will be their undoing in this country.

Posted by Julia | September 6th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
I read somewhere (James Petras I think?) that young American Jews are statistically far more likely to sign up for the I”D”F than for the US Army. I have no way of knowing if this is true, but if it is, it’s very interesting indeed. Imagine the hysteria if it were known that US Muslims are more likely to enlist in the Pakistani or Saudi army than in the US Armed Forces?

Posted by Murphy | September 6th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Very interesting discussion. It is sad that this degree of frankness about U. S. relations with Israel cannot be shown in Congress or the news media. Until there can be an open debate in our society on the issue, without the usual emotional charges of “anti-semitism” from Israeli supporters, there will be no peace in the Middle East.

Posted by J. Norvill Jones | September 6th, 2007 at 6:29 pm
I just finished reading “The Israel Lobby”. I recommend it highly.
It’s factual and unemotional.
It shows frankly the adverse effects the Lobby has on America thru our foreign policy.
The only fault I could find is that they should have also written more about the corruption of our elected representives who allow this perversion because of either their own idealogy, in the case of jewish congressmen and other religious, and the self interested political ambitions of others.

Posted by Julia | September 7th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
Matthew,
I agree with you. Zionism, like manifest destiny, can only succeed by brutalizing the natives. Same with the Palestinian Right of Return. Israeli Jews will not appreciate a huge influx of Arabs to Israel, just as Palestinians did not appreciate a huge influx of Caucasians seventy years ago. The end result will be that the two sides come into conflict (The Hebron Massacre, the King David Bombing, etc.) until one side (Likud or Hamas) wins a dominant position and massacres the other. Maybe the Jews will win again, and complete the Nakhba. Maybe the Palestinians will, and get their revenge. In any case, it will be very bad—far worse than a two-state solution.

Marion,
I did not know about an of the discriminiatory laws and practices you listed. Could you give me more info on this?

Obie,
Your comparison (Palestinian Right of Return versus Holocasut Jews’ property) does not make sense. Holocaust survivors have received reparations for the genocide and displacement, but they were not given the right to rule Germany after WW2. Similarly, Palestinians should receive reparations and an end to the “extreme poverty and discrimination” you mention, but there is no reason why they should rule Israel—save for revenge.

Bob and Tony,
I’m working on Bob’s article, but now there is one point I would like to make. The idea that Jews should gain equal status (instead of being second- or third-class citizens) was indeed quite an antagonism for their Arab overlords. Yes, overlords. Arabs were much better for most of the history of Dhimmitude, but not in the 20th century.
One thing I don’t understand. Zionism “stirred up” a backlash?! What, did the evil colonialists brainwash Arabs into hating Jews, and in this way cause a “backlash”? If not, then the attitudes necessary for anti-Semitic expulsions must have been latent already…

Posted by Shlomo | September 7th, 2007 at 6:40 pm
I’ll stay out of the rest of his arguments, but Shlomo’s reply to Matthew regarding what might well happen if there is a one-state solution might be right. I have no way of judging the likelihood, but there are a fair number of haters in both communities, or so it seems to me sitting several thousand miles away, and mixing them all together into one nation might be a recipe for another Middle East civil war.

Or not. Frankly, I’d happily accept correction on this, because one state with equal rights for everyone is the ideal solution, just as it would have been great if everyone on both sides had felt this way back in the early part of the 20th Century.

I basically agree with Tony Karon’s criticism of Zionism, but whether a one state solution is the way to go now isn’t clear to me. I’m guessing Tony is heavily influenced by what happened in South Africa, but whether that example can carry over to the I/P conflict I couldn’t say.

Posted by Donald | September 7th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
I don’t have a firm position on a binational vs. two state solution, although I do believe the era of a two-state solution being possible may have ended.

Shlomo, Zionism arrived in the region on the back of European colonialism, it associated itself entirely with the colonial mission and from the Arab perspective, the notion that there would be a formalized Jewish state in Palestine begins with the defeat of the Ottomans and the British betrayal of the Arabs.

What I find cute about your reasoning is how you try to create this moral equivalence between Palestinians returning to homes from which they were violently evicted in recent memory, and Jews who hadn’t lived in the region for more than a millennium suddenly turning up and claiming the homes of others. The logic is: I steal your home, then tell you to get over it because I’ve had it for 60 years, and if you came to claim it back now, that would annoy me, so let’s just move on, shall we?

Posted by Tony | September 7th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Tony: the greater irony is that what is a virtue in Zionists, i.e., longing for the Return after 2000 years, is a vice in Palestinians, i.e., longing for a return after 60 years. Shlomo strikes me as nice person, so I think I would like to focus my stronger feelings on those Zionists (unlike him) who actually are malignant.

Posted by Matthew | September 8th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
OK,

This is beginning to upset me. I keep talking about the future; you guys keep talking about the past. From what I’m reading, neither of you are not primarily interested in peace, or in the future of Palestinian youth, so much as you are interested in making the Israeli grandparents pay for their crimes. I am forced to conclude this after hearing you both speak over and over about “moral equivalence” and “justice” and “virtue”.

When an Israeli kintergardener is killed by a rocket hitting his nursery, and when a Palestinian child is shot to death for throwing a stone or a tank, it is a veritable assault on our sense of justice, and of morality, and of virtue–whether you follow the Declaration of Human Rights, the Halacha, or the Shari’a.

Oh, sorry. You’re not concerned with morality so much as with “moral equivalence”. So if some Palestinians are killed, some Israelis should die also. It is morally repugnant in both cases, but since it is equally repugnant, we have reached the Holy Grall of “moral equivalence”. Do the parents burying their children get a prize for this?

Instead of whipping out al-Nakhba the way AIPAC people whip out the Holocaust, can someone actually answer Donald’s question? How will we resolve this conflict in a manner that ensures neither side faces ethnic cleansing, or genocide, or terminal denial of fundamental rights in the FUTURE? What is the best solution that can work?

Posted by Shlomo | September 8th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
“When an Israeli kintergardener is killed by a rocket hitting his nursery, and when a Palestinian child is shot to death for throwing a stone or a tank”

Must of your post is standard straw-man whining, but this sentence requires comment. Note how you differentiate between your two hypothetical child fatalities: one (the Israeli child, obviously) is entirely innocent, and just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The other, (the Palestinian child, of course) cannot be classified as a victim quite so neatly. No, he or she was not shelled while at her desk in school (this has happened in Palestine) or bombarded on the beach with his entire family (ditto): no, he was “throwing a stone or a tank” (sic).

In other words, you are perpetuating the standard hasbara line: While Israelis do sometimes kill Palestinian children, this is either ‘accidental’ or because they were ‘terrorists’. When Palestinians kill Israeli children, however, it is always from pure malice.

Posted by Murphy | September 9th, 2007 at 9:57 am
Any differention was accidental. I do not think lethal force should be used against a kid for throwing rocks, and am strongly opposed to the practice. That’s why I used that example.

Murphy, how is my post straw-man whining in any way? You talk a big game for someone who hasn’t offered a word of refutation. If it’s wrong, shoot it down. You’re invited.

Posted by Shlomo | September 9th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
“Any differention was accidental. ”

Hmmmmm….. if you say so.

“I do not think lethal force should be used against a kid for throwing rocks, ”

But ‘non-lethal’ force is OK? Anyway, my point was that your choice of hypothetical victims was interesting i- and telling - n that the Israeli child was unambiguously innocent, while the Palestinian child, while not deserving of ‘lethal force’, was still engaged in violence (though I must confess I’m not entirely sure what ‘throwing a tank’ means).

“Murphy, how is my post straw-man whining in any way? You talk a big game for someone who hasn’t offered a word of refutation.”

Well, I did say I wasn’t going to engage in your straw-manning. And you don’t refute a straw-man, that would be to give it more credit than it deserves. If you need to know, I thought your post was straw-manning because of your silly claims that nobody wants “peace” except for you.

Posted by Murphy | September 9th, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Shlomo, actually, you can’t move on to peace and the future until you acknowledge what the past is about. The Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust; Israel had everything to do with the Nakbah. That’s the source of the problem. Until Israelis can acknowledge that, they’re unable to find a way forward, because the bubble of denial over the past — which you insist is irrelevant — is actually what locks Israel into the stupendously arrogant mindset of imagining that what it is offering are “generous concessions” when it suggests a partial withdrawal from the West Bank, for example, and then claim the Palestinians are being deceitful and duplicitous when they don’t accept these offers. I agree entirely with Jimmy Carter that the operative principle has to be international law. But Israel has not shown any intention to comply. So you talk of the fate of Palestinian youth in a bubble. Why are you so afraid of acknowledging the past? The reason, I think, is that many Israelis, even liberals, believe that if they acknowledge what happened in 1948, that means they deny their own right to be there.

Tel Aviv University psychologist Carlos Strenger recently argued (http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/868469.html) that Israel’s is unable to make peace with its neighbors in no small part because it is unable to acknowledge its role in creating the Palestinian refugee problem in 1948. He writes: “Israeli public discourse and national consciousness have never come to terms with the idea, accepted by historians of all venues today, that Israel actively drove 750,000
Palestinians from their homes in 1947/8 and hence has at least partial responsibility for the Palestinian Nakba. This has not happened to this very day because this idea is seen as undermining the foundation of the Zionist enterprise and the legitimacy of Israel’s existence. It is as if we were locked into an insoluble dilemma: Either we deny responsibility for the Nakba, or we need to accept that we have no right to be here.

“This is the source of the deep fear that prevents Israel from meeting the Arab world face to face and saying ‘we are here, and we believe that you accept our existence.’ Since Israel has not come to terms with its part in the historical responsibility for the Palestinian Nakba, it cannot truly believe that Arabs could accept our presence in the Middle East. We are locked into a vacillation between self-images of either all-good or all-bad, and hence continue the occupation of the territories, with all the horrors it includes, because the idea of Israel being guilty of anything is still equated with the denial of our right to be here.

“The only way out of this deadlock is to raise the question of how Israel can live with its responsibility for the Nakba into public discourse. The dilemma of ‘either we are morally impeccable, or we have no right to be here’ needs to be replaced with a narrative that accepts that Israel’s moral, historical and political reality is as complex and multilayered as that of most nations.

“In the best of all possible worlds, an Israeli statesman (a rare commodity in an age of mere politicians) would arise and tell the Palestinians: ‘Israel came into existence in tragic circumstances that inflicted great suffering and injustice on your people. We accept responsibility for our part in this tragedy, even though we cannot fully rectify it. Let us sit together and see how we can end the vicious cycle of violence and suffering and live side by side.’

This is not likely to happen in the immediate future. A Jewish Israeli politician who would say such a thing would become unelectable. “

Posted by Tony | September 9th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
You’re right, my choice of hypothetical victims was very telling, and in fact was meant to convey a message: there is no difference between the two deaths. I consider both victims to be equally blameless. In fact, the end of that sentence states explicitly that both deaths are an outrage and an affront to our morality. Good job quoting me wildly out of context, though.

Just so this is lost on no one, the thread started with discussions of the need to have an open debate on Zionism, and the insistent manner in which Zionists shut down the debate. It ended with myself, a Zionist, attempting to make sense of and debate the anti-Zionist position–and with a refusal of the anti-Zionists to engage me!

Has it occured to any of you that if you wish for even one iota of success, at some point you will have to engage with Zionists far more belligerent than myself? And has it occured to you that although I am open to your perspective, I have grown up hearing nothing but the opposite, and that much of what seems obvious to you is quite foreign to me?

And Donald,
Why on earth do you feel a need to “stay out of the way” of my arguments?

This is quite disappointing. Just tell me. How is the Palestinian Right of Return essential for peace? I know it’s obvious. Just spell it out.

Posted by Shlomo | September 9th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Tony,

I actually agree with everything you said, almost to the letter. In addition, I now see why invoking al-Nakba is more logical than invoking the Holocaust. Acknowledging the damage Israel has done, and its continued culpability, is clearly a fundamental building block for coexistence.

However, this answer does not entirely satisfy me. I think that we need a more comprehensive answer for the following reason:

There are a variety of groups and individuals that are pushing for Israel to acknowledge the Nakba. Some of these truly are committed to ending the “vicious cycle of violence and suffering.” Others are not. As you yourself pointed out, right-wing Zionist groups are very aware of the Nakba and its effects. But their acknowledgement of the Nakba has, if anything, made peace even more distant.

Many antisemitic individuals also push for greater acknowledgement of the Nakba on Israel’s part. They do this not for the sake of peace, but so that they can gain moral credence for a more violent and counterproductive attack on Jews. I will not name specific organizations or individuals, because it is not necessary to. But surely we can agree that in some number, these Jew-hating individuals exist. Such individuals gain strength by hiding among, and then hijacking, more peace-loving Palestinian movements. Furthermore, right-wing Zionists use the presence of these individuals, however small, as justification for ignoring the vast majority of peace-loving Palestinian advocates.

Therefore, even though we all have peaceful motives for wishing Israel to acknowledge al-Nakba, I think it would be worthwhile to differentiate ourselves from the more violent movements that wish the same. Doing so would not only knock the wind from AIPAC’s sails, but would also ensure that progressive individuals do not mistakenly support the forces of destruction.

So after we get all the Zionists to acknowledge the Nakba, what is our second step, and third, and fourth? How do the steps after the first one make it clear to all that we are for peace?

Posted by Shlomo | September 9th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
[...] [ii] ”Mearsheimer, Walt and the Erudite Hysteria of David Remnick”, inlägg på Tony Karons blogg Rootless Cosmopolitan, den 31 augusti 2007. [...]

Posted by Ännu en suverän kommentar av Klas Sandberg « Rawia Morras Blog | September 9th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
I stayed out, Shlomo, because I don’t feel the need to insert myself into every single interesting argument I find online, especially when I’m not sure how I feel about it. Ideally, I’d like to see the one state solution, but my impression is that majorities on both sides reject it. Or anyway, I know that’s true on the Israeli side and I think I’ve read claims it’s even true on the Palestinian side, though I’m not sure what that means–surely they’d want the right of return. Perhaps there’s too much bitterness involved for them to want to live as one big happy family. Or I could be wrong in what I remember. (I’m not going to go googling for the answer–no time.) And anyway, it only takes a significant minority on one or both sides to cause a civil war.

I do agree you’re getting overly rough treatment here–for instance, I didn’t take anything you’ve said as elevating one set of innocent lives over the other.

Posted by Donald | September 9th, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Great blog, and interesting discussion here.
This is my first post.
I think it’s necessary to address a couple of factual claims that have been made by some of the less frequent commenters:

- Janie says:
“Israel’s population is around 6 million. 4.8 million of them are Russian. Eighty percent (80%).”
But An article in today’s New York Times mentions “nearly 1.2 million immigrants to Israel from the former Soviet Union”. And almost every commentator I’ve heard talk about Israeli demographics has mentioned that the majority of the Jewish population there today are of Sephardic or Mizrahi origin.

- Murphy says:
“I read somewhere (James Petras I think?) that young American Jews are statistically far more likely to sign up for the IDF than for the US Army. I have no way of knowing if this is true, but if it is, it’s very interesting indeed.”
Yes, it would be interesting, so I tried looking this up. How many Americans join the IDF?
See a Ynet news article from a month ago, “150 American youths to join IDF”, which quotes an official saying that “The number of soldiers who will arrive here this year, is larger than ever before”.
According to this article, in 2005 there were at least 2,750 Jewish U.S. service personnel, because that’s how many were sent copies of the Psalms and Torah.
So these figures suggest that American Jews are a lot more likely to serve in the U.S. military than in the IDF (unless the average Jewish U.S. serviceman serves for more than 18 years).

And I’ll be another one to pile on to Shlomo. He writes:
“Britain had a colonial empire on the Indian subcontinent, and there were also Indians in Great Britain. Does this mean that Britain should have legislated itself out of existence, and established a new, hybrid ‘Britindian’ state? If not, how is this situation different? It, too, ´maintained a colonial regime over those to whom it denied citizenship’. But somehow, Britain and India managed to come up with a ´Two-State Solution’. Why not here?”
To give the obvious answer: the biggest difference is that Britain and India were separated by thousands of miles. And there was no conception among the British colonists in India (or in the political leadership in Britain) that substantial bits of India should become permanently legally part of Britain, such that their residents would have all the same rights as British people in Britain. There was certainly no desire to have the native inhabitants go away so that British people could move in and annex parts of India.

“Palestinians should receive reparations and an end to the ‘extreme poverty and discrimination’ you mention, but there is no reason why they should rule Israel — save for revenge.”
I would think that if Palestinians are a majority of the population in some piece of land called Israel, then that fact in itself (if it is a fact, or at such a time when and if it becomes a fact) would be a pretty good reason why Palestinians should rule Israel.

“The best we can do now is ensure maximum happiness for the grandchildren of Nakhba and Holocaust survivors. I believe the best way for this is to recognize both Jewish and Palestinian claims to the land. The Palestinian Territories are the only place of refuge for Palestinians, who face persecution in virtually every place they are exiled to. … In the future, neither group should have a repeat of the exile and persecution they’ve gone through. Both deserve separate states, and a homeland that is uniquely theirs.”
This is the thing that Zionists don’t seem to understand, or pretend not to understand: individual Palestinians want to be able to return to specific homes in specific towns or villages. Contrast this with the Zionist idea of individual Jews “returning” to some place in some general region (i.e., the Land of Israel). In principle at least, these two conflicting wishes to return are not necessarily incompatible.

“Evanj, you hit the nail on the head about how crazy the logic behind a ‘Right of Return’ is. That’s exactly why it’s absurd to be talking of the ‘inalienable Palestinian right of return’ sixty years later. It has no bearing on today’s events, except for revenge. Am I wrong? Would someone care to convince me otherwise?”
To state the obvious again, evanj was referring to the Jewish law of “return” and how it applies to anyone who is considered part of the worldwide Jewish community, however that is defined. The unfulfilled Palestinian right of return is about specific people returning to specific homes in specific towns and villages. And they (and the UN) have been talking about it since 1948. Was it absurd then? If not, when did it become absurd? 1957? 1967? 1977? 1987? 1997?

Posted by Peter | September 10th, 2007 at 4:20 am
“Good job quoting me wildly out of context, though.”

How so?

“with a refusal of the anti-Zionists to engage me!”

Again, I think you’re straw-manning here. “Engaging” with someone in no way implies you have to agree with all - or any - of their beliefs. It means that you are prepared to at least listen to them and to debate them. That certainly has been going on on this thread.

“And has it occured to you that although I am open to your perspective, I have grown up hearing nothing but the opposite, and that much of what seems obvious to you is quite foreign to me?”

Yes it has, and I dare say most people here appreciate how far you have travelled from the received wisdom of your own environment. Again though, acknowledging that does not mean anyone has to agree with you. And while I’m sure most of us can appreciate that it’s not easy for you to hold opinions which probably seem outrageous to many of the people you meet every day, I’m not sure how that fact should be allowed to shield you from disagreement and debate.

Posted by Murphy | September 10th, 2007 at 9:29 am
““When an Israeli kintergardener is killed by a rocket hitting his nursery, and when a Palestinian child is shot to death for throwing a stone or a tank”

Murphy, you conveniently ignored the end of the sentence, which stated explicitly that both deaths were an affront to justice. My judgement that both of these deaths were a “veritable assault on our sense of justice” should have made it clear I was not attempting to differentiate between the two. If anything, my more “ambiguous” example of a Palestinian victim is sympathetic to the Palestinians, because I go on to reaffirm that even in this case the death is unjust.
In other words, if I am ambiguous, you can say that my comment was meant to IMPLY something. But not when I state EXPLICITLY the opposite thing.

And I don’t want to be shielded from debate in any way. I’ve been waiting three days now for you to stop yelling “straw man” and engage my arguments. Perhaps you do view them as “straw men”. I personally know hundreds of people who would view many of your arguments as “straw men”. These same people also believe these “straw men” arguments, and fervently so, not with the skepticism that I do.

Eventually, you have to engage the straw men. Might as well start with me.

How is Hamas a straw man? How is it a straw man that Hamas seems bent not only on the Right of Return, but also on killing Jews? Last week a rocket landed less than thirty feet from a nursery. Was that just Hamas playing around? A practical joke? Those children are blameless!

I’m still waiting. Lay it on me.

Posted by Shlomo | September 10th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
Peter,

1.”To give the obvious answer: the biggest difference is that Britain and India were separated by thousands of miles. And there was no conception among the British colonists in India (or in the political leadership in Britain) that substantial bits of India should become permanently legally part of Britain, such that their residents would have all the same rights as British people in Britain. There was certainly no desire to have the native inhabitants go away so that British people could move in and annex parts of India.”

OK, so you think that this is different because Israel and the Palestinian Territories are contiguous, and because Israel wants to annex more territory. It is true that this is a difference–this is a dispute over territory, while in British India it was more about natural resources–but is this a difference that makes a two-state solution impossible? I don’t think so. If you do, please explain how.

“I would think that if Palestinians are a majority of the population in some piece of land called Israel, then that fact in itself (if it is a fact, or at such a time when and if it becomes a fact) would be a pretty good reason why Palestinians should rule Israel.”
I agree. It so happens that Israelis are a majority of the population in Israel, and Palestinians are in the West Bank/Gaza. Therefore, ASSUMING A TWO STATE SOLUTION, Israelis (Jewish or Arab) should rule Israel, and Palestinians should rule the West Bank and Gaza.
If you assume a one-state solution, then Palestinians are the majority population between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, so they should rule. I thing we agree that the question of who should rule Israel (excluding the current Palestinian Territories) is dependent on whether or not a Two-State solution is reached. Therefore, we should address that question first.

“This is the thing that Zionists don’t seem to understand, or pretend not to understand: individual Palestinians want to be able to return to specific homes in specific towns or villages. Contrast this with the Zionist idea of individual Jews “returning” to some place in some general region (i.e., the Land of Israel). In principle at least, these two conflicting wishes to return are not necessarily incompatible.”
I’m not sure what your point is here. Jews have a whole religionationalist mythology about very specific places, such as Beersheba and Jericho, such as Palestinians wish to return to Deir Yassin, Akko, etc.
But you’re right, in PRINCIPLE the two conflicting wishes are possible. Jews can have access to Jericho, and Palesinians to Akko–only if we establish a one-state solution. But a one-state solution might well be a bloodbath given the attitudes of certain radicals on both sides.

“And they (and the UN) have been talking about it since 1948. Was it absurd then? If not, when did it become absurd? 1957? 1967? 1977? 1987? 1997?”
Jews have been talking about returning to Zion for the past two millenia, including present-day Jericho and Ramallah. When did this become absurd? 500? 1000? 1500? They should have unmitigated right of return, no?

Also, and this is very unfortunate because the UN is great, I don’t think UN resolutions can be so useful in resolving the conflict. To be blunt, many Jews don’t care about international law, because it failed us utterly when we most needed it. Many Palstinians, including the elected government of Gaza, also seem rather cavalier about violating international law. Sad but true. The UN won’t get us out of this mess.

Oh yes, and welcome!

Posted by Shlomo | September 10th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Uh, Shlomo, Jews have been talking about returning to Zion WHEN THE MESSIAH COMES for the past two millennia. Still no sign of him, eh? (Unless it really was Schneerson, in which case you have to wonder what all the fuss was about…)

Posted by Tony | September 10th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
I don’t understand how that is at all relevant. If people have been ethnically cleansed from the land, they have a “Right of Return” according to a certain ideological perspective. Applying this perspective in a remotely consistent manner would show that both Jews and Palestinians have this right, because at some point both were cleansed from the land. This holds independent of what Isiah said as the Temple was burning.

Posted by Shlomo | September 10th, 2007 at 7:36 pm
[...] First, an illustrative anecdote: A little over a year ago, Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Washington and addressed Congress. The event was supposed to be a booster for the elected Iraqi leadership, showing U.S. support for the new… …more [...]

Posted by Mearshimer, Walt and the Erudite Hysteria of David Remnick | September 11th, 2007 at 1:24 am
Maybe I can be a peacemaker between Shlomo and Murphy. Shlomo, would you agree with the following?
When an Israeli kindergartener is killed by a rocket hitting his nursery, and when a Palestinian child is killed by an IDF bomb hitting his family on the beach, it is a veritable assault on our sense of justice, and of morality, and of virtue — whether you follow the Declaration of Human Rights, the Halacha, or the Shari’a.

Shlomo writes:
“How is it a straw man that Hamas seems bent not only on the Right of Return, but also on killing Jews?”
We could ask equally how it is that the elected Israeli government seems bent not only on rejecting the Right of Return but also on killing Palestinians. In both cases, killing people is a means to an end (return or non-return). In 1945, the U.S. government quite deliberately caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of residents of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo, but I don’t think any of us would say that Americans did this because they were bent on killing Japanese.

“OK, so you think that this is different because Israel and the Palestinian Territories are contiguous, and because Israel wants to annex more territory. It is true that this is a difference — this is a dispute over territory, while in British India it was more about natural resources — but is this a difference that makes a two-state solution impossible? I don’t think so. If you do, please explain how.”
I don’t know about impossible, but you have to acknowledge there is a huge difference with the British in India. Just think about this: Who do we mean when we talk about “Palestinians”? The term refers to non-Jews (and their descendants) who 60 years ago lived in what is now Israel and its occupied territories. And 60 years ago, the majority of those people lived in what is now Israel.

“I thing we agree that the question of who should rule Israel (excluding the current Palestinian Territories) is dependent on whether or not a Two-State solution is reached. Therefore, we should address that question first.”
OK, we agree on democratic rule then. But additionally there is the question about undoing ethnic cleansing.

“I’m not sure what your point is here. Jews have a whole religionationalist mythology about very specific places, such as Beersheba and Jericho, such as Palestinians wish to return to Deir Yassin, Akko, etc.”
If you hear a Palestinian talking about his right of return and then ask him where exactly he thinks he has a right to return to, he’ll tell you a specific place — Deir Yassin or Akko or wherever — where he or his parents or grandparents lived. He’ll likely tell you about that neighborhood and might even show you a property deed and a key to the house. If you hear an immigrant Jew talking about his right of return and then ask him where exactly he thinks he has a right to return to, what are the chances that he’ll give you the name of some village where his ancestors lived?

“But you’re right, in PRINCIPLE the two conflicting wishes are possible. Jews can have access to Jericho, and Palesinians to Akko — only if we establish a one-state solution. But a one-state solution might well be a bloodbath given the attitudes of certain radicals on both sides.”
My experience of talking with Palestinians is that the number of states in a solution is nowhere near as important to them as the right to return to their own home village, whether that village be assigned to a “Palestinian” state or to a “Jewish” state or to “one” state.

“Jews have been talking about returning to Zion for the past two millenia, including present-day Jericho and Ramallah. When did this become absurd? 500? 1000? 1500? They should have unmitigated right of return, no?”
Not sure whether this is sarcastic or not, since you oppose the right of non-Jews to return to the homes they or their parents or grandparents lived in in 1947. But in answer to your question, I would say that it became absurd at least when there was no longer any memory within families of where exactly in Zion their own family came from.

Posted by Peter | September 11th, 2007 at 3:57 am
“How is Hamas a straw man? How is it a straw man that Hamas seems bent not only on the Right of Return, but also on killing Jews?”

More of a red herring than a strawman, since neither Hamas nor its ‘charter’ were mentioned in the post of yours that I was referring to.

“Last week a rocket landed less than thirty feet from a nursery. Was that just Hamas playing around? A practical joke? Those children are blameless!”

Now this is a strawman because, to the best of my knowledge, nobody on this thread mentioned Hamas rocket attacks, much less defended them. Of course, the I”D”F regularly kills Palestinian children (the Hamas rockets caused no injuries, let alone deaths, though of course they were intended to do so) and indifference to Arab life pervades the Israeli military, and some would say Israeli society as a whole. So your outrage over Hamas putting the lives of Israeli children in danger, must, in all fairness, be tempered by your knowledge that Israel kills - rather than ‘panics’ - Palestinians routinely. It barely even makes the newspapers, which is more than you can say for the ‘panic’ caused to one small Israel town.

Posted by Murphy | September 11th, 2007 at 9:34 am
Ok, I’m pressed for time, so I’m just going to try and address what seems to be that main argument.

I don’t think the IDF are a bunch of angels. It is quite possible that, if there were a one-state solution, ISRAELIS would end up massacring the Palestinians (again). But it is also possible that Hamas would end up killing all the Jews. It should be clear to everyone here, given recent history, that significant elements within Israel have no problem killing many Palestinians, and that significant elements within Palestinian society have no problem killing many many Israelis.

I understand Palestinian Right of Return, just as I understand Israeli Right of Return. If the situation were different, I would love for both to be given Right of Return in a single, unified state. But at this moment in time, genocidal tendencies on both sides would seem to make this solution impossible.

Everyone here seems to favor right of return. So do plenty of suicide bombers and lunatic settlers. This was meant in no way to imply any of you are crazy, but what do you sane people plan to do after Israeli and Palestinian lands are merged, and the fanatics go on a rampage? How will you stop them, given that when you try to, they will probably go after YOU? What’s the plan?

I can’t see one state now. Maybe a coequal confederacy that is merged in fifty or a hundred years, but not now. I’m not seeing it. Can anyone show me?

Posted by Shlomo | September 11th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Shlomo, you are probably right about no one-state solution now. But like the EU, this issue will only be solved when it is “enlarged,” i.e., the peoples involved believe in a bigger, less parochial future. Unfortunately, the religious elements have a stake in NOT solving this problem because historically compromise solutions have a way of eroding religious absolutism. As you probably know, the old joke is is that what is good for Jews is not always good for Judaism. I certainly believe that is true for Christians and Christianity. And I suspect it also applies to Islam and Muslims as well.

Posted by Matthew | September 12th, 2007 at 9:57 am
It appears that there’s no room for one state right now, Shlomo, but things can and will change and the alternative may be worse. The status quo of ever increasing Jewish settlement in the occupied territories in concert with confining Palestinians to discontinuous Bantustans connected by IDF patrolled roads is intolerable - actually it’s simply horrific. As Tony and many others have pointed out it is impossible for Palestinians to have any kind of independent state under these conditions. Not to mention that it seems unlikely that Israel will abandon the settlements (do you want to try and forcibly evict those people?). This really narrows the options to continuous conflict and the psychologically and morally corrosive repression that Israel as a society is engaged in, or, the one state solution. The latter option requires great courage and there will be setbacks but if real peace can be made with real equality and inclusion of Palestininians in the state and real contrition on the part of the State of Israel for what was done to the Palestinians then there is hope. The former option is a complete and utter dead end leading only to the ethnic cleansing and genocide by Jewish or Palestinian fanatics that you say you fear, Shlomo. Acknowledging Israeli responsibility for the Nakba with no qualifications or excuses is a good starting point. Hell I’d go one further and acknowledge that it was wrong to even create the state of Israel on land already occupied by another people. I don’t think that this will result in the magical disappearance of Israel anymore than it would the existence of my country (Canada) . The rest of the journey towards the one state solution is achieved by a long (10, 20, 50 years?) process of negotiation and integration of the occupied territories into greater Israel/Palestine overseen by international observers. Reparations and compensation would have to be made by the state of Israel to the victims of the Nakba and the subsequent repression (owners of bulldozed homes and olive groves, parents of children killed and maimed as a result of Israel’s targeted killing policy, etc) . Palestinian security forces, government and social services would have to be integrated with those of Israel. Arms caches would have to be located and destroyed under independent supervison. Recalcitrant factions on both sides will have to be identified and neutralized and the question of Palestinian refugees outside of the territories would have to be addressed. Perhaps if Israel was no longer a pariah state in the region negotiations could begin on how many Palestinian refugees could return to Israel/ Palestine and how many can be integrated into the countries that they now live in - paid for by the state of Isreal/Palestine (heck you could get the Yanks to put their money to good use for a change). Anyway, Shlomo, that’s how these processes seem to work and I’ll acknowledge that there is an appalling amount of hatred and resistance to overcome but I think it’s an option that offers hope for all the parties concerned. Anyway that’s my two bits. Hey Tony can you write something new so we can all move on? - what about Petraeus and the surge?

Posted by Doug Kellam | September 12th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Another perspective on ‘right of return’ issues. Due to beurocratic neglect in Poland (they forgot to complete the paperwork on oficial transfer of properties to new polish owners from previous german ones) and political opportunism in Germany (fringe politicians scoring points by encouraging demands of return of property) there is currently a danger of Germans atempting to take back their properties, which they lost when Stalin moved the polish borders to the west. There have already been a few cases when polish families had to vacate homes which they inhabited for a few generations.
Should this become more common, and should the incompetence of polish authorities in preventing it continue, I would be fully supportive of any extralegal measures taken by the locals to evict the ‘returnees’. I would possibly even participate if it was happening in my area.
I am equally disturbed by the trend of Poles settling just west of the border, in german towns now depopulated by the exodus of ‘ossies’ to the western lands.
Stalin, the murderous bastard that he was, has yet performed a miracle for our part of Europe. He took the jumbled mess of ethnicities, constantly at eachother’s throaths, and placed each one of them in a separate country, with clearly defined borders, without any ‘dangling bits’.
Look at what happened in Yugoslavia, which didn’t undergo such segregation.
Any current atempts at ‘returning’ would threaten to bring back the old mess, and so are irresponsible. We have currently more right to those houses that the Germans would want back. Why? Not becouse of any legal or moral or historical justification, no. Simply because if they do start kicking the current inhabitants out of their houses, sooner or later they will have those houses burnt, with them inside. And then if the german govt decides to ‘intervene on behalf’, the land will rightfully belong to the germans again, because they will have more guns. That’s how it works. Things that were so nicely sorted will again become ugly.
You discuss the Israelis’ vs the Palestinians’ ‘right of return’ in terms of ‘what should be done’. I read the discussion with interest and enjoiment and found it greatly stimulating in intelectual terms. I allso found it completely irrelevant. Since when is a contest over territory between two tribes decided by ‘what is right’ or ‘what should be done’? It is a simple fact that the stronger side, or the one able to gain stronger allies, will win and get rid of the weaker side.
Currently, it looks like the stronger side will be the Israelis. At some point, possibly soon and probably under cover of a wider regional conflict, they will exterminate or ‘clense’ the remaining Palestinians. That’s what nations do, that’s what they are for.
The current nazi tendencies in israel will be deepened by the deed. The chasm between the Israelis and their neighbours will widen, preserving the hostilities, so that one day, if and when the tables turn, the Arabs will perhaps exterminate or ‘clense’ the Israelis.
Inshallah
This dynamic has been put in motion the day Israel was created, and will not be stopped by actions of either sides, who both are stuck in it. Peace can be made, but only the way stalin made it in our part of europe. An outside force would have to conquer the whole region, designate clear cut borders, preferably based on geographical features like rivers or mountain ridges, resettle populations and force them to stay put long enough to grow roots in the new places. This will obviously not happen, and would be no less bloody than what it was ment to prevent. So that’s about it. The way tribes work, violence sometimes is the solution.

Posted by Adam Wozniak | September 13th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
[...] That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt’s controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion, [...]

Posted by Let the floodgates open at Antony Loewenstein | September 13th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
Unlike some of the more Darwinian posters, i don’t see why a different Israel cannot evolve into being where Arabs are given equal rights alongside a Palestinian state. There have always been small states with a different ethnicity in the Middle East, Lebanon comes to mind. The “glasnost” among the Diaspora will certainly help. There is a perception that both Israelis and Arabs cannot come to a peaceful settlement of their own accord, but in fact, the historical animosity has been actively promoted and fanned by the geopolitical players with their own agenda in the region.

Posted by Qwerty | September 14th, 2007 at 6:27 am
[...] That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt’s controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion, [...]

Posted by Despite a Backlash, Many Jews Are Questioning IsraelIs a Jewish Glasnost Coming to America? - CommonDreams.org | September 14th, 2007 at 10:04 am
Querty hits on a major point. The phony age-old antagonism is a product of outside interference. Not only did Jews live in the Islamic World for more than 1,000 years–often in better conditions than in Christian Europe, they were the majority in Jerusalem in 1900, long before Independence. If the Arabs were innately “murderous,” etc, that would not have happened.

“Inevitable” conflicts satisfy changeable politics. It is amazing that when Britain effectively abandoned Orange Supremacy in Northern Island, the irreconcilable communities began to reconcile. There is a lession there.

Posted by Matthew | September 14th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Querty hits on a major point. The phony age-old antagonism is a product of outside interference. Not only did Jews live in the Islamic World for more than 1,000 years–often in better conditions than in Christian Europe, they were the majority in Jerusalem in 1900, long before Independence. If the Arabs were innately “murderous,” etc, that would not have happened.

“Inevitable” conflicts satisfy changeable politics. It is amazing that when Britain effectively abandoned Orange Supremacy in Northern Island, the irreconcilable communities began to reconcile. There is a lession there.

Posted by Matthew | September 14th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
I do not claim the Arabs to be innately murderous. I claim all people, especially when considered and acting as ethnic groups, to be innately murderous. Once a certain set of conditions occurs (a competition over a vital resource, and it doesn’t get more vital than land and water), the killing begins and continues until one side irrevocably wins or both sides exhaust themselves. That set of conditions didn’t exist before the creation of Israel, so Jews could live in peace in Jerusalem. But it exists now, when Israelis decided and wer able to cast out the Palestinians from their land, and so the killing will continue until the full resolution or exhaustion of both sides.
I agree that such conflicts can be fuelled/maintained by external politics. I did, after all, mention ‘obtaining stronger allies’ in my first post, I perhaps should have mentioned also ‘allies’ imposing themselves, as happened in 47/48 to both sides of this conflict.
I agree also, that removal, shifting, or adding, of external influence can change the outcome of the conflict.
The withdrawal of British support for the Protestants did that, because it brought balance to the two exhausted sides of the conflict. Peace happened, but it happened within the dynamic of tribal conflict, through exhaustion of both sides and establishing of a balance.
Would that happen also if the US withdrew its support for Israeli colony? I don’t think so. The military balance would still favour the Israelis. No balance, no peace. I would rather expect the Israelis to become desperate, and use all their firepower while they still have it, and while the other side cannot respond in kind. It would only quicken the massacre.
So you got me thinking, what other options are there, that do not require changing the human nature and going against the dynamic of tribal conflict?
Stalin’s method- physically sorting the populations and keeping them separated until they forget they had some issues (ask Moses how long that takes, approximately), wouldn’t work with a nuclear power.
Withdrawing support for the Israelis would be likely to precipitate a hasty ‘resolution of the Palestinian question’ while the going was still relatively good.
So perhaps arming and training the Palestinians? Bring them to the level displayed by Hesbollah so that they too can fight the IDF to a standstill. A decade or so of that, and perhaps both sides will be tired enough, and balance established to their mutual satisfaction, to put an end to the fighting. This could be less farfetched than it sounds, if Iran or some other power decides to earn brownie points with the Sunnis.

Posted by Adam Wozniak | September 15th, 2007 at 9:54 am
[...] That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt’s controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion, [...]

Posted by Tomgram: Tony Karon: Growing Dissent among American Jews by Tom Engelhardt « Dandelion Salad | September 15th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
[...] That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt’s controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion, [...]

Posted by How Sh*t Works » Blog Archive » Tomgram: Tony Karon: Growing Dissent among American Jews by Tom Engelhardt | September 15th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
[...] That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt’s controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion, [...]

Posted by Tomgram: Tony Karon on Growing Dissent among American Jews « SF Gray Panthers | September 16th, 2007 at 3:13 am
Are you sure that nobody asked Remnick to write his little essay?

Posted by Larry Gonick | September 18th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
[...] First, an illustrative anecdote: A little over a year ago, Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Washington and addressed Congress. The event was supposed to be a booster for the elected Iraqi leadership, showing U.S. support for the new… …more [...]

Posted by Kill Oslo Before Oslo Kills Israel | September 20th, 2007 at 4:08 am
[...] Mearshimer, Walt and the Erudite Hysteria of David Remnick First, an illustrative anecdote: A little over a year ago, Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Washington and addressed Congress. The event was supposed to be a booster for the elected Iraqi leadership, showing U.S. support for the new… [...]

Posted by Israel » Blog Archive » Mearshimer, Walt and the Erudite Hysteria of David Remnick | September 22nd, 2007 at 11:55 am
[...] That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt’s controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion. [...]

Posted by Sabbah’s Blog » Blog Archive » For American Jews, Dissent Against Israel Has Become Mainstream | September 27th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
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Mearsheimer, Walt and the Erudite Hysteria of David Remnick

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