I. The Fact of Israel

Israel at 60 is an intractable historical fact. It has one of the world’s strongest armies, without peer in the Middle East, and its 200 or so nuclear warheads give it the last word in any military showdown with any of its neighbors. Don’t believe the hype about an Iranian threat – Israel certainly fears Iran attaining strategic nuclear capability, but not because it expects Iran to launch a suicidal nuclear exchange. That’s the sort of scare-story that gets trotted out for public consumption in Israel and the U.S. Behind closed doors, Israeli leaders admit that even a nuclear-armed Iran does not threaten Israel’s existence. (Israel’s security doctrine, however, is based on maintaining an overwhelming strategic advantage over all challengers, so the notion of parity along the lines of Cold War “Mutually Assured Destruction” with Iran is a major challenge, because without a nuclear monopoly, Israel loses a trump card in the regional power battle.)

Palestinian militants may be able to make life in certain parts of Israel exceedingly unpleasant at times, but they are unable to reverse the Nakbah of 1948 through military means. (Hamas knows this as well as Fatah does, which is why it is ready to talk about a long-term hudna and coexistence – although it won’t roll over and accept Israel’s terms as relayed by Washington in the way that the current Fatah leadership might.)

Israel, in other words, is here to stay – and its citizens know this, which may be why they appear to more indifferent to the search for peace with the Palestinians than at any time in the past three decades. So confident are the Israelis in being able to withstand whatever the Palestinians throw at them that they are able to turn away from the hellish life they have created for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Sure, let Olmert – a weak and skittish leader whose domestic political standing is comparable to that of President Bush, except that the Israeli prime minister can’t seem to shake off the whiff of corruption – engage in the charade of negotiating a hypothetical peace (let’s be very clear about this: the current talks between Abbas and Olmert are aimed only at designing a “shelf” agreement, the elaboration of an “horizon” not unlike the Geneva exercise by Yossi Beilin and Yasser Abed-Rabbo a couple of years ago – not a series of steps or deadlines that anyone plans to implement — this is its most optimistic outcome; even that seems doomed to fail, though…) with a hypothetical Palestinian leader. (To paraphrase Stalin on the pope, how many divisions does Mahmoud Abbas command?) Who cares? It’s not as if Olmert is going to confront the settlers or even dismantle most of the 600 or so roadblocks that choke life in the West Bank. So let him and Abbas perform their endless duet of the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”…

The fact of Israel’s survival until now, and for the foreseeable future, is a grim reality for its 1 million Palestinian citizens, whose citizenship is at best, second-class – and more so for the 4 million Palestinians over which it maintains sovereign power in the West Bank and Gaza, without granting them citizenship – for whom Israel means living under an apartheid regime. And that, in turn, means that the trappings of globalized modernity enjoyed by Israel’s secular middle class – the American lifestyle, the high-tech economy and the European football – all come at the price of perennial uncertainty under a cloud of potential violence.

Just as there’s little chance of Israel being eliminated in the foreseeable future, so is there little chance of it militarily eliminating Palestinian resistance. There’s no serious peace process in the works, right now, and the geography created by Israel’s settlement policy in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since their capture in 1967 has made the prospect of a Palestinian state largely hypothetical, too – it takes an optimistic imagination to conceive of a viable independent state comprising of Gaza and those West Bank cantonments that lie between the major Israeli settlement blocs and the roads that connect them.

So, while Israel has prevailed in the conflict over its creation that has raged since 1948, it has been unable to end that conflict on its own terms. The Palestinians driven out during the Nakbah have not simply disappeared or been absorbed into surrounding Arab populations, as Israel’s founders had hoped. And without justice for the Palestinians, Israel is no closer now than it was 60 years ago to being able to live in a genuine peace with its neighbors.

At this point, however, the Israelis don’t seem to care.

The curious irony of history, though, is that while the Zionist movement managed to successfully create a nation state in the Middle East against considerable odds, that movement is dead — the majority of Jews quite simply don’t want to be part of a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East. And so the very purpose of Israel has come into question. It’s certainly not the “national home of the Jews,” as much as the Zionists huff and puff about this being the case (frankly, anyone who tells me my “national home” as a Jew is somewhere other than where I was born or chose to live, is an anti-Semite in my book, but let’s not go there for now) — the simple fact is that almost two thirds of us have chosen freely to live elsewhere, and have no intention of ever settling in Israel. Jewish immigration to Israel is at an all-time low, and that’s unlikely to change. In a world where persecution of Jews is increasingly marginal, the majority of Jews prefer to live scattered among the peoples, rather than in an ethnic enclave of our own. That’s what we’ve chosen.

Curiously enough, the very “normality” achieved by Israel in an era of globalization has prompted three quarters of a million Israeli Jews to move abroad. “You have wonderful children,” Ehud Olmert told a gathering of French Jewish leaders two years ago. “I wish they would come home.” Not only are the bulk of French Jews not planning to move to Israel, the supreme irony is that Olmert’s own sons have joined the quiet exodus of Israeli-born Jews leaving Israel to live abroad. Today, it has become the norm for any Israeli who can to acquire a foreign passport.

Israel may be an intractable historical fact, but the Zionist ideology that spurred its creation and shaped its identity and sense of national purpose has collapsed – not under pressure from without, but having rotted from within. It is Jews, not Jihadists, that have consigned Zionism to the dustbin of history.

So what, exactly, is Israel, now? Avram Burg, former Knesset Speaker, appeared to sense the writing on the wall in his plaintive op ed in 2003:

We live in a thunderously failed reality. Yes, we have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvellous theatre and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or anti-missile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed.

It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents’ shock, that they do not know. The countdown to the end of Israeli society has begun.

What Burg seemed to recognize is the absurdity of seeing the modern State of Israel as some kind of prophetic fulfillment of the Jewish story. If we were to imagine that this, indeed, was what God had intended, we’re imagining a deity with a very, very twisted sense of humor. Three years later, Burg concluded that he could no longer think of himself as Zionist, and recognized that Zionism itself had become an obstacle to Israelis finding peace — and to his own pursuit of his Jewish values.

II. Israel is a Monument to Anti-Semitism…

I visited Israel the year I finished high school, which was the 30th anniversary of its founding. My officially-organized itinerary (I was there as part of a Habonim contingent for intensive ideological training) started the same way as those of any visiting head of state today: At the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem.

It is impossible to complete this vivid encounter with the industrial-age savagery meted out by the Nazis on the Jews of Europe without being profoundly moved and angered. It certainly added a jet of gasoline to the Zionist flame that burned in my teenage heart, and I can only assume that it’s the shaming effect of the exhibits that has the likes of President George W. Bush mumbling about how the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz. Oy, who puts these ideas in your head, Mr. President? (I can guess, actually, but we won’t go there.) Speaking selfishly, perhaps, I’m rather glad the U.S. didn’t kill Primo Levi. And actually, Mr. President, if you want to be atoning for failing the Jews of Europe in the 1940s, a better place to start might be the fact that anti-Semitic U.S. immigration policy prevented two thirds of the survivors of Auschwitz from actually settling here. Not that the Zionist movement of the time was at all upset by this — as Morris Ernst recalls of his efforts to lobby his friend President Roosevelt to admit more Jewish immigrants at the end of the war, they were furiously denounced by Zionist leaders. The fate of the Jews of Europe had never been a foremost concern for Israel’s founders. As Ben Gurion put it in 1938 in his diary, “If I knew it was possible to save all [Jewish] children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz-Yisrael, I would choose the latter - because we are faced not only with the accounting of these [Jewish] children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish People.”

Still, by the 1960s, the Israeli leadership began to recognize the utility of making the Holocaust the centerpiece of its national story, overcoming its own reluctance to engage with the survivors and their story. By representing itself as the state of the survivors, bringing Eichmann to trial in Jerusalem as a way of educating its next generation in the horrors of the Holocaust in order to offer them a unifying perspective on their common national identity, Israel could establish a narrative frame for rationalizing its behavior in respect of the Palestinians, too. So deep has been the penetration of this particular construct that when Jimmy Carter challenged the apartheid policies Israel has adopted on the West Bank, he was quite seriously accused of giving aid and comfort to Holocaust-deniers! (The demented logic here held that by failing to give adequate attention to the Holocaust when discussing the West Bank, he was effectively denying the former!)

Still, I think Yad Vashem is an appropriate starting point for any visit to Israel, because I believe that the Holocaust really was the key to Israel’s creation. The modern nation-state of Israel did not emerge from the spiritual yearning for a “return to Zion” that had long been an essential part of the Jewish liturgical tradition — that “return” had always been clearly tied to the arrival of the Messiah; that was never understood as a recipe for the creation of a nation state in Palestine before the Zionists arrive on the scene, in concert with the rise of nationalism in Western and Central Europe in the late 19th century. The Zionist movement, which called for the creation of a Jewish nation-state, emerged as a response to the political crisis facing Western European Jews at the turn of the 19th century, as the breakdown of empires stirred nationalist passions that threatened the status of Jews in many European countries. And also the ongoing oppression of the Jews of the Russian empire. Still, even then, it was hardly the dominant response to that crisis: The Zionist movement had been a minority trend in mainstream Jewish politics in Europe before World War II (and it hardly existed at all among Jews of the Islamic world).

But the Holocaust destroyed most of the Jewish leadership of Europe, and it shamed the world into granting Jews a nation-state in Palestine — settling there became a matter of survival for two thirds of the survivors of the Holocaust, who despite the ordeal they had suffered, were mostly denied any alternative.

Israel, then, rather than some kind of Jewish achievement or prophetic triumph, looks to me more like a huge monument to Western anti-Semitism. Zionism had demanded that the Jews have a nation-state of their own, claming that for Jews to live among others was simply unnatural and untenable, and that anti-Semitism was a natural and inevitable consequence of gentiles having Jews in their midst. Apparently vindicated by the Holocaust, they set about building a sovereign nation state that would serve as a “national home” to the Jewish people. Israel was never intended to simply be a state of the Israelis, Arab and Jewish. It was a state for the Jews of the World, and it dedicated itself to “ingathering” them as it “redeemed” the Biblical land of Israel. It’s precisely for that reason that I, who was born in Cape Town South Africa, can automatically assume the rights of citizenship and land ownership in the place where my friend, Jamil, was born, but was driven out of at age 4, and to which he is forbidden from returning simply because he is not Jewish.

It’s also this logic that rationalized the ethnic cleansing of 1948, and the calamitous policy of settling Israelis in the territories occupied in 1967.

III. …But anti-Semitism is on the Wane

The founder of the modern Zionist movement, Theodore Herzl, framed the movement’s attitude to anti-Semitism in his diary comments while covering the notorious Dreyfus trial in France in the late 19th century: “In Paris, then, I gained a freer attitude toward antisemitism which I now began to understand historically and make allowances for,” wrote Herzl. “Above all, I recognized the emptiness and futility of efforts to “combat antisemitsm”.

The premise of Zionism has been that anti-Semitism is inevitable and immutable when Jews live among gentiles, allowing Jews only a truncated and perennially threatened existence in “exile.” This was the very basis of their case for creating a separate Jewish nation-state, in order to achieve “normality” alongside other nations and nationalisms.

This premise, of course, was never accepted by a majority of Jews, although the Holocaust had made Israel an historic imperative for hundreds of thousands of Jews who found themselves with nowhere else to go.

Still, today the political crisis of European Jewry that produced the Zionist movement has passed. Anti-Semitism has become a marginal threat to Jewish life in much of the world, and the majority of Jews have voted with their feet to live in a wider world, rather than in an ethnic ghetto. Today, the preferrred destination of Jews leaving former Soviet territories is Germany; and tens of thousands of the Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel during the Russian economic collapse of the Yeltsin years have since returned to Russia. The head of the Russian Jewish Congress estimates the number at up to 120,000, while the Israeli embassy in Moscow says that 90,000 Israeli citizens are currently living in Russia. And Russia is hardly the most philo-Semitic option. The Zionist authorities in Israel have long ago accepted that they’re unlikely to see signficant immigration from the Jewish communities of North America and Western Europe, where there is little significant pressure on Jews to vacate.

So, it turns out, we’re able to live quite comfortably among others, which is where the majority of us choose to spend our lives. Israel has emerged as one of the world’s largest Jewish communities, but it seems a little wishful to imagine it the sine qua non of Jewish life on the planet — we managed without it for 2,000 years, after all. And do we really believe that the reason Jews today feel safe and secure living in the United States or Canada, for example, is the existence of a well-armed Israeli Defense Force?

IV. Be Careful of What You Wish For

The greatest impulse driving the early Zionists was the idea that by separating themselves into an independent state of their own, Jews could achieve the “normality” that eluded them in Europe. They could right what the Marxist-Zionist Ber Borochov called the “inverted triangle” of the Jewish class structure, building a society founded on Jewish agrarian and industrial labor. Jewish farmers, Jewish worker, Jewish soldiers, marching together singing the Internationale. For those of more liberal persuasion, Zionism offered the opportunity for nationalist nationhood with all the trappings of romantic illusion, just like the German nationalists, or the Italian nationalists or the Hungarian nationalists.

This nationalist “normality” has longsince been achieved, of course. Despite its ongoing conflict with its neighbors, Israel has Jewish farmers and Jewish soldiers and Jewish cab drivers and gangsters and prostitutes — along with the more familiar crop of doctors, scientists, mathematicians, violinists and chess players. And, in keeping with the “normality” of the age of globalization, its Jewish entrepreneurs create companies in Silicon Valley, its Jewish footballers play in Europe, its Jewish live in lofts in New York, its Jewish club kids wander the pyschotropic beaches of Goa… I could go on, but you get the picture. We’re a wandering people (even before the Romans ostensibly exiled us from the Holy Land, there were thousands of Jews living all over the Mediterranean basin…), and many young Israeli Jews, like young Jews — and young people of whatever background — everywhere, want to be part of a global conversation, a global economy, a global playground. Globalization mocks national sovereignty and its boundaries, and its patterns of integration today may be a greater threat to the Zionist project than any Jihadism.

Even when I was first there in ‘78, giddily lapping up the ideology, I was warned that one of the biggest crises Israel faced was that its own young people didn’t give a toss about Zionism. Why would they be any more likely to embrace nationalist kitsch than would kids raised in East Germany or Franco’s Spain?

The very “normality” created by Israel over the past 60 years undermines the nationalist mission of the state’s founders — if the wider world is sufficiently comfortable for Jews to make their homes all across it, then why not Israeli Jews, too? As we noted earlier, 750,000 — 15% of Israel’s Jewish population — already live abroad. The likelihood of the world’s Jews moving to Israel to bolster its Jewish population to keep pace with the Palestinian birthrate is increasingly remote. More likely is a net loss of Jewish population as Israel’s best and brightest see no obstacles, and plenty of allure to going forth into a wider world.

V. Israel Without Zionism

On Yom Kippur in 1979, instead of going to shul — a pointless exercise for an atheist who no longer felt the need to pretend for the sake of communal bonds, now that I was forging my own community — I stayed home and read Uri Avnery’s seminal book, “Israel Without Zionism.” His work was a revelation that had a major part in my “deprogramming” as a Zionist. Here was a soldier of the Haganah speaking bluntly about the crimes committed against the Palestinians in 1948, laying bare the brutal truth beneath the national mythology I’d been spoonfed. Avnery recognized that for Israelis to be able to live in peace in their neighborhood, their starting point had to be relinquishing the ideology that rationalized their conquest and displacement of others, and instead to forge a common commitment to justice.

Zionism rationalizes conquest and colonization as “redemption” of Jewish territory on behalf of the world’s Jews. It treats the Palestinians only as an obstacle and threat to its own purposes, not as people with the same rights as Jews and with legitimate claim to the land on which they were born. And yet, there’s a guilty conscience that sometimes emerges in flashes — a rare moment of Jewish ethical recognition, that is quite at odds with Zionism. My favorite came from Ehud Barak, world class chump though he may be in the annals of statesmanship, when he was on the campaign trail in 1999, and was asked by a TV talkshow host what he’d have done if he’d been born Palestinian. “Join a fighting organization,” he said in a flash of honesty he’d later regretted.

But if the roles had been reversed, and it had been the Israeli Jews who’d been first driven out of their homes in 1948, and then occupied in 1967, you can bet that Barak and Rabin and all before them would have been leaders of the PLO. Ariel Sharon would have been in Islamic Jihad!

The end of the Zionist moment leaves Israeli Jews facing — although in many cases not necessarily facing up to — the reality that the people with whom they’re going to share the Holy Land are not the rest of us Jews, who have no intention of moving there, but the Palestinians, who they found there and displaced and dispossessed, and continue to rule over — supposedly in our name, but without our consent.

Zionism — contemporary Jewish nationalism — is unlikely to bring Israel peace, because of its failure, or inability, to accord full equality to the claims of others.

As Rami Khouri noted in 2006 during the Lebanon war, in one of my all-time favorite columns on Israel and its neighbors,

Deuteronomy, a pivotal book of the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament), is supremely relevant here because it blends the three issues that I believe Israeli, Arab and international journalists must affirm in order to honour their professional dictates along with their own humanity. These are: good governance anchored in the rule of law; a moral foundation for human relations anchored in the dictate to treat others as you want others to treat you; and the towering divine commands to ‘choose life’ and ‘pursue justice’.

Deuteronomy is an appropriate balm because it emphasises - in both human society and the divine plan - the central value of justice that is anchored in a system of codified laws that are administered fairly by compassionate and competent judges. The most beautiful and powerful part of Deuteronomy is verses 18-20, ending with: ‘Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue.’

…The single biggest reason that Israel has found itself locked in ever more vicious wars with assorted Arab neighbours is its refusal to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians and other Arabs on the basis of the rule of law, and to resolve disputes on the basis of both parties enjoying equal rights.

On the two occasions that it has made resolutions on the basis of law and equal rights - the peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt - Israel has found calm, official acceptance and some normal contacts with citizens in those Arab lands. But in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, where Israel has acted unilaterally and in a predatory and violent way, it has reaped only resistance, ever more fierce and proficient with the years.

The common Israeli view … sees the Arabs and Iran as pits of Islamic terror and anti-Semitic savagery that want only to kill Jews and annihilate Israel. They are free to live in this imaginary world if they wish to, but the consequences are grim, as we see today. Subjugated and savaged Arabs will fight back, generation after generation, just as the Jews did historically, inspired as they were by the moral force of the ‘Deuteronomistic’ way. If the world does not offer you justice, you fight for your rights.

The missing element in Israeli behaviour is to ask if Israel’s own policies have had any impact on reciprocal Arab behaviour. If this is a war between two sides - which I believe it is - then both need to examine their policies, and make concessions to resolve their disputes. Peace-making and conflict resolution must be anchored in law that dispenses justice equally to all protagonists. The law we have to deal with here comprises UN resolutions and bodies of international conventions and legal precedents.

We cannot pick one UN resolution we want implemented - say, 1559 - and forget the others, such as, say, 242 and 338. This is what has happened since 1967 and even before. The rights of Israel have been given priority over the rights of Arabs, and this skewed perception has been backed by US might.

I wish Israeli journalists would apply to their writing and analysis the moral dictates and divine exhortations that their Jewish forefathers passed down from generation to generation: obey the law, treat others equally, pursue justice, choose life. Journalists should identify the legitimate rights, grievances and needs of both sides by providing facts rather than propaganda.

Israel and the US have ploughed ahead for decades with a predatory Israeli policy that savages Arab rights, land and dignity. In return, public opinion in the Arab world has become violently anti-Israeli, and resistance movements have emerged in Palestine and Lebanon. If current policies continue, similar movements will emerge elsewhere, just as Hamas and Hizbollah were born in the early 1980s in response to the Israeli occupation of their lands.

Moses had it right, perhaps because he accumulated much wisdom during his 120 years of life. Meet the legitimate demands of both parties to a dispute, he said, and a fair, lasting resolution will emerge. Ignore the centrality of justice and equal rights for both parties, and you will be smitten by divine fire - or fated to fight your adversaries forever, as Israel seems to have opted to do.

Obviously not, at least not at the Seders I’ve been to. So, plainly, we’ve been sold a pile of goods somewhere along the line. Clearly, there’s been conversion on a mass scale. And I’d picked up scraps of information suggesting that the Jews did, in fact, vigorously proselytize and convert members in the centuries before the Roman Empire helped create Catholicism.

I’d recently noted the provocative work of the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, whose new book When and How the Jewish People Was Invented makes the case that Ashkenazi Jews are mostly descendants of the Turkic Khazars of Central Europe, who converted en masse to Judaism around the 10th Century, while the Sephardim are rooted in Berber tribes in North Africa who did likewise. The most likely descendants of the original Judeans, he argues, are in fact the Palestinians — that’s because the “exile” and forcible dispersion by the Romans never happened, he argues; it was a myth. Most of the Judean Jews remained on the land, and later converted to Christianity and Islam.

It’s mischievous stuff, of course, and I don’t know what to make of it — I’m not entirely sure if I can buy his idea that this whole narrative of exile and wandering was created by 19th century German-Jewish nationalists — I’d be curious to know to what extent the same narrative was present among the Sephardim, who were largely immune to Zionism until it became their own <i>nakbah</i> in 1948. I don’t know the answers, of course, but I think Sand is asking some questions that need to be asked. Clearly, there are gaping holes in the version of Jewish history popularized during the Zionist moment.

So I’m glad Uri Avnery had a more developed take than I do.

The Lion and the Gazelle

By Uri Avnery

Tonight the Jews all over the world will celebrate the Seder, the unique ceremony that unites Jews everywhere in the defining Jewish myth: the Exodus from Egypt.

Every year I marvel again at the genius of this ceremony. It unites the whole family, and everyone - from the venerable grandfather to the smallest child - has a role in it. It engages all the senses: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. The simplistic text of the Haggadah, the book which is read aloud, the symbolic food, the four glasses of wine, the singing together, the exact repetition of every part every year - all these imprint on the consciousness of a child from the earliest age an ineradicable memory that they will carry with them to the grave, be they religious or not. They will never forget the security and warmth of the large family around the Seder table, and even in old age they will recall it with nostalgia. A cynic might see it as a perfect example of brain-washing.

Compared to the power of this myth, does it really matter that the Exodus from Egypt never took place? Thousands of Egyptian documents deciphered in recent years leave no room for doubt: the exodus of masses of people, as described in the Bible, or anything remotely like it, just never happened. These documents, which cover in the finest detail every period and every part of Canaan during this epoch prove beyond any doubt that there was no “Conquest of Canaan” and no kingdom of David and Solomon. For a hundred years, Zionist archeologists have devoted tireless efforts to finding even a single piece of evidence to support the Biblical narrative, all to no avail.

But this is quite unimportant. In the competition between “objective” history and myth, the myth that suits our needs will always win, and win big. It is not important what was, the important thing is what fires our imagination. That is what guides our steps to this day.

The Biblical narrative connects up with documented history only around the year 853 BC, when ten thousand soldiers and 2000 battle chariots of Ahab, King of Israel, took part in a grand coalition of the kingdoms of Syria and Palestine against Assyria. The battle, which was documented by the Assyrians, was fought at Qarqar in Syria. The Assyrian army was delayed, if not defeated.

(A personal note: I am not a historian, but for many years I have reflected on our history and tried to draw some logical conclusions, which are outlined here. Most of them are supported by the emerging consensus of independent scholars around the world.)

The kingdoms of Israel and Judea, which occupied a part of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, were no different from the other kingdoms of the region. Even according to the Bible itself, the people sacrificed to various pagan deities “on every high hill and under every green tree”. (1 Kings 14:23).

Jerusalem was a tiny market town, much too small and much too poor for any of the things described in the Bible to have taken place there at the time. In the books of the Bible that deal with that period, the appellation “Jew” (Yehudi in Hebrew) hardly appears at all, and where it does, it clearly refers simply to an inhabitant of Judea, the area around Jerusalem. When an Assyrian general was asked “talk not with us in the Jewish language” (2 Kings 18:26), what was meant was the local Judean dialect of Hebrew.

The “Jewish” revolution took place in the Babylonian exile (587-539 BC). After the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem, members of the Judean elite were exiled to Babylon, where they came into contact with the important cultural streams of the time. The result was one of the great creations of mankind: the Jewish religion.

After some fifty years, some of the exiles returned to Palestine. They brought with them the name “Jews”, the appellation of a religious-ideological-political movement, much like the “Zionists” of our time. Therefore, one can speak of “Judaism” and “Jews” - in the sense accepted now - only from then on. During the following 500 years, the Jewish monotheistic religion gradually crystallized. Also at this time, the most outstanding literary creation of all times, the Hebrew Bible, was composed. The writers of the Bible did not intend to write “history”, in the sense understood today, but rather a religious, edifying and instructive text.

To understand the birth and development of Judaism, one must consider two important facts:

(a) Right from the beginning, when the “Jews” came back from Babylon, the Jewish community in this country was a minority among the Jews as a whole. Throughout the period of the “Second Temple”, the majority of Jews lived abroad, in the areas known today as Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Cyprus, Italy, Spain and so on.

The Jews of that period were not a “nation” - the very idea did not yet exist. The Jews of Palestine did not participate in the rebellions of the Jews in Libya and Cyprus against the Romans, and the Jews abroad took no part in the Great Revolt of the Jews in this country. The Maccabees were not national but religious fighters, rather like the Taliban in our days, and killed many more “Hellenized” Jews than enemy soldiers.

(b) This Jewish Diaspora was not a unique phenomenon. On the contrary, at that time it was the norm. Notions like “nation” belong to the modern world. During the period of the “Second Temple” and later on, the dominant social-political pattern was a religious-political community enjoying self-government and not attached to any specific territory. A Jew in Alexandria could marry a Jewess in Damascus, but not the Christian woman across the street. She, on her part, could marry a Christian man in Rome, but not her Hellenist neighbor. The Jewish Diaspora was only one of many such communities.

This social pattern was preserved in the Byzantine Empire, was later taken over by the Ottoman Empire and can still be detected in Israeli law. Today, a Muslim Israeli cannot marry a Jewish Israeli, a Druze cannot marry a Christian (at least not in Israel itself). The Druze, by the way, are a surviving example of such a Diaspora.

The Jews were unique only in one respect: after the European peoples gradually moved on to new forms of organization, and in the end turned themselves into nations, the Jews remained what they were - a communal-religious Diaspora.

The puzzle that is occupying the historians is: how did a tiny community of Babylonian exiles turn into a worldwide Diaspora of millions? There is only one convincing answer to that: conversion.

The modern Jewish myth has it that almost all the Jews are descendents of the Jewish community that lived in Palestine 2000 years ago and was driven out by the Romans in the year 70 AD. That is, of course, baseless. The “Expulsion from the Country” is a religious myth: God was angry with the Jews because of their sins and exiled them from His country. But the Romans were not in the habit of moving populations, and there is clear evidence that a great part of the Jewish population in the country remained here after the Zealots’ Revolt and after the Bar-Kochba uprising, and that most Jews lived outside the country long before that.

At the time of the Second Temple and later, Judaism was a proselytizing religion par excellence. During the first centuries AD it fiercely competed with Christianity. While the slaves and other downtrodden people in the Roman Empire were more attracted to the Christian religion, with its moving human story, the upper classes tended towards Judaism. Throughout the Empire, large numbers adopted the Jewish religion.

Especially puzzling is the origin of “Ashkenazi” Jewry. At the end of the first millennium there appeared in Europe - apparently out of nowhere - a very large Jewish population, the existence of which was not documented before. Where did they come from?

There are several theories about that. The conventional one holds that the Jews wandered from the Mediterranean area to the North, settled in the Rhein valley and fled from the pogroms there to Poland, at the time the most liberal country in Europe. From there they dispersed into Russia and Ukraine, taking with them a German dialect that became Yiddish. The Tel Aviv University scholar Paul Wexler asserts, on the other hand, that Yiddish was originally not a German but a Slavic language. A large part of Ashkenazi Jewry, according to this theory, are descendents of the Sorbs, a Slavic people that lived in Eastern Germany and was forced to abandon its ancient pagan creed. Many of them preferred to become Jews, rather than Christians.

In a recent book with the provocative title “When and How the Jewish People was Invented”, the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues - like Arthur Koestler and others before him - that most of the Ashkenazi Jews are really descended from the Khazars, a Turkic people that created a large kingdom in what is now South Russia more than a thousand years ago. The Khazar king converted to Judaism, and according to this theory the Jews of Eastern Europe are mostly the descendants of Khazar converts. Sand also believes that most Sephardi Jews are descendents of Arab and Berber tribes in North Africa that had converted to Judaism instead of becoming Muslims, and had joined in the Muslim conquest of Spain.

When Jewry stopped proselytizing, the Jews became a closed, ethnic-religious community (as the Talmud says: “Converts are hard for Israel like a skin disease”).

But the historical truth, whatever it is, is not so important. Myth is stronger than truth, and it says that the Jews were expelled from this land. This is an essential layer in modern Jewish consciousness, and no academic research can shake it.

In the last 300 years, Europe turned “national”. The modern nation replaced earlier social patterns, such as the city state, feudal society and the dynastic empire. The national idea carried all before it, including history. Each of these new nations shaped an “imagined history” for itself. In other words, every nation rearranged ancient myths and historical facts in order to shape a “national history” which proclaims its importance and serves as a unifying glue.

The Jewish Diaspora, which - as mentioned before - was “normal” 2000 years ago, became “abnormal” and exceptional. This intensified the Jew-hatred that was anyhow rampant in Christian Europe. Since all the national movements in Europe were - more or less - anti-Semitic, many Jews felt that they were left “outside”, that they had no place in the new Europe. Some of them decided that the Jews must conform to the new Zeitgeist and turn the Jewish community into a Jewish “nation”.

For that purpose, it was necessary to reshape and reinvent Jewish history and turn it from the annals of a religious-ethnic Diaspora into the epic story of a “nation”. The job was undertaken by a man who can be considered the godfather of the Zionist idea: Heinrich Graetz, a German Jew who was influenced by German nationalism and created a “national” Jewish history. His ideas have shaped Jewish consciousness to this day.

Graetz accepted the Bible as if it were a history book, collected all the myths and created a complete and continuous historical narrative: the period of the Fathers, the Exodus from Egypt, the Conquest of Canaan, the “First Temple”, the Babylonian Exile, the “Second Temple”, the Destruction of the Temple and the Exile. That is the history that all of us learned in school, the foundation upon which Zionism was built.

Zionism represented a revolution in many fields, but its mental revolution was incomplete. Its ideology turned the Jewish community into a Jewish people, and the Jewish people into a Jewish nation - but never clearly defined the differences. In order to win over the religiously inclined Jewish masses in Eastern Europe, it made a compromise with religion and mixed all terms into a one big cocktail - the religion is also a nation, the nation is also a religion, and later asserted that Israel is a “Jewish state” that belongs to its (Jewish?) citizens but also to the “Jewish people” throughout the world. Official Israeli doctrine has it that Israel is the “Jewish nation state”, but Israeli law narrowly defines a “Jew” as only a person who belongs to the Jewish religion.

Herzl and his successors were not courageous enough to do what Mustafa Kemal Ataturk did when he founded modern Turkey: he fixed a clear and sharp border between the Turkish nation and Islamic religion and imposed a complete separation between the two. With us, everything remained one big salad. This has many implications in real life.

For example: if Israel is the state of the “Jewish people”, as one of our laws says - what is there to stop an Israeli Jew from joining the Jewish community in California or Australia? Small wonder that there is almost no leader in Israel whose children have not emigrated.

Why is it so important to differentiate between the Israeli nation and the Jewish Diaspora? One of the reasons is that a nation has a different attitude to itself and towards others than a religious-ethnic Diaspora.

Similarly: different animals have different ways of reacting to danger. A gazelle flees when it senses danger, and nature has equipped it with the necessary instincts and physical capabilities. A lion, on the other side, sticks to its territory and defends it against intruders. Both methods are successful, otherwise there would be no gazelles or no lions in the world.

The Jewish Diaspora developed an efficient response that was well suited to its situation: when Jews sensed danger, they fled and dispersed. That’s why the Jewish Diaspora managed to survive innumerable persecutions, and even the Holocaust itself. When the Zionists decided to become a nation - and indeed did create a real nation in this country - they adopted the national response: to defend themselves and attack the sources of danger. One cannot, therefore, be a Diaspora and a nation, a gazelle and a lion, at the same time.

If we, the Israelis, want to consolidate our nation, we have to free ourselves from the myths that belong to another form of existence and re-define our national history. The story about the exodus from Egypt is good as a myth and an allegory - it celebrates the value of freedom - but we must recognize the difference between myth and history, between religion and nation, between a Diaspora and a state, in order to find our place in the region in which we live and develop a normal relationship with the neighboring peoples.

Passover is a time of asking questions, and I have a few. This year, though, the furor that surrounded Barack Obama’s pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and his sermons that dared to suggest that this Christian nation may actually be earning God’s wrath and damnation for some of its behavior, reminded me of an issue I’d first encountered in South Africa: The idea that the Passover/Exodus narrative of the Hebrews’ flight from Pharaoh and slavery doesn’t belong exclusively to any tribe, but is a universal tale of freedom into which suffering people everywhere are able to insert themselves. And also that even if your forebears were victims of injustice, you’re quite capable of being a perpetrator of injustice

I think the Rev. Wright furor offered many white Americans an introduction they found shocking to the reality that the black Church in America has always connected viscerally to the liberation narrative of the Biblical people of Israel, making that narrative their own as a source of succor for their own struggles and trials. Martin Luther King, remember, spoke of going to the top of the mountain and seeing the promised land, knowing that he might not make it there. In other words, casting himself as Moses. And it’s an ongoing, vibrant tradition that gives the African American church its special vitality.

The ability of oppressed people to find themselves in the Exodus narrative of liberation is, of course, precisely the point of that narrative. The problem in Egypt wasn’t simply that it was the Jews who lived in slavery; the problem was was slavery itself. And the antidote to slavery advocated in the Torah (the five Books of Moses) — human community constituted on the basis of law and justice rather than political authority claimed on divine grounds — is a universal one; it applies, absolutely equally, to everyone, and everyone is invited, as Moses did, to challenge authorities that offer anything less.

The God of Abraham, proclaimed as the one true god, is obviously everyone’s god; he’s not a tribal fetish; he’s been invoked precisely to challenge the sort of tribal fetish deities that the Egyptians had used to rationalize their system of oppression. So, the Passover/Exodus narrative has powerful resonance to all people of the Abrahamic faiths (and possibly others) who may find themselves confronting oppression.

But those who feel threatened by others’ demands for justice — oppressors who cloak their own abuses of others in pieties of Christian soldierhood or the Star of David as the brand icon of an occupation — get very uncomfortable when they realize that others see them as inheritors, not of the righteousness of the Biblical Hebrews’ flight to freedom, but of Pharaoh’s attempts to suppress the Israelites.

But throughout the Old Testament, the Jewish prophets are warning the Israelites to take nothing for granted. The mantle of righteousness cannot be inherited genetically (surely, the God of Abraham is not a racist who judges people by their DNA) or claimed simply through vigorous prayer and observance of ritual; it must be earned in one’s conduct in relation to others. Thus Hillel’s famous definition of Judaism while standing on one foot: “That which is hateful unto yourself, do not do unto others; all the rest is commentary.” In other words, it is only via the decency of your behavior in the world that you can be a good Jew.

Jews who commit injustices against others would be unequivocally condemned by the Jewish prophets, just as those who drop bombs on others or sentence them to death are plainly deluded when they claim to be guided by the inspirational example of Jesus. That, I think, is the essence of what Reverend Wright was saying in those passages that caused so much controversy — that God would damn, not bless an America that committed injustices. To which I’d add, in line with Rami Khouri’s profound challenge to Israeli journalists at the height of the last Lebanon war, an injustice committed under a flag bearing the Star of David would be fiercely condemned by the Biblical Jewish prophets.

It was easy to see how little our Jewish genetic lineage did to make us really Jewish in the South Africa of my youth, where every Passover, we sat around seder tables singing, in a barely understood Hebrew, of the days when we were slaves, while the black women who lived in our backyards under domestic labor system not that far removed from slavery, carried in steaming tureens of matzoh ball soup and tzimmes. We may have convinced ourselves that our DNA entitled us to claim this story as our own, but it was abundantly clear that in the South African context, most Jews had thrown in their lot with Pharoah, while the Israelites were working in their kitchens.

The mantle of justice associated with the Torah prophets, it seemed to me later, was nobody’s birthright; it had to be earned.

As a young activist heading out into the townships every weekend to meetings where communities were planning to resist eviction or burying those who had fallen in the fight against the regime, I was intrigued to hear the preachers and ordinary people couch their own struggles firmly in the narratives of the Exodus.

But around my own seder tables, the descendants of Pharoah’s slaves paid scant attention to the plight of those in their kitchens. They were discussing real estate and accounting scams — and, of course, how long it might be before “the schwartzes” (yiddish for “blacks”) would rise up and spoil the party.

If Hillel was right (and I believe he was) that Judaism is less about rituals and the minutiae of halachic law than it is about the ethical treatment of others, I can safely say that I learned very little of Judaism in the more than 200 hours of family Seders I sat through in South Africa. In keeping with thousands of years of tradition, we always kept a chair empty and a glass full in case the Prophet Elijah showed up. Looking back, I shudder to think what he would have made of the spectacle had he actually accepted the invitation.

I suspect he’d have dragged us over the coals in language not unlike that used by Reverend Wright. A friend once told me that his father, an Anglican priest, believed that whereas Christians had to work their way into heaven, Jews were basically on the guest list; our entry to Paradise was assured, by virtue of the fact that we’d been born Jewish. I thought that was a remarkably silly idea. Not only that; it’s remarkably dangerous, too, because it rationalizes moral laziness and injustice and violence committed in the name of a false righteousness. Unfortunately, I suspect, my friend’s father’s belief that as Jews, we are genetic entitlement to God’s favor, is all too widespread. Passover, and the universal tale of oppression and freedom it celebrates, is a good opportunity to burst that bubble.

But the beard appears to be starting to itch. As the moral and political midgets that lead Israel today rushed to denounce Jimmy Carter for doing the grownup thing and opening talks with Hamas, the editors of Haaretz pulled no punches, telling them in a stern editorial why Jimmy Carter should be given the royal treatment by Israel. Noting that none of Carter’s detractors had achieved anything close to what he has done in bringing Israel to peace with its neighbors, the editors wrote:

The boycott (of Carter by Israel’s leaders) will not be remembered as a glorious moment in this government’s history. Jimmy Carter has dedicated his life to humanitarian missions, to peace, to promoting democratic elections, and to better understanding between enemies throughout the world. Recently, he was involved in organizing the democratic elections in Nepal, following which a government will be set up that will include Maoist guerrillas who have laid down their arms. But Israelis have not liked him since he wrote the book “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid.”

Israel is not ready for such comparisons, even though the situation begs it. It is doubtful whether it is possible to complain when an outside observer, especially a former U.S. president who is well versed in international affairs, sees in the system of separate roads for Jews and Arabs, the lack of freedom of movement, Israel’s control over Palestinian lands and their confiscation, and especially the continued settlement activity, which contravenes all promises Israel made and signed, a matter that cannot be accepted. The interim political situation in the territories has crystallized into a kind of apartheid that has been ongoing for 40 years. In Europe there is talk of the establishment of a binational state in order to overcome this anomaly. In the peace agreement with Egypt, 30 years ago, Israel agreed to “full autonomy” for the occupied territories, not to settle there.

These promises have been forgotten by Israel, but Carter remembers.

And, of course, Haaretz, representing the grownup trend in Israeli politics, knows that, as Rob Malley and Hussein Agha so eloquently explain, pursuing a peace process that excludes Hamas is not just futile, it’s actually deeply damaging to the prospect for peace.

The beard doesn’t agree. Representing the teenage logic of the Bush Administration and the AIPAC crowd, he scolds his editors and urges them to “just say no to Carter.” Everybody hates Carter, didn’t they know? And he lives only to undermine Israel. His apartheid comparison, with which anyone (including the Haaretz editors) who knows anything about apartheid and the conditions of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank finds little quarrel, is based on “a concoction of exaggerations, inventions, distortions and lies.” Don’t know who’s more mordantly funny, this guy or the Australian with the undertaker’s voice, Mark Regev, who flaks for the Israeli foreign ministry.

If nothing else, the presence of Rosner’s cranky right-wing nationalism on the Haaretz site is testimony to the paper observing best tradition of openness to a diversity of op-ed opinion. But it’s also an argument for mixing things up a little more.

You could say Jimmy Carter was tempting fate by meeting with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal — after all, his entirely appropriate evocation of apartheid in reference to the regime Israel has created on the West Bank earned him the label “Holocaust-denier” from the more demented end of the American Zionist spectrum. But Carter, bless him, is sticking to his guns, making the rather straightforward adult argument that has eluded so much of the U.S. political mainstream that the only way to achieve peace is to talk to all of those whose consent it requires.

And I’d say Carter has reason to suspect that despite the pro-forma criticisms of his Meshal meeting from Secretary of State Condi Rice as well as the McCain-Clinton-Obama roadshow, the backlash won’t be anything like the firestorm created by his apartheid book. It was reported today, in fact, that the Bush Administration is regularly briefed on back-channel talks between Iranian officials and a group of former U.S. diplomats led by Papa Bush’s U.N. ambassador, Thomas Pickering. So, far all the posturing and bluster, there’s a back channel. And I’d wager that despite the official sanctimony, Carter will be debriefed on his conversations with Meshal by both Israeli and American officials — because Meshal is a key player, like it or not.

The inevitability of talking with Hamas is already widely recognized in U.S. policy circles, and especially in Israel. Already, the Israelis negotiate secretly over issues such as the fate of Corporal Gilad Shalit, prisoner exchanges and a cease-fire with Hamas through intermediaries such as Egypt. And a poll published by the Israeli daily Haaretz in February showed that two out of three Israelis support direct talks between their government and Hamas — an option publicly advocated by such high-profile Israeli leaders as former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy and former foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami.

Noam Shalit, father of Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit who has been held by Hamas for almost two years now, expressed a profound understanding of what the U.S. role in the region ought to be, after meeting with Carter. The fact that Carter isn’t perceived as biased towards Israel, he said, would actually help him mediate! Now there’s a basic truth about the proper U.S. role that has been ignored since Bill Clinton bumbled his way through the peace process.

The Bush Administration, needing to maintain its vacuous John Wayne facade, won’t publicly concede that its policies on Hamas have failed and open talks; as with Iran, it prefers to “outsource” such initiatives (to Egypt, for example) for purposes of plausible deniability. But those, like Carter, who’re not running for office, are able to freely advocate talking to Hamas as a matter of urgency. Even Colin Powell has added his voice to the chorus of foreign policy grownups advocating the option. “They’re not going to go away,” Powell said of Hamas on National Public Radio last year. “And we have to remember that they enjoy considerable support among the Palestinian people. They won an election that we insisted on having.”

The Bush Administration failed to reckon with the reasons for Hamas’s victory, and, as a result, has spent the past two years vainly trying to reverse the election result — and has only made Hamas stronger as a result.

So while the Bush Administration may protest that Carter’s meeting with Meshal will weaken its efforts of isolating Hamas, everyone in the region knows that strategy has failed. The idea that it should be avoided so as not to weaken Mahmoud Abbas is idiotic — nothing has weakened Abbas as much as this policy of attacking Hamas while forcing the Palestinian Authority president to jump through hoops while the occupation continues to choke Palestinian life. Carter is simply making clear that it’s time to move on from that failed strategy, and to engage with the intractable fact of Hamas.

To demand as a precondition for such talks that Hamas “renounce” violence and “recognize” Israel is specious: The terms on which Hamas would abandon its strategy of violence ought to be the key subject of discussion with the organization, not a precondition for talking to it. As for “recognizing” Israel, it ought to be noted that the Palestine Liberation Organization amended its Charter to delete clauses denying recognition of Israel only five years after the Oslo Accords.

But just as bearing the burden of political responsibility for the Palestinian national fate had forced Fatah and the PLO to recognize the intractable reality of Israel — as distasteful as any Palestinian would find that, simply because the Palestinians as a people were forcibly displaced from three quarters of historic Palestine in the course of its creation. Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas negotiated with Israel because they recognized that it couldn’t be militarily defeated, not because they suddenly decided that the Palestinian national movement had been wrong all along.

Hamas may be slowly moving to the same point. In an important post on his blog South Jerusalem last week, Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenburg noted that Meshal, in an interview with the Palestinian paper al-Ayyam, appeared to signal acceptance of a two-state solution. Meshal reiterated Hamas’s support for the principles of the unity government, including negotiations with Israel in pursuit of a sovereign Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. “We are committed to the political platform on which we agreed with the other Palestinian forces and in convergence with the Arab position,” said Meshal, referring to the 2002 Arab League offer of full normalization of relations with Israel if it withdraws to its 1967 borders and resolves the refugee issue. “Thus all the international parties should deal with this political fact and judge the political platform to which we agreed. The challenge here is not to search in the minds of peoples but [look at] the offered political platform on the table and the American administration and the international community should work to get Israel to be committed to it … This is the way out. After that, whoever wants to recognize Israel or not, that would a matter of his personal convictions.” Hamas, in other words, is willing to abide by a Palestinian national consensus over a two-state solution. As Gorenburg writes, “He really wishes Israel would vanish, but that’s not his political program. He’d rather take a couple pills against nausea, and accept reality.”

No matter how distasteful he finds recognizing Israel, Meshal appears to acknowledge it as an established historical fact. And Carter’s visit is a sign that, no matter how distasteful they find Hamas’s own track record, a growing number of Americans and Israelis are beginning to recognize that, as Colin Powell put it, Hamas is “not going to go away.” The symmetry in their reasoning may have profound consequences. After all, peace between two warring parties convinced of the justice of their own cause only becomes possible when each recognizes the impossibility of eliminating the other by military means.

The International Monetary Fund warns that spiraling food inflation threatens the survival of 100 million people; the World Bank warns that it could bring down some 33 governments. As I wrote on TIME.com last week,

The sociology of the food riot is pretty straightforward: The usually impoverished majority of citizens may acquiesce to the rule of detested corrupt and repressive regimes when they are preoccupied with the daily struggle to feed their children and themselves, but when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose. That’s especially true when the source of their hunger is not the absence of food supplies but their inability to afford to buy the available food supplies. And that’s precisely what we’re seeing in the current wave of global food-price inflation. As Josette Sheeran of the U.N. World Food Program put it last month, “We are seeing food on the shelves but people being unable to afford it.”

When all that stands between hungry people and a warehouse full of rice and beans is a couple of padlocks and a riot policeman (who may be the neighbor of those who’re trying to get past him, and whose own family may be hungry too), the invisible barricade of private-property laws can be easily ignored. Doing whatever it takes to feed oneself and a hungry child, after all, is a primal human instinct. So, with prices of basic foods skyrocketing to the point that even the global aid agencies — whose function is to provide emergency food supplies to those in need — are unable, for financial reasons, to sustain their current commitments to the growing army of the hungry, brittle regimes around the world have plenty of reason for anxiety.

The reason for this food crisis is the current structure of global inequality (as someone noted recently, the rich demand fuel for their SUVs, turning farmland to biofuel production at the expense of food needed by the poor) combined with the basic Malthusian reality of scarcity: The very spread of capitalism in previously closed economies such as India and China has spurred rapacious demand for oil and natural gas (whose price rises have an inflationary effect on food prices), and the emergence of a middle class pretty much the same size as America’s, who are not only seeking cars and appliances, but are also eating more meat — and producing a single calorie of meat protein takes seven to 12 calories of grain, which has dramatically increased inflationary pressure on grain prices.

The interesting thing, though, is that solving this particular crisis will require that the World Bank and IMF abandon the economic orthodoxy that they imposed globally during the 1990s — the “Washington consensus,” that frowns on things like government spending on feeding the poor.

The testimony of General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker this week — and the ensuing congressional debate — were so utterly predictable, so bland and so basically unchanged from what we heard a year ago, that I thought I’d check in on what I wrote a year ago on the matter, under the title Why the U.S. Can’t Leave Iraq. And so much of it applied, with such minor variation, that I thought if Petraeus and Crocker — and a supporting cast of senators — can roll out pretty much the same speeches and analysis as they did a year ago, then why the hell shouldn’t I?

Here it is again, then, exactly as it appeared on April 26, 2007:

The debate in Washington over troop withdrawals from Iraq is largely a pantomime for domestic political consumption — the Democrats are maneuvering to disassociate themselves from an unpopular war that a majority of their senators originally backed, and that they know can’t be ended any time soon but for which they don’t want to share the blame come election year 2008. The reality is that the U.S. can’t leave Iraq for the foreseeable future without fundamentally altering the basic goals of its Middle East policy over the past half century, and the Democrats talk of “benchmarks” and “deadlines” is unlikely to be taken seriously by the Iraqi players — except to the extent that they need to humor the Americans. The failure of the Iraqi government to make significant “progress” towards achieving the Bush Administration’s benchmarks may be routinely reported here has a sign of infighting among them or their political weakness, but the reality may be that they have no intention of acting out Washington’s script.

The Iraqis are unlikely to believe the threats that if they don’t do as they’re told, the U.S. will go home — Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki may have reason to fear that the U.S. will try and engineer his ouster in a coup (although it has no alternative leader capable of gaining any traction), but not that the U.S. will simply walk away from Iraq. That’s because Maliki, like all the other players in Iraq, knows that the Americans didn’t invade their country out of some magnanimous concern for Iraqi wellbeing; the invasion was motivated by U.S. concerns and interests. And so the threat to take their troops and go home unless the Iraqi politicians agree to adopt the Americans’ idea of good governance rings pretty hollow in light of the matrix of interests that drive U.S. foreign policy in the region.

It’s not that they doubt that the U.S. will eventually be forced out of Iraq by domestic pressure driven by the cost in U.S. blood and treasure of maintaining the expedition — they’re not “shocked and awed” by U.S. power, remember, and recognize it as finite and fallible. Each of the players in Iraq has a Plan B for that eventuality, but they’re in no hurry to hasten the moment. (Even Moqtada Sadr plays to popular sentiment by demanding withdrawal, but he’s demanding a timetable rather than immediate withdrawal.) They’re actually assuming that the U.S. will eventually go. Until then, however, they’ll continue using the U.S. presence to pursue their own political interests and agendas — even as many of them publicly demand U.S. withdrawal — and position themselves to gain maximum advantage when it actually does go (as opposed to acting in ways that advance U.S. interests in order to allow Washington to substantially draw down). And, of course, Washington’s own position reflects a similar gulf between the actual policy and the public statements — Bush, for example, has always dodged the question, whenever asked (even by John Kerry in the presidential debates) about why the U.S. is building 14 permanent bases in Iraq

“While the U.S. can no longer successfully manipulate regional actors to carry out its plans, regional actors have learned to use the U.S. presence to promote their own objectives. Quietly and against the deeply held wishes of their populations, they have managed to keep the Americans engaged with the hope of some elusive victory.

That’s an observation by Dr. Hussein Agha, in one of the best pieces I’ve read in ages on Iraq, arguing why none of the region’s political players, from Israel to al-Qaeda, wants the U.S. to withdraw right now. (Agha’s piece is an absolute must-read; as are his ongoing contributions along with Robert Malley to the New York Review of Books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — most recently this one.) There’s no comfort in this for the Bush Administration, because it’s not as if anyone in the region (indeed, anyone from Israel to al-Qaeda, regardless of their rhetoric) who believes the U.S. can win in Iraq; the reason all of them need it to remain there is in pursuit of their own interests.

Even while King Abdullah denounces the U.S. occupation as illegal, Saudi Arabia and its fellow pro-Western Arab regimes can’t afford to see the U.S. leave, because such a departure would bring great peril to their own prospects of survival. The U.S. for better or worse long ago signed on as the guarantor of their security, and the spectacle of a stunning defeat for their key backer is intolerable to these regimes — and would force them, at minimum, to fundamentally alter their relationship with the U.S. to Washington’s detriment, in order to ensure their own survival. They’re already suspicious of the Shiite dominated regime in Baghdad, and without the U.S. there to restrain its excesses against the Sunnis, these regimes would be even more hostile, forcing Maliki even closer to Iran and simply deepening the cycle of suspicion and hostility. Also, Agha notes, “As some Arabs see it, the occupation is what holds the country together. So long as coalition forces are deployed, a full-blown breakup can be avoided.”

The interests of these regimes, as well as Israel whose own sense of its military deterrent power has been badly shaken by the U.S. failure in Iraq, need the U.S. to remain. So does Turkey, which sees the U.S. presence as the best guarantor against the Iraqi Kurds seceding and forcing Turkey into a political-military quagmire of its own in northern Iraq. (The flip side, of course, is that the Kurds have used the U.S. presence as a buffer against their Arab and Turkish foes, behind which they have maximized their autonomy.) Al-Qaeda’s interest in having the U.S. in Iraq is so obvious there’s no need to dwell on it here.

Having created a vacuum, Washington simply has no alternative but to fill it — or, as Colin Powell might have it, “you broke it; you own it.” And I have no doubt that if the Democrats were in the White House now, and given responsibility for managing the realm (not just Iraq, but the entire connected matrix of U.S. interests in the region), that they’d reach the same conclusion. That’s why Iraq is seen as such a catastrophe by the U.S. strategic establishment: The U.S. cannot win, but nor can it accept the consequences of retreat.

Agha notes, though, that it may be equally important for the likes of Syria and Iran to keep the Americans engaged in Iraq, because as long they’re bogged down there, they’re unable to contemplate other adventures — and if they should do so, the massive U.S. troop presence in Iraq gives those countries an accessible target for retaliation.

Among the Iraqi political factions, none is yet ready for the U.S. to withdraw, according to Agha:

Inside Iraq, this is a period of consolidation for most political groups. They are building up their political and military capabilities, cultivating and forging alliances, clarifying political objectives and preparing for impending challenges. It is not the moment for all-out confrontation. No group has the confidence or capacity decisively to confront rivals within its own community or across communal lines. Equally, no party is genuinely interested in a serious process of national reconciliation when they feel they can improve their position later on. A continued American presence is consistent with both concerns - it can keep clashes manageable and be used to postpone the need for serious political engagement.

Shias in government would like the US to stay long enough for them to tighten their grip on the levers of state power and build a loyal military. Those Shias who are not in power would like them to stay long enough to avoid a premature showdown with their rivals. Militant Shia groups can simultaneously blame the occupation forces for their community’s plight and attack them to mobilise further support.

The maneuverings of Moqtada Sadr perfectly illustrate the point: He is at once in the government — even since he withdrew his cabinet ministers, he has continued to have his bloc vote with Maliki, and has even been said to be helping Maliki accomodate U.S. concerns by making himself scarce — and out in the street, riding the wave of popular anger against the occupation. He’s not hedging his bets as much as playing out the clock to preserve his political advantage.

In short, the Iraqi political class is unlikely ever to give the U.S. what it wants — a client regime that will secure the interests that drove the U.S. to invade in the first place. It’s not that they don’t understand the demands that Washington has deemed to be in their best interests; it’s that they have something else in mind. Their patience is a lot greater than that of the U.S. public, which is why the U.S. occupation, for them, is a phase that will eventually end, but which they’ll use to position themselves to best take advantage of the moment in which the U.S. is forced to withdraw — or more likely to radically reorder things in Iraq, perhaps by backing some form of coup. That’ll be the moment for Sadr to bring his forces onto the streets, for the Kurds to consider their options, for the Arab regimes to once again back an Iraqi dictatorship, and so on. Until then, however, the U.S. occupation represents less of a crisis than an opportunity.

Last word to Agha:

In this grim picture, the Americans appear the least sure and most confused. With unattainable objectives, wobbly plans, changing tactics, shifting alliances and ever-increasing casualties, it is not clear any longer what they want or how they are going to achieve it. By setting themselves up to be manipulated, they give credence to an old Arab saying: the magic has taken over the magician.

With the 60th anniversary of Israel’s birth — and of the Palestinian Nakbah (catastrophe) — which are, of course the same event, almost upon us, I was reminded this week that April 9 was also the 60th anniversary of an event that has long epitomized the connection between the creation of an ethnic-majority Jewish state and the man-made catastrophe suffered by the Palestinian Arabs. That would be the massacre at Deir Yassein, a small village near Jerusalem where fighters of the Irgun, led by Menahem Begin, massacred up to 250 Palestinian civilians — in what later emerged as a calculated campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” using violence and the threat of violence to drive Palestinians to flee their homes and land, which were then summarily appropriated by the new state of Israel, which passed legislation forbidding the Palestinian owners from returning to their property. It was the events of 1948 that created the Palestinian refugee problem, and set the terms of a conflict that continues to define the State of Israel six decades later. No resolution of the conflict is possible without understanding the events of 1948 — something that precious few mainstream U.S. politicians do. The irony is that Israelis are far more likely to be familiar with the uglier side of their victory in 1948 than are their most enthusiastic supporters on these shores.

I was no dignitary, but just as every politician visiting Israel is still taken first to the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem, so do did my own official trip begin there in the winter of 1978 — as part of a Habonim leadership training program. The horrors memorialized at Yad Vashem pressed all the intended buttons in my 17-year-old mind, I realized a few months later, as a freshman student at the University of Cape Town, when I came very close to having the crap beaten out of me in a fight that I almost provoked when confronting Muslim students handing out leaflets marking Al-Quds day. I have had little appetite for physical confrontation since age 12, but I did not hestitate to grab the leaflets of a student named Ashraf, and throw them to the ground. He jumped at me, cursing. “You’re trying to deny my existence, you scum!” I screamed. “What about Dir Yassein?” he yelled, as he leaped towards me, restrained by his buddies as mine hustled me away, admonishing me for my provocative behavior. In truth, I hadn’t even recognized myself in that moment; it was all adrenal rage, a channeling of the “Never Again!” Warsaw Ghetto spirit unleashed in me by what I had seen at Yad Vashem. There was no room in there to consider what might have motivated Ashraf, of course; in the face of genocide (which was what I imagined he represented) there was no room for debate.

Yet, Ashraf, too, had pressed a button. I knew exactly what he was getting at by citing Deir Yassein. In the progressive, “Labor” Zionist movement of which Habonim was a part, we had long recognized the 1948 massacre of up to 250 Arab men, women and children in the village near Jerusalem as an ugly stain on the “purity of arms” myth in which we had always cloaked violence from Israeli side. We knew about Deir Yassein, but we could dissociate ourselves from it, or so we imagined, because it had been carried out not by the Haganah of Ben Gurion, but by an Irgun unit led by Menahem Begin. And as far as we ardent young Zionists of the left were concerned, Begin, who by then was Prime Minister of Israel, was nothing but a fascist thug and terrorist — hell, even Ben Gurion detested the man and condemned the Deir Yassein killings.

We in Habonim had no truck with the “fascists” of Betar, the youth wing of Begin’s movement that was now Israel’s ruling party. We stood for a “socialist Zionism” that would serve as a model to humankind of universal brotherhood and equality — thus the depths of our self-delusion. And the Betarim were the first to mock it. They, too, knew all about Deir Yassein. And they laughed at our revulsion over the massacre. “Do you think we’d ever have had a Jewish state if it wasn’t for actions like Deir Yassein?” they asked. Back then, of course, having been fed only the bubbemeis about the “miracle” in which most of the Arab population had voluntarily upped and left in 1948 to make way for an Arab invasion, I had no idea of the organized ethnic cleansing that was undertaken not only by the Irgun, but the Haganah of David Ben Gurion.

(I will confess, though, that at that time, it took reading about those events from Jewish sources, like Uri Avnery, to make it emotionally safe for me to accept the truth; if they were being hurled at me only by those whom I could dismiss as out to exterminate me and my kind, I’m not so sure it would have been as easy.)

The work of Benny Morris and other Israeli historians in the late 80s made abundantly clear that Deir Yassein was no isolated aberration, demonstrating that the mainstream Haganah, at Ben Gurion’s behest, had conducted an organized and systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing to clear Palestinian Arabs off the land that would become the State of Israel. (As to the rhetorical question of the Betarim, actually, the prospects of a Jewish ethnic majority state were pretty slim under the 1947 UN Partition plan, because 45% of the population of what would have been the Jewish State was Palestinian Arab — after all, Palestinian Arabs were the majority of the total population of Palestine, and it was hard to partition a substantial Jewish majority based on the demographics facts of 1947. So, not only Begin, but also Ben Gurion, set out to change those demographic facts.

But our willingness, in Habonim, to acknowledge even what we deluded ourselves was the aberration at Deir Yassein, was unusual. Unlike Benny Morris — whose swing to the right has seen no retraction of his understanding of the events of 1948; these days he simply complains that the ethnic cleansing was incomplete — most of Israel supporters abroad desperately need to believe the mythology about a “miracle” in which Israel overcame impossible odds (actually, the population size of neighboring countries meant nothing on the battlefield, where the armed forces Israel was able to field were more than a match for the armies sent by Arab countries) — and also about Palestinians stupidly just leaving of their own free will, expecting to return as soon as their side won. The idea that Jewish people would load civilians onto trucks at gunpoint and force them out of their homes and into the oblivion of refugee life was unthinkable for Jewish supporters of Israel, because they could not recognize themselves in such actions. The idea that by its very creation, Israel had turned three quarters of a million Palestinians into refugees — and quickly legislated to deny them the right to return — is simply too distasteful to swallow. Better to imagine a bloodless birth, in keeping with what Benny Morris called the “righteous victims” mythology.

The late Edward Said noted in 2000 that Israelis are more comfortable discussing the events of 1948 than are their most fervent American supporters. It’s worth quoting at length:

A month ago, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz sent over a leading columnist of theirs, Ari Shavit, to spend several days talking with me; a good summary of this long conversation appeared as a question-and-answer interview in the August 18 issue of the newspaper’s supplement, basically uncut and uncensored. I voiced my views very candidly, with a major emphasis on right of return, the events of 1948, and Israel’s responsibility for all this. I was surprised that my views were presented just as I voiced them, without the slightest editorialising by Shavit, whose questions were always courteous and un-confrontational.

A week after the interview there was a response to it by Meron Benvenisti, ex-deputy mayor of Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek. It was disgustingly personal, full of insults and slander against me and my family. But he never denied that there was a Palestinian people, or that we were driven out in 1948. In fact he said, we conquered them, and why should we feel guilty? I responded to Benvenisti a week later in Ha’aretz: What I wrote was also published uncut. I reminded Israeli readers that Benvenisti was responsible for the destruction (and probably knew about the killing of several Palestinians) of Haret Al-Magharibah in 1967, in which several hundred Palestinians lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers. But I did not have to remind Benvenisti or Ha’aretz readers that as a people we existed and could at least debate our right of return. That was taken for granted.

Two points here. One is that the whole interview could not have appeared in any American paper, and certainly not in any Jewish-American journal. And if there had been an interview the questions to me would have been adversarial, hectoring, insulting, such as, why have you been involved in terrorism, why will you not recognise Israel, why was Hajj Amin a Nazi, and so on. Second, a right-wing Israeli Zionist like Benvenisti, no matter how much he may detest me or my views, would not deny that there is a Palestinian people which was forced to leave in 1948. An American Zionist for a long time would say that no conquest took place or, as Joan Peters alleged in a now-disappeared and all but forgotten 1984 book, From Time Immemorial (that won all the Jewish awards when it appeared here), there were no Palestinians with a life in Palestine before 1948.

Every Israeli will readily admit and knows perfectly well that all of Israel was once Palestine, that (as Moshe Dayan said openly in 1976) every Israeli town or village once had an Arab name. And Benvenisti says openly that “we” conquered, and so what? Why should we feel guilty about winning? American Zionist discourse is never straight out honest that way: it must always go round and talk about making the desert bloom, and Israeli democracy, etc., completely avoiding the essential facts about 1948, which every Israeli has actually lived. For the American, these are mostly fantasies, or myths, not realities. So removed from the actualities are American supporters of Israel, so caught in the contradictions of diasporic guilt (after all what does it mean to be a Zionist and not emigrate to Israel?) and triumphalism as the most successful and most powerful minority in the US, that what emerges is very often a frightening mixture of vicarious violence against Arabs and a deep fear and hatred of them, which is the result, unlike Israeli Jews, of not having any sustained direct contact with them.

For the American Zionist, therefore, Arabs are not real beings, but fantasies of nearly everything that can be demonised and despised, terrorism and anti-Semitism most specially. I recently received a letter from a former student of mine, who has had the benefit of the finest education available in the United States: he can still bring himself to ask me in all honesty and courtesy why as a Palestinian I let a Nazi like Hajj Amin still determine my political agenda. “Before Hajj Amin,” he argued, “Jerusalem wasn’t important to Arabs. Because he was so evil he made it an important issue for Arabs just in order to frustrate Zionist aspirations which always held Jerusalem to be important.” This is not the logic of someone who has lived with and knows something concrete about Arabs. It is that of a person who speaks an organised discourse and is driven by an ideology that regards Arabs only as negative functions, as the embodiment of violent anti-Semitic violent passions.

There are growing numbers of Israelis who want to confront the reality of the fact that much of the “Jewish State” is built on the ruins of homes, lands and villages seized at gunpoint from others, before laws were passed legalizing what was, in a moral sense, essentially theft justified by war, and then simply flattening and building over them.

In Chicago, recently, I met Eitan Bronstein of Zochrot, an Israeli organization dedicated to drawing Israelis’ attention to what lies, hidden and denied, beneath their feet, for example by posting signs in the middle of Israeli towns and cities denoting where Arab villages once stood, and explaining the fate of those villages — and other creative strategies to draw Israelis’ attention to the Nakbah. (Click on their video page here for some fascinating material.) And to begin concrete practical discussion on how (not whether) the right of return of Palestinian refugees would be implemented in contemporary Israel. (Click here for video of Eitan in Deir Yassein, leading participants in an event marking anniversary of the massacre.)

Here’s an extract from a piece I wrote two years ago about The Lemon Tree, the most important book anyone looking to understand the conflict could read:

Dalia Eshkenazi, like me and hundreds of thousands of other Jewish kids around the world, grew up believing that the Palestinians had simply fled their homes in 1948, miraculously making way for a Jewish State — either out of ignorance and fear; mostly in response to radio broadcasts urging them to leave so that Arab armies could wipe out Israel. That’s when the Palestinians were discussed at all. Israel preferred (and still prefers) not to think too much about the fact that much of the “Jewish State” is built on the ruins of homes, lands and villages seized at gunpoint from others, before laws were passed legalizing what was, in a moral sense, essentially theft, and then simply flattening and building over them. Dalia, whose family had emigrated from Bulgaria in 1948 when she was an infant, often wondered about the previous inhabitants of the beautiful old stone house in which she’d grown up in Ramla.

Then, one day in 1967, one of them showed up and knocked on her door. Bashir Khairi, whose family — like most others in the town — had been loaded onto buses at gunpoint and driven out of town and then forced to walk miles to Ramallah, had taken advantage of Israel’s conquest of the West Bank to travel to Jerusalem, and then to his old home. Dalia allowed him in, and immediately understood his connection with the house. Thus began a fraught and complex friendship that allowed for a dialogue quite unique between an Israeli and a Palestinian. There’s no happy ending or simple outcome. But her engagement with Bashir allows to Dalia to adopt what I would consider a more Jewish attitude to her country’s predicament: She is a committed Zionist, but is nonetheless forced to dispense with the web of self-serving myths propagated by the Zionist movement over Israel’s creation, and instead confront the reality that it occurred at the cost of a crime perpetrated against another people. For Dalia, the dilemma is to find a solution that avoids turning her own people into refugees. For Bashir, it’s a simple case of the “right of return” and the belief that Israelis and Palestinians can live together in a single democratic polity — a position for which, by the end of the book, he’s spent about a third of his life in prison, as a leader of the PFLP.

I don’t want to get into the nuances — you need to read this book. Go to Amazon and buy this book right now, or for more, click here to hear him discuss the book on NPR’s Fresh Air — or get a glimpse of his accompanying radio documentary from this NPR transcript. And also, this piece of his published by my friend Tom Engelhardt. Believe me, I don’t know Sandy Tolan from a bar of soap; this is quite simply the most important book I’ve read for ages.

The pair find no easy answers, of course. But they are able to conduct an honest dialogue based on a recognition of their common humanity — a dialogue made possible by the fact that Dalia is able to acknowledge what really happened in 1948, and accept Israel’s responsibility. She doesn’t only take Bashir’s word for it; she begins to investigate and finds Israelis who were actually involved in some of the relevant military operations who tell her how the Arabs of Ramla and many other towns and villages were driven out in what, today, would be called a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

I had the same experience myself in 1979, on Yom Kippur, when I read Uri Avnery’s “Israel Without Zionism,” written by an Israeli who was there, who fought in that war, and who bluntly revealed that the massacre at Deir Yassin (as recounted at this link from a liberal Zionist perspective) was not an isolated incident…

The suppression of the history of the ethnic cleansing of 1948 within the Zionist movement — and its substitution by the frankly preposterous myth that had us believe that 700,000 people had turned themselves into refugees with nothing but the clothes on their backs in response to radio broadcasts telling them to do so — is premised on the idea that to admit and acknowledge what Israel had done to the Palestinians in 1948 would undermine the moral legitimacy of the State of Israel. But you have to wonder what moral legitimacy is established on the basis of falsehoods. Israelis know very well where the Palestinian refugee problem came from, and they also understand its significance in fueling the conflict. Why else, when asked what he would have done had he been born Palestinian, did Ehud Barak answer (during his 1999 election campaign), “join a fighting organization”? Barak, a bit of a weasel, really (he tried to suggest, in the wake of the Camp David debacle, that his sole purpose in negotiating with the Palestinians was to “unmask” the duplicity of Yasser Arafat), almost personifies Israel’s struggle with its bad conscience: Despite acknowledging the reason why Palestinian fight, he later insisted that Israel could never accept responsibility for having created the Palestinian refugee problem.

Yet, as the relationship between Dalia Eshkenazi and Bashir Khairi shows, such acknowledgment is the only basis for an honest dialogue between the two sides: How they proceed from that acknowledgment is a major point of negotiation, but it can’t be avoided. In one scene in “The Lemon Tree,” Dalia’s husband shocks his Palestinian guests by telling them that Israel is not afraid of Syria or Hizballah or any other neighbors, but it is deeply afraid of the Palestinians. They’re shocked and ask why. He answers: “Because you’re the only ones with a legitimate claim against us.”

A Palestinian friend told me years later that Avnery was a good friend of his. Early in their relationship, Avnery suddenly realized that my friend was one of the Palestinian villagers that Avnery’s unit had forced onto trucks at gunpoint and driven out of their village near Jerusalem, forcing his family into West Bank exile. My friend poured him another drink and their friendship deepened. 1948 is known to the Palestinians simply as the “Nakbah” — the catastrophe. But for Israeli Jews, too, it was a catastrophe of a different type; a moral “nakbah.” Dalia Eshkanazi is rare — although hardly alone — among Israelis, Zionists even, in recognizing that fact. (Even though, in the U.S., recognition of such a simple truth would probably have her branded an “anti-Semite.”)

I’m not sure how this conflict will be solved, and while I can recognize the fundamental flaws of a two-state solution, I’m also skeptical of the simplicities advocated in support of a single state solution. But I do know that, like the relationship between Dalia Eshkenazi and Bashir Khairi, it will have to proceed on an honest acknowledgement of the humanity of all the protagonists, and an honest accounting of the history of Palestinian dispossession. Whatever the solution, it will have to involve justice and fairness.

And it’s on that front that the U.S. and others have stumbled over the rise of Hamas. To simply demand that Hamas recognize the State of Israel is pointless. Fatah recognized the State of Israel, but only because it had become clear to them that Israel was an intractable strategic reality — not because they recognized the moral basis claimed by Israel for its own existence, but simply because they recognized the futility of trying to fight on to reverse the fact of its existence against overwhelming military odds. Ask Abu Mazen or any other Palestinian leader, for that matter, in an honest moment, would he rather Israel had not come into being in 1948, and I have no doubt of what the honest answer would be. This book may help the objective observer, and indeed, Israelis themselves, better undertand why.

History can’t be reversed, but nor can it be denied. It’s time more Americans became better acquainted with the Palestinians, and, indeed, with the Israelis — and with the big picture of the brutally tragic history they share. Understanding that history is the key to changing its tragic course.

The idea of the starving masses driven onto the streets to demand bread, and then being forced by the violent response of the state to seek its overthrow, had seemed impossibly quaint for decades — the stuff of a distant epoch, kept alive in Broadway musicals and Warren Beatty vehicles in a world where the masses were acquiring cell phones. Bread? Who needs bread? Let them eat arugula at globalization’s ever-expanding buffet table.

But a cursory look at the headlines of the past month — a general strike and mass protests in Egypt, the storming of the presidential palace in Haiti, violent protests in Cote D’Ivoire and Cameroon, demonstrations in Uzbekistan, Yemen and Indonesia, among others, suggests that the proverbial “wretched of the Earth” are arising, all over again, this time in response to skyrocketing food prices.
Turns out the Malthusians, and even — gasp! — their Marxist progeny, were not entirely wrong, after all: Spread capitalism to every corner of the globe (a planet already blighted by a century of industrialism with its attendant sometimes catastrophic climate) and the rich do, indeed, get richer, while the poor do get poorer, although not necessarily more numerous. The patterns are uneven, but basic laws of scarcity still prevail. Global food prices have risen 80% over the past three years, and the primary reason may be the success of capitalism in China and India over the past two decades: Their industrialization has spurred demand for energy beyond the capacity of supply, which has pushed oil prices to levels five times what they were in the mid 1990s. That, in turn, has raised pressure on food prices by making agricultural inputs more expensive, and by prompting the substitution of biofuel crops for edible ones on scarce farmland. And, of course, capitalism has indeed raised the living standards of hundreds of millions of people in those countries — they’re eating more, and better, particularly more meat. The fact that it takes some eight calories of grain to produce a single calorie of beef means that the expansion of meat protein in the diet of previously poor Chinese workers also creates a massive increase in global demand for grains. Throw in climate disasters such as the Australian drought, and you have food inflation spiraling so fast that even the U.N. agency created to feed people in emergencies is u