Matt Yglesias

Mahmoud Abbas Dropping Out of Palestinian Elections

Reports are out that Mahmoud Abbas is telling people he won’t run for re-election as head of the Palestinian Authority: “The aides said Abbas received calls earlier today from Israel’s president and defense minister, the president of Egypt and the king of Jordan, all asking him to reconsider.”

People want Abbas to reconsider, because him declining to run could be a disaster for the peace process which, in turn, would be a disaster for the remaining credibility of the four figures in question. But note that among those begging Abbas to reconsider is not Israel’s prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, who loves the idea of isolating and discrediting Palestinian moderates in order to bring Palestinian radicals to power and thus have the pretext he wants to avoid peace negotiations. The question is why the United States has been helping Netanyahu do this. The Obama administration’s decision to back-track on its initial demand of a settlement freeze, followed by the catastrophically counterproductive pressure that was brought to bear on Abbas to disavow the Goldstone report have massively undermined his political position. The upshot has been another set of victories for the Hamas-Likud partnership that’s been ruining things in Israel/Palestine since the wave of suicide bombings that brought Netanyahu to power in the first place in the 1990s.

Living Conditions in Gaza

It’s probably just the well-known anti-Israeli bias of the Condé Nast corporation at work, but I certainly found Lawrence Wright’s description of living conditions in the Gaza Strip to be pretty affecting. It seems to me that a lot of the huffing and puffing you hear about this person’s bias or that person’s moral equivalence is about trying to distract people from looking clearly at what’s going on:

Israeli patrols tightly enforce a three-mile limit in the Mediterranean and fire on boats that approach the line. [...]

The Israeli blockade includes a ban on toys, so the only playthings available have been smuggled, at a premium, through tunnels from Egypt [...]

Many of Gaza’s sports facilities have been destroyed by Israeli bombings, including the headquarters for the Palestinian Olympic team. [...]

Israeli authorities maintain a list of about three dozen items that they permit into Gaza, but the list is closely kept and subject to change. Almost no construction materials—such as cement, glass, steel, or plastic pipe—have been allowed in, on the ground that such items could be used for building rockets or bunkers. [...]

According to Haaretz, the I.D.F. has calculated that a hundred and six truckloads of humanitarian relief are needed every day to sustain life for a million and a half people. But the number of trucks coming into Gaza has fallen as low as thirty-seven. [...]

Until Operation Cast Lead, there were several concrete plants, a flour mill, and an ice-cream factory, but they have all been bombed or bulldozed, and the mixing trucks for the concrete have been knocked over. Houses and mosques and shops lie in rubble; entire neighborhoods have been demolished. [...]

Most economic activity came to a halt in 2007, with the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Now, according to the U.N., about seventy per cent of Gazans live on less than a dollar a day, and seventy-five per cent rely on international food assistance. [...]

[T]he tanks that line the border do lob shells into the territory, causing many random casualties. While I was there, a teen-age girl was killed, and her young brother injured, in such an incident. The Israelis maintain a buffer zone along the border about half a mile deep, which places at least thirty per cent of the Strip’s arable land off limits. [...]

The Deputy Defense Minister, Matan Vilnai, warned that Gazans were “bringing upon themselves a greater Shoah, because we will use all our strength in every way we deem appropriate.” [...]

That’s completely without getting into what happened during the attack and who was killed and why and how. This is a prison in which over 1.5 million people, the majority of whom are under the age of 18, are serving time.

Obama’s Settlement Climbdown

Spencer Ackerman has a good post on the damage the Obama administration’s apparent climbdown on the settlement freeze issue is doing to moderate Palestinian leaders. From the perspective of Bibi Netanyahu, that’s great. He doesn’t want to freeze settlements, he doesn’t want to remove settlements, and he doesn’t want a comprehensive peace agreement. But he doesn’t want to come right out and say that he has no intention of negotiating a comprehensive peace. So his best hope is either that a humiliated Fatah leadership loses to Hamas, or else that Fatah leaders need to move so far to the right to forestall that from happening that there’s nothing to negotiate over.

Either way, a disaster for peace and ultimately for Israel.

It’s worth observing this is the dynamic that’s existed between Netanyahu and Hamas since back in the Oslo days with the actions of each re-enforcing the political position of their alleged enemies on the other side, hollowing out the middle ground and plunging the region into an ever-more-disastrous situation.

Americans Favorably Disposed to Pro-Israel Lobbying, and Increasingly So

The Anti-Defamation League’s poll on anti-Jewish beliefs in America features a couple of instances of what I think are dubious statistical interpretation, but also a bunch of interesting stuff. This trend, in particular, is interesting and I think runs somewhat counter to media perceptions:

In the early nineties, public opinion was closely divided on the merits of the influence of pro-Israel lobbying organizations. More recently, however, support became pretty overwhelming reflecting, I would guess, the growing influence of Christian Zionist thinking.

Water Rights in Israel-Palestine

I get a little tired sometimes of a the navel-gazing intra-Jewish controversies about Israel. Here’s a first-order issue:

Israel is denying Palestinians access to even the basic minimum of clean, safe water, Amnesty International says. In a report, the human rights group says Israeli water restrictions discriminate against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. [...]

In the 112-page report, Amnesty says that on average Palestinian daily water consumption reaches 70 litres a day, compared with 300 litres for the Israelis.

Israel is, of course, a democracy. And politicians in democracies are responsive to the interests of the electorate. Jewish settlers in the West Bank get to vote. Palestinians in the West Bank don’t get to vote. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that infrastructure decisions are systematically made in ways that favor the interests of the settlers over the interests of the stateless Palestinians. These are the wages of occupation.

Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace

I was debating with Jon Chait at a J Street panel this morning on the subject of “what does it mean to be pro-Israel?” As expected, we disagreed on a number of points, most of which I was right on and he was wrong on. But one thing he said in his opening remarks that I really disagreed with was that there was an ambiguity running through the J Street constituency as to whether the group was or should be pro-Israel at all.

That just struck me as kind of nuts. My J Street button said “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace.” It’s not a subtle aspect of the messaging. But when we moved to the Q&A time it became clear that a number of people in the audience really were quite uncomfortable self-defining as “pro-Israel” in any sense and that others are uncomfortable with the basic Zionist concept of a Jewish national state. I was, of course, aware that those views existed but it had seemed to me that it was clear that that wasn’t what J Street is there to advocate for. Apparently, though, it wasn’t clear to everyone.

Which I think is interesting. Readers will know that I’m not a big fan of nationalism and I am a big fan of trans-national projects like the European Union and the United Nations. And it’s even true that I really kind of hope that hundreds of years from now there won’t be national states at all, instead we’ll all be lumped in with the Vulcans and the Andorians in a United Federation of Planets and off we’ll go. But there’s clearly no prospects for the abolition of the nation-state in the short-term. And the Jewish people’s claim to a nation-state is just as strong as the Finnish or Dutch or Thai claim. Or, for that matter, as the Palestinian claim. By far the best way to secure a just resolution of those conflicting claims is through a two-state solution—an independent Palestine, and a democratic Jewish Israel.

I completely grasp the pull of radical cosmopolitan values, but I think people who think that the area west of the Jordan River would be a great place to try implementing them in the short-term are being a bit crazy. It’s not even clear that Belgium or Canada will be able to survive as bi-national entities.

Who’s “Pro-Israel”?

I’m gone this morning to speak at the J Street conference. Jon Chait and I will be debating what it means to be “pro-Israel.” Always looking for synergy I wrote a Daily Beast column on this very subject. So there.

HRW and Hamas

Since Human Rights Watch’s work in the Middle East and North Africa is driven by the organization’s anti-Israel agenda, clearly this letter urging Hamas leadership to take seriously the allegations made against their group in the Goldstone Report and to implement Goldstone’s recommendations can’t actually have happened. For that matter, since Goldstone himself was part of the very same vast anti-Israel agenda his own report can’t possibly have said that stuff.

That said, if we pretend that HRW really did issue the statement posted on their website, it highlights an interesting dynamic. Clearly, in the real world Hamas is not an organization that’s interested in human rights or the laws of war. But if you read the article you can see that Hamas is at least an organization that’s interested in pretending to be interested in these things and gets into a dialogue with human rights groups:

Prior to the vote, a Hamas Foreign Ministry adviser, Ahmad Yusuf, had said that Hamas “will try to do our best” to investigate rocket attacks against Israeli population centers. Yusuf also claimed that Hamas had only intended its rocket attacks to hit Israeli “military targets,” rather than Israeli civilians, and that “maybe some of these rockets missed their targets” because they were “primitive weapons.”

That’s pretty transparently nonsense:

In its letter to Haniya, Human Rights Watch recalled repeated statements by Hamas officials and fighters indicating an intent to direct the rockets toward civilian targets and asked Hamas to clarify its stance on the issue. A June 11, 2006 statement from the Izz el-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the Hamas armed wing, for example, said that in response to an Israeli attack that targeted Palestinian fighters, the group had carried out a rocket attack against the Israeli town of Sderot and would continue attacking Sderot “until its residents flee in horror. We will turn Sderot into a ghost town.”

The point here is that Hamas seems to believe that its own legitimacy and interests can, in fact, be damaged by the perception that it is violating the laws of war and attracting the disapproval of human rights monitors. What’s more, Hamas is clearly very interested in pressing human rights claims against Israel. But that, of course, opens them up to pressure to acknowledge the criticisms of their own conduct being made by those very same group. HRW grew out of the Helsinki Watch concept, which was aimed at holding the Communist Bloc to account for violations of agreements they had plainly signed in bad faith. At the time, that was regarded by many as a futile and pointless task, but in retrospect most people now acknowledge that their work was important and effective.

Bernstein on Human Rights Watch

It’s certainly news that Human Rights Watch’s critics were able to get a former HRW chairman to slam the organization for having the temerity to hold Israel to the same standards of international humanitarian law to which it holds every other country. But Bernstein doesn’t appear to have any arguments to make that any of the instances of human rights violations HRW has documented didn’t take place. Instead his view is basically that Israel ought to be exempt from criticism because its enemies are mean:

Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. [...]

The organization is expressly concerned mainly with how wars are fought, not with motivations. To be sure, even victims of aggression are bound by the laws of war and must do their utmost to minimize civilian casualties. Nevertheless, there is a difference between wrongs committed in self-defense and those perpetrated intentionally.

For one thing, The New York Times really shouldn’t publish op-eds stating that “the government of Iran . . . has openly declared its intention . . . to murder Jews everywhere.” There are Jews in Iran, unmurdered, subject to the same repressive dictatorship as Iran’s Muslims, with its abuses duly cataloged and condemned by Human Rights Watch.

The argument in the second graf I quote is, huffing and puffing aside, all there is to Bernstein’s argument. He thinks that Hamas and Hezbollah “started it” and Israel is acting in self-defense, and that countries acting in self-defense should generally be exempted from international humanitarian law and human rights norms. This is a thesis a lot of people seem eager to embrace in the specific case of Israel, but few people seem prepared to defend as a general proposition or to apply as a general matter. People don’t defend it as a general proposition because it’s not defensible. For one thing, this just isn’t what international humanitarian law says. Just war theory has always recognized specific ethical obligations of combatants that are unrelated to the justice of their cause, and international humanitarian law does the same. After all, subjectivizing the obligations of combatants in the way Bernstein proposes would drain the standards of all force. All participants in all wars think that they’re the good guys and the enemy is the bad guys.

It’s the existence of independent standards that lets us say that it’s wrong and illegal of Hamas to lob rockets at Israeli towns, and to try to build a consensus around that point that’s independent of people’s views on all the different twists and turns of the Israeli-Arab conflict. But by the very same token Israel’s obligation to minimize civilians’ exposure to harm also exists independently of people’s views on all the different twists and turns of the Israeli-Arab conflict. To relativize combatants obligations to the merits of their underlying position would just reduce human rights and humanitarian law to politics, with everyone saying all their conduct was justified by the justice of their cause.

If people want to say that the whole quest to articulate objective human rights standards and international humanitarian law is inherently futile or misguided, then fine. But an awful lot of people who claim not to believe that seem to want to turn around and reject the underlying premises of the endeavor when it turns out that Israel—like its adversaries—sometimes violates those standards.

Still Marching in Iran

Iran has some kind of regular anti-Israel parade day (because, obviously, that sort of thing does a huge amount to alleviate Palestinian suffering…) but this year it went a bit awry:

Conservatives had warned against using the annual pro-Palestinian march, known as Quds Day, as an excuse for renewed protests against Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose disputed re-election in June plunged Iran into its worst internal crisis in three decades.

But the protesters turned out anyway, wearing green, the color of opposition, and often walking alongside larger groups of state-sanctioned marchers bearing huge banners denouncing Israel. The protesters even flouted Iran’s support for pro-Palestinian militants, chanting “No to Gaza and Lebanon, my life is for Iran.” And when officials shouted “death to Israel” through loudspeakers, protesters derisively chanted “death to Russia” in response. [...]

The opposition leaders Mir Hussein Moussavi, Mehdi Karroubi and Mohammad Khatami joined the crowds, drawing appreciative cheers and chants of support. Later, Basij militia members tried to attack Mr. Khatami and Mr. Karroubi, but defenders fought them back, opposition Web sites reported.

Meanwhile, Ahmadenijad took the occasion to opine that the Holocaust “is a lie” designed to bolster support for Israel. Earlier this week a prominent anti-regime ayatollah in Iran stepped up his rhetoric accusing the government of being a “military regime” and urging clerics to preach resistance.

Goldstone Report Findings

Judge Richard Goldstone

Not really unexpected, but good to have on record:

The UN Fact-Finding Mission led by Justice Richard Goldstone on Tuesday released its long-awaited report on the Gaza conflict, in which it concluded there is evidence indicating serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law were committed by Israel during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.

The report also concludes there is also evidence that Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes, as well as possibly crimes against humanity, in their repeated launching of rockets and mortars into Southern Israel.

Presumably Judge Goldstone issued these findings motivated by his racist attitudes toward Jewish people, and threw in the stuff about Palestinians in an effort to cloud over his true agenda with false even-handedness.

Hamas Embracing Holocaust Denial

The UN Relief and Works Agency, which oversees assistance to Palestinian refugees, was considering the idea of including a unit on the Holocaust in history lessons to Palestinian schoolchildren. It seems like a good idea to me that, among other things, might help the kids better understand the context for their current situation. Hamas leaders, however, are having none of it:

Hamas spiritual leader Younis al-Astal lashed out after hearing that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, the main U.N. body aiding Palestinian refugees, planned to introduce lessons about the Holocaust to Gaza students. Adding the Holocaust to the curriculum would amount to “marketing a lie and spreading it,” al-Astal wrote in a statement. [...]

Many Palestinians are reluctant to acknowledge Jewish suffering, fearing it might diminish their own. Attitudes toward the Holocaust range from outright denial to challenging its scope.

Israeli officials are using this argument as a pretext for why western governments shouldn’t reconsider their attitudes to dealings with Hamas. Meanwhile, the actual situation in Gaza is incredibly dire. As Brian Katulis, Marc Lynch, and Robert C. Adler wrote for CAP in July:

In the six months since unilateral ceasefires by Israel and Hamas were announced on the eve of President Obama’s inauguration, the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip have suffered from shortages, including basic medicines and services. In early March, the International Conference in Support of the Palestinian Economy for the Reconstruction of Gaza that was held in Egypt raised a total of $4.4 billion in pledges from the international community for the Palestinian Authority. But stringent import restrictions imposed by Israel and the continued divisions among Palestinian factions have impeded these funds from delivering much benefit to Palestinians.

A recent ICRC report emphasizes that the Israeli blockade has pushed unemployment to over 40 percent, while depriving the population of regular access to running water, to say nothing of proper medical. They warn that tens of thousands of children are going malnourished due to “deficiencies in iron, vitamin A and vitamin D.” The indifference of both the Israeli government and the Hamas leadership toward the practical aspects of this humanitarian crisis is truly appalling.

Hadar Susskind Joins J Street

J Street, the newish pro-peace Israel lobby, seems to have scored a major coup by snagging Hadar Susskind, currently vice president and Washington director for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, as their new director of policy and strategy. James Besser from New York Jewish Week explains:

“My goal is to build as broad a base of support as possible for Israel at this politically pivotal moment when there is both great opportunity to make progress in resolving the conflict and a tremendous risk of squandering it,” Susskind said in a statement. “I look forward to working to grow a strong and integrated progressive pro-Israel movement and to build that much needed support across the spectrum of American political life.”

His background – he was born in Israel and served in the IDF in Lebanon – won’t please those right-wingers who say J Street is anti-Israel because it disagrees with …well, them. And it probably won’t mollify more mainstream leaders who worry that the new group undercuts American Jewish unity on key questions involving Israel.

The significance of attracting people with this kind of credibility, however, isn’t to mollify high-information ideologues who simply disagree with a progressive approach to these issues. The significance is that a great many American Jews are torn between their generally progressive approach to political issues and the fact that they often worry about the real motives of people who become critical of Israeli policy or the status quo in US-Israel relations. It’s difficult to have those kind of doubts about Israeli-born IDF veterans with a track record of working in significant Jewish organizations.

Bronfman Argues for Settlement Freeze

As Dana Goldstein points out, Edgar Bronfman (”one of the main funders behind the Birthright Israel program, which sends young American Jews to Israel to develop their Zionist sympathies”) is not exactly one of the usual suspects of the Jewish left on the debate over America’s Israel policy. Still, he sees the logic of the push for Israel to get real about halting settlement construction and beginning to reverse it:

At a certain point, there will be more Arabs than Jews living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, thereby leading to one de facto apartheid state if no resolution to the conflict is reached via a two-state solution. [...] But continued “natural growth” in West Bank settlements cannot be allowed to take priority over the possibility of normalized relations with the entire Arab world. Peace with its neighbors, not the sensitivities of a small minority of religious settlers, has to be Israel’s ultimate objective.

Right.

The “No Drama” Foreign Policy

I find myself pretty strongly disagreeing with the Scottish government’s release of convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al Megrahi. But David Frum’s post on the matter reminds me of one of the things I most appreciate about Barack Obama’s approach to foreign policy:

Of course, there’s a more likely explanation for the lack of outcry: this administration’s lack of moral center on terrorism. Whether it is his gentle reproofs of Ahmadinejad or his readiness to shake hands with Hugo Chavez, Barack Obama just does not get all that excited about international bad actors. Not that the president never gets angry. He can get plenty angry over the arrest of Henry Louis Gates or Israeli settlements. Lockerbie: not so much.

To me what’s going on here is that Barack Obama tries to make policy according to what Weber called an “ethic of responsibility.” He’s the President of the United States. He wields a mighty and awesome degree of power. But he’s not omnipotent. So he’s resolved to try to use his power on the world stage in ways that make things better. Refusing to shake hands with Hugo Chavez doesn’t help anyone or improve anything. Talking with the UK government in advance about our objections to releasing a Lockerbie bomber might achieve something. But loudly denouncing them ex post facto isn’t going to help anyone or improve anything. By contrast, getting mad at Israel about settlements really might accomplish something—the US-Israeli relationship is completely different from the US-Iranian relationship and “this thing we’re doing is pissing off the president” could realistically be a factor in Israeli decision-making.

The Skip Gates episode is an interesting example. I think the way to think about this is that it pushed Obama’s personal buttons in a way that made him forget his sound approach to these things. On Gates, he acted the way Frum and other neocons want him to act all the time—embracing an ethic of ultimate ends in which the most important thing is to align his expression of his sentiments with transcendent moral values. The fact that wading into the controversy wouldn’t accomplish anything was set aside. But, in fact, the intervention only made things worse and Obama wisely moved to try to reverse himself and smooth things out.

The point either way is that venting outrage is a job for a columnist or a blogger. A president needs to manage real-world situations with attention to the consequences for people’s lives.

Huckabee Calls for Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinian Territories

Mike Huckabee is a fairly charming guy, but the fact that these kind of sentiments can be uttered by a member of the American political mainstream tells you a lot about why Arabs mistrust America’s approach to the Israeli-Arab conflict. He’s moved on from his general support for settlements to a call to, I guess, deport the entire population of Palestine to someplace else:

Speaking to a small group of foreign reporters in Jerusalem, Huckabee, seen as a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2012, said the international community should consider establishing a Palestinian state some place else.

“The question is should the Palestinians have a place to call their own? Yes, I have no problem with that. Should it be in the middle of the Jewish homeland? That’s what I think has to be honestly assessed as virtually unrealistic.”

In some ways, however, Huckabee is to be congratulated on his frankness. The implication of the policies of the Netanyahu administration, and of U.S.-based Jewish organizations that are pressing Barack Obama to back off America’s opposition to settlements, points exactly in the direction Huckabee is now espousing. Bibi and AIPAC aren’t about to start embracing a binational state, so they’re either talking about creating an apartheid system or else trying to make life sufficiently intolerable for the Palestinians that they all leave. American critics of criticizing Israeli policy don’t like to articulate such ideas because they’re appalling, but this is the road we’re heading down.

Is Mary Robinson Bad for the Jews?

Mary Robinson has had a long and interesting career. As the White House press office noted when explaining Barack Obama’s decision to grant her a Presidential Medal of Freedom:

Mary Robinson was the first female President of Ireland (1990 – 1997) and a former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (1997 – 2002), a post that required her to end her presidency four months early. Robinson served as a prominent member of the Irish Senate prior to her election as President. She continues to bring attention to international issues as Honorary President of Oxfam International, and Chairs the Board of Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI Alliance). Since 2002 she has been President of Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative, based in New York, which is an organization she founded to make human rights the compass which charts a course for globalization that is fair, just and benefits all.

Naturally, Abe Foxman sees an insidious plot against the Jewish people:

Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, today issued a statement saying that Robinson has “anti-Israel bias” and calling the decision to bestow America’s highest civilian honor upon Robinson as an agent of change “ill-advised.”

James Besser explains the case, such as it is, against Robinson. You see, back in 2001:

Robinson didn’t support the anti-Semitic outbursts at Durban, but a credible case can be made that she didn’t do enough to prevent them – or speak up loudly enough after the debacle.

I think it takes a pretty serious case of narcissism to reach the conclusion that this bill of particulars ought to outweigh a person’s entire career.

My sense is that what’s really going on here is the same as what’s happening with pro-Israel groups’ years-long campaign against Human Rights Watch. It’s simply not possible to do a credible job of international human rights monitoring without criticizing Israeli behavior now and again. Exercising sovereign authority over the lives of millions of stateless persons is a human rights fiasco waiting to happen. But a lot of Jewish organizations in the United States seem to take the view that because Israel’s human rights record is better than, say, Sudan’s (and it sure is better) that any criticism of Israel amounts to anti-Israel bias.

Dershowitz: Palestinians ‘Played A Significant Role In The Holocaust’

Professor Alan Dershowitz (publicity photo from alandershowitz.com)

Matt Duss says most of what needs to be said about the bizarre Avigdor Lieberman / Alan Dershowitz team-up to suggest that somehow “the Palestinian leadership, supported by the Palestinian masses, played a significant role in Hitler’s Holocaust.”

Let me just add, however, that if we’re going to cite alleged Palestinian complicity in the Holocaust as justification for dispossessing them of their claims to East Jerusalem that what this mostly does is bolster the argument, often heard from anti-Zionist Arabs, that the Jewish state should be located in Europe where obviously a much-greater degree of complicity existed. Obviously in the real world whatever the rights and wrongs of decisions made in the 1940s there’s no practical or humane way to turn back the clock and put Israel where Kaliningrad is or some such. But it just goes to show how nonsensical the entire line of inquiry is in the first place. As a historical matter, there’s a link between the Holocaust and the foundation of the State of Israel, but to try to ground Israeli claims to sovereignty over Middle Eastern land on the basis of some kind of decades-old collective guilt for events in which Arabs were extremely peripheral players is bizarre.

The US-Israeli Alliance, Beyond Blood and Soil

Eric Cantor, token Jewish Republican, was naturally a featured speaker at Christians United for Israel’s big event yesterday. He offered the view that while “reaching out to the Muslim world” is all well and good we need to make sure that “as Americans that our policies be firmly grounded in the beliefs of the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which this country was founded.” It’s not totally clear to me what this means beyond Cantor trying to build Jewish-Christian solidarity on a solid foundation of anti-Muslim sentiment, but Jon Chait thinks we should understand it as meaning something more particular, namely that “he wants the United States to treat Israel the way Russia treats Serbia — an ally based on common cultural heritage.”

Chait further comments:

It’s also perfectly nuts. The basis of the U.S.-Israel alliance is, and should continue to be, Israel’s democratic character and desire to live in peace, in contrast to the eliminationist intentions of its neighbors. Cantor is saying that Israel deserves America’s support merely because of its Jewish quality. So if, say, Israel were to become a fascistic state bent on the destruction of its neighbors*, then the case for the U.S.-Israel alliance would be no less strong, because of a shared religious heritage. It’s a rancid, illiberal, primitive way of thinking about foreign policy.

*Yes, left-wingers, I know you think this is already the case. Take your comments to Stephen Walt’s blog.

The footnote gives us a caricatured view of a liberal critique of the U.S.-Israeli status quo. But surely we can admit that there’s some middle ground between “a fascistic state bent on the destruction of its neighbors” and a state with a “democratic character” possessed of a “desire to live in peace.” The Bibi Netanyahu administration does not appear to have any interest in destroying Egypt or Syria or Jordan or Lebanon but it also doesn’t appear to have any interest in living in peace with the Palestinians. Nor does it even have any interest in ceasing to expropriate Palestinian land. And while certainly not a fascistic state, it is a state where in the West Bank the level of rights one has is determined by whether one is Jewish or not.

Americans, especially liberal American Jews, have tended to gloss over that situation noting that Israel is operating from a position of some duress. What’s more, the fact that Israel exercises sovereignty over a population of millions of non-citizens is deemed to be a temporary situation rather than an integral characteristic of the Israeli state. This, however, is where the question of the settlement freeze really comes into play. The more settlements grow and expand, and the more the Israeli government characterizes any limits on settlement expansion as an intolerable violation of settler rights, the more the situation in the West Bank ceases to look temporary. And when viewed as a non-temporary situation, the idea of a patch of territory in which citizenship is differentiated by ethnicity, with segregated roads and walled-off townships and differential access to water looks less-and-less like a democracy.

The Israel Test

Around the office last week we all had a good chuckle over the arrival of a book called The Israel Test whose promotional sheet advertises the book with the headline “WASP Prophet of Reaganomics calls Israel the crucial battlefield for Capitalism and Freedom in our time.” But it was just today that I started reading further. The argument turns out to be somewhat unusual in that it hinges in part on what chapter three dubs “The Tale of the Bell Curve,” in other words the innate genetic superiority of the Chosen People relative to the goyim. He offers some intriguing examples to illustrate this point beyond the familiar fact that Jews win lots of Nobel Prizes and are good at chess. For example:

Yes, there is a religious component in anti-Semitism, but there is also a political and economic element, reflected in the objective anti-Semitism of Karl Marx, Noam Chomsky, Friedrich Engels, Howard Zinn, Naomi Klein, and other Jewish leftist leaders who above all abhor capitalism. Jews, amazingly, excel so readily in all intellectual fields that they outperform all rivals even in the arena of anti-Semitism.

Alternative interpretations would include the possibility that Naomi Klein probably isn’t an anti-Semite, or even that when you combine belief Jewish genetic superiority with the fact of Jewish proclivity for left-wing politics that you seem to get the conclusion that left-wing politics is correct. Back to the publicity material, we learn that what’s so awesome about Israel is that it “concentrates the genius of the Jews in one place.” Which at least to my eye makes it sound a bit as if Gilder likes Israel in part because he wishes American Jews would leave him alone and go live there instead.

Yes, of Course Netanyahu’s Commitment to Peace is Disingenuous

Isabel Kreshner for The New York Times does her best to tell the truth about Bibi Netanyahu, and is clearly groaning against the limits of newspaper convention:

In the weeks since Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, finally accepted the principle of a Palestinian state, with qualifications, there has been deep skepticism about his sincerity. [...] even senior officials and prominent figures of his conservative Likud Party have been busy explaining, privately and publicly, why they think there is not likely to be a Palestinian state any time soon, in ways that raise even more questions about the current government’s commitment to reaching a final peace accord.

And Mr. Netanyahu’s diplomatic turnaround was greeted by a notable silence among the Likud firebrands and hawks, widely interpreted here as a sign that they feel they have nothing to fear.

Meanwhile, Israel is plowing ahead with a new settlement in East Jerusalem. The Obama administration’s words on the Israel-Arab conflict have been admirable, but it’s becoming clear that more than words will be needed. CAP’s recent set of policy recommendations for rescuing the two state solution before it’s too late is recommended reading.

Israeli Government, AIPAC Stepping Up Attacks on Human Rights Watch

As a Jewish progressive, one of the most disturbing elements about Israel’s recent trajectory has been an increasingly tendency by the Israeli government and by hawkish Jewish organizations to respond to criticism of Israel’s human rights record by lashing out against human rights groups. The Jerusalem Post, for example, has a report on how the Israeli government is planning to step up attacks on Human Rights Watch not by contesting HRW’s work on the merits, but by assailing the organization as somehow hypocritical for raising funds from private Saudi individuals. And Matt Duss observes that AIPAC has been emailing journalists with a story making the same argument.

Anyone genuinely interested in a good-faith exploration of whether or not Human Rights Watch ignores human rights abuses by Saudi Arabia or by other states in the region can easily enough click over to their website and find their comprehensive work on the Middle East and North Africa. You will swiftly see that the idea that HRW is some kind of Israel-bashing organization is nonsense. Their currently featured item is about just the subject you’d expect—the recent clampdown in Iran. The headline is “Iran: Detainees Describe Beatings, Pressure to Confess”. They also did a July 8 item highlighting broken promises on women’s rights from Saudi Arabia. They’re highlighting work on torture in the United Arab Emirates and on how administrative detention undermines the rule of law in Jordan.

This is vital work taking place in a large number of countries. Countries that, as the Israeli government is usually the first to point out, tend to treat their citizens really poorly. Smearing the organization doing this kind of work is very damaging. There aren’t, after all, a lot of people doing credible work of this sort. And part of the reason HRW is credible is that they call it like they see it—they don’t zero in on particular countries to serve a geopolitical agenda. Which means that when Israeli policies violate international law or human rights norms, Israel gets criticized. If this makes Israelis uncomfortable, then maybe instead of lashing out with unsupported accusations of of bias they ought to reconsider their own actions.

Haaretz: Bibi Netanyahu Thinks Emanuel and Axelrod are “Self-Hating Jews”

I try not to put too much stock in foreign press reports, but this from Barak Ravid in Haaretz seems like something Bibi Netanyahu had better deny quickly:

Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office. Two months after his visit to Washington, he is still finding it difficult to communication normally with the White House. To appreciate the depth of his paranoia, it is enough to hear how he refers to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s senior aides: as “self-hating Jews.”

I wonder what they make of other top executive branch Jews like Larry Summers and Peter Orszag.

Biden on Israel/Iran

Israel Air Force F-15s (wikimedia)

Over the weekend, Joe Biden made some news with these remarks on the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iran:

BIDEN: Look, Israel can determine for itself — it’s a sovereign nation — what’s in their interest and what they decide to do relative to Iran and anyone else.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Whether we agree or not?

BIDEN: Whether we agree or not. They’re entitled to do that. Any sovereign nation is entitled to do that. But there is no pressure from any nation that’s going to alter our behavior as to how to proceed. What we believe is in the national interest of the United States, which we, coincidentally, believe is also in the interest of Israel and the whole world. And so there are separate issues. If the Netanyahu government decides to take a course of action different than the one being pursued now, that is their sovereign right to do that. That is not our choice.

This is being read by some, including Marc Lynch, as a “green light” for an Israeli attack. Like Robert Farley I think the most straightforward reading of what Biden said is rather different, he’s trying to distance the United States from any possible Israeli military action by making it clear that what Israel does or doesn’t do is decided in Israel rather than in Washington.

The main problem with this, I think, is that probably nobody’s going to believe it. Already you see many Americans taking Biden’s statement that the U.S. doesn’t control Israeli policy to “really” mean that the U.S. is encouraging Israel to attack.

Netanyahu Proposes “Settlement Freeze” That Would Allow for Much New Settlement Construction

I’d say the developments reported by Ethan Bronner in The New York Times show that even very modest American pressure can force the Israeli government to try to do something to heal the breach. But it’s important to be clear that this doesn’t actually amount to very much:

Israel would be open to a complete freeze of settlement building in the West Bank for three to six months as part of a broad Middle East peace endeavor that included a Palestinian agreement to negotiate an end to the conflict and confidence-building steps by major Arab nations, senior Israeli officials said Sunday. [...] The freeze would not affect construction that was already under way, nor include East Jerusalem. But it would mean that during the specified time no construction of any kind could start even in the close-in settlement blocks that Israel expects to keep in any future two-state agreement with the Palestinians.

The combination of the short duration of the promise with the exemption for “already under way” development seems to deprive this of much real force. This wouldn’t halt any projects on which ground has been broken, and it wouldn’t halt continued planning, etc. for any projects planned to be undertaken in the near future. And my guess is that there’s probably a lot you could do to fudge the difference between a “shovel ready” but not-yet-underway project and one that’s already begun.

There’s no reason it should be this hard for Israel to agree to just stop and thereby toss the ball back into the Palestinians court.