Why the Settlements are a Red Herring: Views from the Left and the Right

The settlements are a red herring, and anyone who knows recent as well as more distant history understands this. Israel, and Israelis, have shown their willingness, even their eagerness, to dismantle settlements--see Yamit, Gaza, northern Samaria--and make even larger land concessions/withdrawals--see all of Sinai, southern Lebanon buffer zone, all of Gaza) in the hopes that this would achieve the long yearned for peace and normalization. If land for peace has proven to be a chimera, what then would freezing existing settlement growth solve?
below, views from the left and right.
david brumer

From my point of view, there are settlements and then there are settlements. I'll get to the differences soon. But the idea of stopping all construction in all settlements means that once again the Israelis will be ceding something in advance and for nothing in return. This is a destructive negotiating tactic and will encourage the same kind of intransigence -you give me, I take- that has marked the Palestinians in all of the talks. After all, the West Bank is one of the prime subjects of the parleying. Telling the Israelis that they can't build another house in this settlement and in that one, too (in all of the settlements, in fact) means that no one can marry and no one can have children and no one can add a room to the house. This is not diplomacy; it is the smothering of ordinary life. Since there is an ongoing demographic race in Jerusalem, which is also one of the subjects at any future conference, why doesn't the administration also demand from the Jews and the Arabs that they cease pro-creating? m peretz

Netanyahu should have unequivocally rejected the false symmetry drawn between settlements and genocidal schemes against the Jewish state. He should have reproved his interlocutors for the grossly unjust moral equivalence they carelessly create. It might have helped to remind opinion-molders abroad that the settlements didn't cause our regional strife and that consequently, visceral enmity for Israel won't disappear, even if every last settlement does. The settlements, Bibi should have emphasized, are red herrings deliberately dragged in - with heaps of malice aforethought - to mislead the uninitiated and thereby undermine Israel.
Arabs regard all of Israel as an illegitimate settlement. Israel was hated, designs for its destruction were blueprinted and terror was rampant before the first settlement was founded on land liberated in the Six Day War of self-defense. Had the Arab world not attempted to destroy Israel in 1967, the territories on which settlements eventually arose wouldn't have come under Israel's control - ergo Arab belligerence predated Israeli settlements.
Israel's head of government might have added that these settlements aren't remote from Israel's heartland. Indeed, they're directly adjacent to its most crowded population centers, besides being the cradle of Jewish history. Jews are hardly foreign interlopers in their homeland. Large Jerusalem neighborhoods - some continuously Jewish from time immemorial - are categorized internationally as objectionable "settlements."
SETTLEMENTS AREN'T the problem and removing them isn't the solution. sarah honig

Settling the Settlementss

Martin Peretz
There's a bit of a fracas today just below Michael Crowley's astute Plank, "Obama v. Netanyahu," about whether or not I had ever criticized the settlements. Well, the truth is that I have, actually from early on when they were creations facilitated by peace icons like Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin. Just to test me, take a look at my writings from Hebron during the summer of 2005.

Having said this, let me make clear that in the 42 years since the Six Day War, the Palestinians haven't shown any serious readiness to make peace with Israel that would encourage Jerusalem to make any more one-sided concessions in advance that experience proves will just be pocketed and not be reciprocated at all.

In the exchange of demands between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the Netanyahu government has asked that the P.A. recognize the State of Israel and also that it is the state of the Jewish people. One would think that there would be nothing simpler than this. It was the basic presumption of the League of Nations mandate to the British in Palestine, starting in 1921-1922. And most significantly from the point of view of international history, the United Nations General Assembly sanctioned and provided for a "Jewish state" in Palestine and an "Arab state" in Palestine already in late 1947.
I will make my not-at-all-pedantic little point again: The imagined Arab state was not denoted as Palestinian because no one in their right mind at the U.N. saw a Palestinian people on the horizon. The local Arabs were mostly satraps of the surrounding Arab countries. They defined themselves within tribes and clans, extended families and gangs of ruffians There was no national vision with which to see the lost opportunity. They now apparently do really want a state and they even call themselves Palestinians, which is a promising start. Mazal tov. When the Zionists aspired to statehood they built national institutions, and they were building those national institutions ever since World War I, at least. Not so the Palestinians who have supped for almost 60 years at the penurious gruel fed to them by UNRWA, which is the U.N.'s instrument for keeping them dependent. And their case for a state was made by waves of successive organizations whose identity was tied to distinctive forms of terrorism.
Still, Israel has committed itself to withdrawing from the 92% of the land it captured in 1967, plus compensation in Israeli territory abutting an envisioned Palestinian state. No, no, said the Palestinians. We'll take nothing less than 100% of the very territory Jordan had ruled after annexing it in 1949. It was Yassir Arafat, after all, who walked out of Bill Clinton's Camp David talks in 2000 and not Ehud Barak who actually gave and gave and gave.
Now, the Obama administration is engaged in another try at the peace process, egged on presumably by the preposterous idea that, if Bibi only utters the magic phrase "two-state solution" and halts construction even for natural growth in every single one of the settlements, America's troubles in the world of Islam will not only ease but be transformed. Not surprisingly, Hilary Clinton, our martinet secretary of state, has enthusiastically rushed to formulate these instructions to Israel in the harshest possible terms.
This has been a long detour to coming back to my view of settlements. From my point of view, there are settlements and then there are settlements. I'll get to the differences soon. But the idea of stopping all construction in all settlements means that once again the Israelis will be ceding something in advance and for nothing in return. This is a destructive negotiating tactic and will encourage the same kind of intransigence -you give me, I take- that has marked the Palestinians in all of the talks. After all, the West Bank is one of the prime subjects of the parleying. Telling the Israelis that they can't build another house in this settlement and in that one, too (in all of the settlements, in fact) means that no one can marry and no one can have children and no one can add a room to the house. This is not diplomacy; it is the smothering of ordinary life. Since there is an ongoing demographic race in Jerusalem, which is also one of the subjects at any future conference, why doesn't the administration also demand from the Jews and the Arabs that they cease pro-creating?
In fact, the 2003 "road map" made distinctions among settlements, envisioning that most would be vacated by Israel but that the largest would remain sovereign Israeli territory. The very largest happen to cling to Jerusalem. I wouldn't withdraw from them in a million years. Not even the crankiest peacenik in Israel would pull out from Ma'aleh Adumim, virtually cheek by jowl to Jerusalem and with more than 35,000 inhabitants. There are other smaller towns close to Jerusalem that will not be given up. This is a matter of the security of the city, its breathing room and, yes, its centrality in Jewish history and in contemporary Jewish life.
There is a price to be paid by the Palestinians by their suicidal politics over the decades. In fact, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert withdrew from four West Bank settlements. But that was before the Gaza settlements and the entirety of the Strip which Israel vacated became a war front with missiles and rockets regularly fired into Israel. Jerusalem had prepared for a much wider retreat from Judea and Samaria so that Palestine could emerge as territorially intact. If Netanyahu is reluctant now to utter the "two-state solution" mantra it is because the mistakes of his three predecessors -Ehud Barak, Sharon and Olmert- have taught him that Israel should not give by declaration in advance what is properly the subject of a treaty and of its enumerated and believable guarantees. And if I were Netanyahu, I would expect also to be able to increase defensive settlements in the Jordan Valley rift as a protection against Palestinian terror flowing east to west and west to east between the kingdom and the new Palestine.
The regions populated by Palestinian Arabs would still be coterminous and coherent. And if he has to give a little more of the Negev to the Palestinian state, so be it. As the Israelis have demonstrated, the desert also produces...If you will it is no dream. A peace process should not be an invitation to mayhem. I am afraid that the Obama administration has embarked on a perilous journey. It should stop trying to orchestrate what Israel does in the (vain) hope that the Palestinian Authority will come around and say something realistic.

P.S.: The Yale University Press has recently published a book, One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel-Palestine Conflict, by the brave and truthful historian Benny Morris. He is also a frequent contributor to TNR. I've learned from every piece of writing he has done, even when some of the material shocked me. One of the original "new historians" of Zionism, Morris writes in this book about a possible solution to the "problem." It is a federation between Palestine and Jordan. OK with me; not OK, I believe, either with the king or the politicians of Palestine. The National Interest has had this book reviewed in its current issue by Walter Laqueur, certainly the most distinguished living historian of almost every aspect of the subject. A clear headed Zionist, he is not a patsy for anyone. He also thinks that the settlements, if held too indiscriminately and too long, would ruin Israel. But he knows well the intrinsic impediments to the Palestinians actually dealing with real realities on the ground. Here and there, I disagree with Laqueur (as with Morris). But it would be a good deed for someone to slip either Morris' book or Laqueur's review essay, at least, into the president as he starts off on a trip to wherever. And it better be soon, before he flies to Cairo and promises the impossible and gets nothing in return.

Another Tack: What Bibi didn't say
Sarah Honig
In salvaging the image of a beleaguered country like Israel, it's not merely the justice of the case which counts, and not only how convincingly it's made in private. The key is to ensure listenership. Even the most effective of arguments is useless without an audience.
Binyamin Netanyahu had that audience, and with it the opportunity to stress the most elementary facts of our existence, which are, alas, too often overridden by simplistic slogans and shallow conventional wisdom. He could have done more good than Israel's entire diplomatic corps and then some. Whatever he accomplished behind the scenes, Bibi missed the opportunity to sound the voice of sanity in obsessively kitschy and dangerously unrealistic America.
Lots of ears were perked to hear what Israel's newly reelected PM would say when he visited Washington (for the first time after reassuming office) to meet with new US President Barack Obama (whose posture vis-a-vis Israel is more than a little disconcerting). Contention between the two simmered barely below the surface, tension was in the air and the media was on the lookout for good copy. America was listening.
Too bad Bibi failed to seize the opportunity.
Unlike his three predecessors, his heart is in the right place and he was prudent to evade the public semblance of open confrontation with Obama. Yet Obama hardly reciprocated in kind. He preached superciliously from the supposed moral high ground, seeming intent on casting Netanyahu as the obstructionist nay-sayer.
To dodge the baited and primed trap, Netanyahu abstained from trashing the "two-state solution" too stridently, regardless of how deceptive and how much of a survival-threatening proposition it represents for Israel. In our inauspicious circumstances, we should be grateful he didn't obsequiously offer to swallow the poisoned pill, as his three predecessors had with suicidal alacrity.
But Bibi could have challenged other fashionable mantras mouthed unthinkingly everywhere as if they were gospel. Moreover, golden opportunities to set the record straight presented themselves away from the White House turf, where Netanyahu was understandably loath to irk his unfriendly host.
HE COULD, for example, have refuted various facile refrains on Capitol Hill - like the persistent notion that settlements impede peace. This issue of course is intrinsically interconnected with the cliche condemnation of Israeli "occupation" and the sanctimonious clamor for a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu should have unequivocally rejected the false symmetry drawn between settlements and genocidal schemes against the Jewish state. He should have reproved his interlocutors for the grossly unjust moral equivalence they carelessly create. But he seemed resigned to the equation and only demanded reciprocity in its application.
It might have helped to remind opinion-molders abroad that the settlements didn't cause our regional strife and that consequently, visceral enmity for Israel won't disappear, even if every last settlement does. The settlements, Bibi should have emphasized, are red herrings deliberately dragged in - with heaps of malice aforethought - to mislead the uninitiated and thereby undermine Israel.
Arabs regard all of Israel as an illegitimate settlement. Israel was hated, designs for its destruction were blueprinted and terror was rampant before the first settlement was founded on land liberated in the Six Day War of self-defense. Had the Arab world not attempted to destroy Israel in 1967, the territories on which settlements eventually arose wouldn't have come under Israel's control - ergo Arab belligerence predated Israeli settlements.
Israel's head of government might have added that these settlements aren't remote from Israel's heartland. Indeed, they're directly adjacent to its most crowded population centers, besides being the cradle of Jewish history. Jews are hardly foreign interlopers in their homeland. Large Jerusalem neighborhoods - some continuously Jewish from time immemorial - are categorized internationally as objectionable "settlements."
SETTLEMENTS AREN'T the problem and removing them isn't the solution. Israel foolishly dismantled 21 Gaza Strip settlements in 2005. Did peace blossom all over as a result? Precisely the reverse occurred. The razing of Israeli communities was regarded as terror's triumph, expediting the Hamas takeover. Emboldened by seeming success, Hamastan amassed formidable military arsenals and launched rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.
Israel generously left behind costly hothouses and other livelihood-generating facilities - incentives for Gazans to opt for productive pursuits rather than murder and mayhem. Nevertheless, the bequeathed infrastructure was wrecked in violent frenzy and turned into terror bases. So much for addressing Gaza's humanitarian plight.
This pattern should be borne in American minds before Congressional kibitzers admonish Israel. Fatahland stands ready in Judea and Samaria to emulate Hamastan. However, the potential disaster for Israel on its elongated eastern flank makes Gazan aggression in the south appear negligible.
Netanyahu should have spread out maps and pointed to the location of the settlements that so incense the State Department. They adjoin Petah Tikva, Kfar Saba and Netanya - all quite close to Tel Aviv. This is Israel's notorious narrow waistline (nine miles between the Mediterranean and the border near Netanya). The settlements give Israel minimal depth and constitute bulwarks against utter chaos rather than obstacles to utopian harmony. They are precisely the opposite of what latter-day disguised blood-libelers claim.
Maligning the settlements - with such alarming unanimity - is the updated version of blaming Jews for whatever ails the world. Once it was medieval Europe's Black Death. Today it's Islam's insidious inroads into modern Europe. Even responsibility for Iranian nukes can be laid at Israel's door. If only Israeli settlements were sacrificed to appease the savage beast, the rest of the world might enjoy a lulling respite. And when that respite is over, more demands will be made of the Jews - who, as always, upset global equilibrium.
In the plainest language, Netanyahu should have told his listeners that they are going after the wrong side, allowing the real miscreants to gain strength while weakening a true ally and making it more vulnerable to hostile predation. This, Netanyahu should have declared, won't save America, or anyone else. It will only hasten the cataclysm.
Netanyahu should have reminded Americans that during the Six Day War - before any so-called Israeli occupation or settlement activity began - a Jordanian WWII-vintage Long Tom cannon hit an apartment building in central Tel Aviv's Kikar Masaryk, a mere hop from City Hall. That antiquated weapon was fired from a lowly hill outside Kfar Saba. Visible and assailable from that hill are greater Tel Aviv, the extended Dan and Sharon regions and Israel's three power stations (Ashkelon, Reading and Hadera). Were that hill to be ceded, no car could travel safely in metropolitan Tel-Aviv and no plane could land or take off from Ben-Gurion Airport.
Any attempt to hinge "accommodation with Iran" on suffocating the settlements is tantamount to advising Israelis to slit their own throats before Ahmadinejad nukes them. That's what Bibi should have said. Instead he mumbled something about not constructing new settlements.

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My Review of Daniel Gordis' "Saving Israel" in weekend edition of the Jerusalem Post

Saving graces
DAVID BRUMER , THE JERUSALEM POST

Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End

By Daniel Gordis

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.272 pp., $25.95, hardcover

Daniel Gordis's important new book, Saving Israel, calls for nothing short of reinventing modern Zionism. For without such a reinvention, the very continuance of the Zionist enterprise is in mortal danger. Gordis makes clear that what is at stake is not just the perpetuation of the Jewish state, but the very existence of the Jewish people.
The results of two studies in the twin pillars of modern Jewish life, one in Israel, the other in America, reveal how serious matters have gotten. When asked if the destruction (mind you, the destruction, not the gradual withering away) of Israel would be a personal tragedy for them, an astounding 50 percent of Jewish Americans under the age of 35 said it would not. The other alarming study result is that 50% of Israeli schoolchildren apparently do not know who Theodor Herzl was.

Hard as this is for some of us to believe, these statistics reflect an increasing trend of alienation from millennial Zionist aspirations as well as a growing ignorance of basic Jewish history, both modern and ancient. Gordis points to the poetry of pre-state Zionists like Natan Alterman and Haim Bialik, noting that while they criticized and challenged the biblical ethos of the Jews, they were steeped in the richness of those sacred texts and in the history of our people.
Sophisticated works like Alterman's "The Silver Platter" or Bialik's "In the City of Slaughter," while rebukes of the old order, called for the creation of a "new Jew" and reflected their authors' prodigious knowledge of Jewish history. Today, many an Israeli is ambivalent about his or her army service, is hard pressed to explain why he should pay exorbitant taxes and live by the social dictates of what he considers medieval religious fanatics, and wonders aloud about the merits of or need for a Jewish state. Too many of these Israelis, warns Gordis, no longer believe in a Zionist ethos in large part because they have lost the connection to their roots in Jewish life. Gordis is talking about Jewish identity and Jewish history, not necessarily Jewish religious life, an important subject he tackles in other chapters.

To make matters worse, all this disaffection and disconnection come at a time when Israel is facing external threats from implacable enemies like Hizbullah, Hamas and Iran, enemies with demonic designs against the Jewish state. The "euphoric" Oslo years, when peace was deemed around the corner, have given way to suicide bombings, unrelenting missile and rocket attacks, soldier kidnappings, successive proxy wars against Iranian sponsored terrorists and no signs that these threats will be eradicated any time soon. Without a deep and abiding sense of purpose, which can only come from a profound belief in Jewish rootedness in Zion, including a belief in the justness and rightness of the Zionist project, no one in their right mind would continue making the kind of sacrifices called for in Israel.

If the goal is to be just another "normal" country in the family of nations, Zionism - read, Israel - is destined to fail, according to Gordis. In the chapter "Not Just a Hebrew-Speaking America," he describes why the America ideal is a dangerous model for a country with very different goals, living a very different reality in a very different neighborhood. Gordis argues that the normality that Israelis have long yearned for is impossible to attain and not even desirable. "For normalcy as a goal will not breed the kind of distinctiveness that Israeli survival will require. If Israelis cannot articulate anything profound about Jewish civilization, or say anything about the grandest ideas that have long been at the core of Jewish life, what possible reason could there be to continue to defend a Jewish country?"

Gordis's writing is at its strongest and most cogent when he discusses the imperatives of that defense. He explores the uncomfortable history of our people in relation to power, and then makes a compelling case for Israel's prosecution of an unending series of moral wars. It's impossible to write a serious book about modern Israel's relationship to political and military power today without referring to Ruth Wisse's recent seminal work on the subject, Jews and Power, and Gordis continues where she left off. Wisse examined our inclination to give greater weight to our moral behavior than to the exigencies of survival, a tendency she characterized as "moral solipsism."

GORDIS RECONSIDERS Jewish power and our uneasy relationship to its use in his chapter, "The Wars That Must Be Waged." He goes back to both biblical injunctions ("blot out the memory of Amalek" - Deuteronomy 25:17-19; Saul's failure to obey the commandment to obliterate the enemy; "I [Samuel] will not go back with you; for you have rejected the Lord's command, and the Lord has rejected you as king over Israel" - 1 Samuel 15:26); and biblical/historical accounts of just wars waged by the Jewish people. Gordis reexamines the story of Hanukka and the centrality of the military victory the Jews won over their adversaries. The real miracle was that a small band, led by the Maccabees, was able to overcome the much larger and more powerful Greek forces and regain control of the Temple and Jerusalem.
Hanukka was originally a military victory celebration. Initial eyewitness accounts spoke of victory celebrations lasting for eight days, without an emphasis on the "miracle" of enduring flames from oil. In more recent times, the poet Aharon Ze'ev wrote a children's song, "We Bear Torches," insisting that a miracle did not happen to us, but rather people, with their courage and their might, wrought the miracle ("we chiseled away the stone until we bled").
Another illustration of our discomfort with the exercise of power comes from a midrash retelling the part of the Passover story where God chastises his angels for reveling in song, while the Egyptian army perished in pursuit of the fleeing Hebrews. (B. Megilla 10b) "The work of My hands is being drowned in the sea, and you would chant hymns?" But there is another midrash that is cited far less frequently. In this one, God reprimands the angels, saying, "My troops are in distress, and you would sing to me?" (Exodus Rabba 23:7). A very different message, suggesting that there are battles that must be fought and won, unavoidably shedding blood.
Clearly, many Jews today, including some Israelis, subscribe to the credo that war and the use of force is "un-Jewish." This is particularly so for Western Jews, especially those who've been raised in the comfort and safety of America. Many have a visceral aversion to war, are committed to the principles of pacifism and find themselves at odds with Israel's military actions.
Gordis concludes that the pacifist option would lead to national suicide of the Jewish people. Nonviolence is a luxury that we can ill afford. Instead, he suggests that we defend ourselves when necessary, "occasionally using massive force, with all the ambivalence that that inevitably arouses." We should embrace the often ignored Jewish tradition's understanding that the use of military might is sometimes a necessity (in fact, Jewish law has an entire category of war, milhemet mitzva, "commanded wars," or wars that must be waged), and in certain circumstances, the only thing that will keep us alive in an increasingly hostile world.
In other chapters, Gordis explores pressing issues facing Israel today, including the rising tensions between Israeli Arabs (who now prefer the moniker Palestinian-Israelis) and Israeli Jews, and those between secular Jewish Israelis (as well as more moderately observant Jews) and the haredim. or ultra-Orthodox. He poses unsettling questions that have been unasked for too long and raises politically incorrect propositions, not as dogma, but as a beginning for constructive dialogues.

Among those questions: "How should Israel balance its democratic principles with the sense that something should be Jewish about the country? But who should decide what that something is? And what are the rights of those who disagree? Should all Israeli schoolchildren study the Bible and some religious content? To what extent should Israel's Arabs be required to study the Hebrew Bible, or classic works of Zionist literature? Should Jewish Israelis also study the Koran?" And how can Israel's growing Arab population be more integrated into Israeli society, with all the rights, privileges and responsibilities of citizenship, with the inherent tensions as a minority in a Jewish state, with that state engaged in ongoing belligerencies with fellow Arab states?

RATHER THAN providing the answers, Gordis suggests that the best way forward is to allow these questions to percolate in the free marketplace of ideas. He recommends restoring Judaism to the heart of Israel's national debate. Included in that Judaism is not just religion but Jewish history and Jewish tradition. It should be no more the sole province of the ultra-religiousharedim than staunchly secular Israelis. The challenge is to foster dynamic and creative debates in the Zionist public square about what the Jewish state should be, and why it matters to have a Jewish state in the first place.
Gordis cautions that our greatest strengths can prove to be our greatest weaknesses (and undoing). We are by nature a self-reflective and self-critical people, and this has served us well (note how after the debacle of the IDF's performance in the Second Lebanon War, stock was taken, leaders were dismissed and the army restored its fighting prowess and morale). We must not let that healthy tendency veer into self-flagellation and worse, self-loathing. This can be seductive to some, when peace seems more distant than ever. It must be one party's fault, goes the reasoning, and since the Palestinians are increasingly seen by the world as the victim, then the fault must lie with the Jews.

These are not easy tasks. Jews the world over will need intellectual and moral fortitude to withstand the avalanche of criticisms, attacks and vilifications that do not relent, as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict shows no signs of resolving in the near future. And Israelis will increasingly need to gird their loins as well, for the likelihood is that their children will continue to be called to the battlefield. Courage, resolve and commitment will be needed. This can only happen with a renewed sense of purpose, a redefining of what the Zionist enterprise is all about and why it matters to not just Israelis, but Jews all over the world.

The writer is on the executive committees of StandWithUs/Northwest and the Seattle Chapter of the American Jewish Committee. A geriatric social worker and psychotherapist, he is also the recipient of a Certificate of Congressional Recognition for Excellence in Public Diplomacy in Support of Israel on behalf of his work with The Israel Project. http://brumspeak.blogspot.com/

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Important Voices on the Left in Israel (Ari Shavit) & America (Jeffrey Goldberg) re: Israel, Iran, Nukes and the Stakes for the World

Iran will surely top Netanyahu's agenda when he meets with President Obama this week. Too many in the West have already resigned themselves to Iran joining the still small circle of nations possessing nuclear weapons. Clearly, Israelis have not accepted this prospect as inevitable and will not sit idly by. The West, led by President Obama, would do well to consider the dire implications of a nuclear Iran, while there is still time to prevent such a disastrous, and irrevocable development.
Below, Ari Shavit's chilling prophecy of what today's inaction could lead to and Jeffrey Goldberg's careful analysis of what the threat of a nuclear Iran looks like to Israel and the Jewish people.
david brumer

The first signs that something was wrong had already appeared at the end of that first year of grace. Nevertheless, Washington was astounded when, in the summer of 2010, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that he was expelling international inspectors and galloping full-tilt toward the production of nuclear weapons. The shock turned to horror on the eve of Christmas 2010, when Iran's spiritual leader, Ali Khamenei, stated that his country had its first three nuclear warheads - aimed at Riyadh, Cairo and Tel Aviv.Spring 2011 was dramatic. First a mutual defense treaty and an agreement to collaborate on oil exports were signed between Tehran and the fragile Baghdad government. Then Kuwait, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Dubai bowed their heads and signed treaties that made them protectorates of the rising Shi'ite state. Saudi Arabia took the opposite approach: In May 2011, it announced that it had purchased nuclear weapons from Pakistan both for itself and for its ally Egypt.
By Thanksgiving 2011, the situation was clear. Jordan's King Abdullah left for exile in London. Hezbollah took control of Beirut and a bloody war of attrition erupted between Israel and the Palestinians. The unrest in western Asia had repercussions on the rest of the international arena: Afghanistan went up in flames, Pakistan collapsed and Russia raised its head. In view of Washington's helplessness, some European states began to lean increasingly toward China. When the price of oil rose above $200 a barrel, the American economy plunged into another deep recession. Obama had no chance in the snows of Iowa in 2012.
excerpt from Ari Shavit's Obama in 2012, after he fails to deal with Iran

Mr. Netanyahu says he supports Mr. Obama’s plan to engage the Iranians. He also supports the tightening of sanctions on the regime, if engagement doesn’t work. But there should be little doubt that, by the end of this year, if no progress is made, Mr. Netanyahu will seriously consider attacking Iran. His military advisers tell me they believe an attack, even an attack conducted without American help or permission, would have a reasonably high chance of setting back the Iranian program for two to five years. Around the world, this would be an extraordinarily unpopular step, but Mr. Netanyahu knows he would have much of the Israeli public behind him. Even the man who delivered the eulogy at his brother’s funeral, the far more dovish Shimon Peres, has assimilated the lessons Benzion taught his sons. When I visited recently with Mr. Peres, who is now Israel’s president, I asked him if there is a chance that his country has over-learned the lessons of Jewish history. He answered, “If we have to make a mistake of overreaction or underreaction, I think I prefer the overreaction.”
excerpt from Jeffrey Goldberg, Israel’s Fears, Amalek’s Arsenal

Israel’s Fears, Amalek’s Arsenal
By JEFFREY GOLDBERG
WHEN the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visits the White House on Monday for his first stage-setting visit, he will carry with him an agenda that clashes insistently with that of President Obama. Mr. Obama wants Mr. Netanyahu to endorse the creation of a Palestinian state. Mr. Netanyahu wants something else entirely: the president’s agreement that Iran must be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons. Mr. Netanyahu, in his first term as prime minister in the late 1990s, earned a reputation for conspicuous insincerity. It is therefore possible to interpret his fixation on Iran — he told me in a recent conversation that it is ruled by a “messianic apocalyptic cult” — as a way of avoiding the mare’s nest of problems associated with the Middle East peace process, especially the escalating pressure from the Obama administration to curb Jewish settlement on the West Bank.

This reading of Mr. Netanyahu holds that he is, at bottom, a cynic (or, if you agree with him, a pragmatist), who will bluff vigorously but bend whenever he thinks it expedient or unavoidable. In his first term, he betrayed the principles of the Greater Israel movement by relinquishing part of Judaism’s second-holiest city, Hebron, to the control of Yasir Arafat. His pragmatism evinces itself, as well, in his apparent belief that the relationship between Israel and Washington is sacrosanct. In other words, Mr. Netanyahu, despite his rhetoric, would never launch a strike on Iran without the permission of Mr. Obama — permission that in no way appears forthcoming.

But this is to misread both the prime minister and this moment in Jewish history. It is true that Mr. Netanyahu would prefer to avoid hard decisions concerning the Palestinian issue, for reasons both political (he is not, let us say, sympathetic to the cause of Palestinian self-determination) and strategic (he believes the Palestinians, divided and dysfunctional, their extremists firmly in the Iranian camp, are unready for compromise). Nevertheless, the prime minister’s preoccupation with the Iranian nuclear program seems sincere and deeply felt. I recently asked one of his advisers to gauge for me the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s anxiety about Iran. His answer: “Think Amalek.”

“Amalek,” in essence, is Hebrew for “existential threat.” Tradition holds that the Amalekites are the undying enemy of the Jews. They appear in Deuteronomy, attacking the rear columns of the Israelites on their escape from Egypt. The rabbis teach that successive generations of Jews have been forced to confront the Amalekites: Nebuchadnezzar, the Crusaders, Torquemada, Hitler and Stalin are all manifestations of Amalek’s malevolent spirit.

If Iran’s nuclear program is, metaphorically, Amalek’s arsenal, then an Israeli prime minister is bound by Jewish history to seek its destruction, regardless of what his allies think. In our recent conversation, Mr. Netanyahu avoided metaphysics and biblical exegesis, but said that Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons represented a “hinge of history.”

“Iran has threatened to annihilate a state,” he said. “In historical terms, this is an astounding thing. It’s a monumental outrage that goes effectively unchallenged in the court of public opinion. Sure, there are perfunctory condemnations, but there’s no j’accuse — there’s no shock.” He argued that one lesson of history is that “bad things tend to get worse if they’re not challenged early.” He went on, “Iranian leaders talk about Israel’s destruction or disappearance while simultaneously creating weapons to ensure its disappearance.

”Mr. Netanyahu doesn’t believe that Iran would necessarily launch a nuclear-tipped missile at Tel Aviv. He argues instead that Iran could bring about the eventual end of Israel simply by possessing such weaponry. “Iran’s militant proxies would be able to fire rockets and engage in other terror activities while enjoying a nuclear umbrella,” he said. This could lead to the depopulation of the Negev and the Galilee, both of which have already endured sustained rocket attacks by Hamas and Hezbollah. More broadly, he said, a nuclear Iran “would embolden Islamic militants far and wide, on many continents, who would believe that this is a providential sign, that this fanaticism is on the ultimate road to triumph.”


To understand why Mr. Netanyahu sees Iran as a new Amalek, it is essential to understand two aspects of his intellectual and emotional development: The scholarship of his father, and the martyrdom of his older brother.His father, Benzion Netanyahu, 99, is a pre-eminent historian of Spanish Jewry. “The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th-Century Spain,” his most notable book, toppled previously held understandings of the Inquisition’s birth. Over more than 1,300 pages, Benzion Netanyahu argued that Spanish hatred of Jews was not merely theologically motivated but based in race hatred (the Spanish pursued the principle of limpieza de sangre, or the purity of blood) that reached back to the ancient world. The elder Netanyahu also argued that efforts by the Jews of Spain to accommodate their adversaries were futile, in part because the charges against them were devoid of logic or fact, and, perhaps most important, because the written or spoken expression of Jew hatred (his preferred term for anti-Semitism) inevitably led to physical persecution. “What emerges from our survey,” he wrote, “is that the Spanish Inquisition was by no means the result of a fortuitous concourse of circumstances and events. It was the product of a movement that called for its creation and labored for decades to bring it about.”A close reading of Benzion Netanyahu suggests a belief that anti-Semitism is a sui generis hatred, one that is shape-shifting, impervious to logic and eternal. The only rational response to such sentiment, in the Netanyahu view, is militant Jewish self-defense.

Benjamin Netanyahu and his two brothers were raised in a home darkened by the history of the Inquisition, and they were taught Benzion’s understanding of the consequences of Jewish weakness. In his 1993 book, “A Place Among the Nations,” Benjamin Netanyahu wrote about what he saw as one of the miracles of the Zionist revolution: “The entire world is witnessing the historical transformation of the Jewish people from a condition of powerlessness to power, from a condition of being unable to meet the contingencies of a violent world to one in which the Jewish people is strong enough to pilot its own destiny.”

If his father provided Mr. Netanyahu with his historical framework, his brother Yonatan bequeathed on him the model of a Jew who devoted his spirit to the cause of his people’s survival. Yonatan, who was killed while leading the 1976 raid on the Entebbe airport in Uganda to free Israeli captives of Arab and German hijackers, is perhaps the most venerated figure in the post-Warsaw Ghetto Jewish martyrology, mainly because Entebbe still symbolizes the purest expression of the modern Jewish rejection of passivity.

Friends and advisers say Benjamin Netanyahu took three lessons from his brother’s death: The first is that those who threaten Jews, and have the means to carry out their threats, should be neutralized pre-emptively. The second is that no one will defend the Jews except the Jews themselves. The third is that destiny has chosen the Netanyahus to expose and battle anti-Semitism — before it reaches the point of genocide.

In his eulogy for Yonatan Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defense minister, said: “There are times when the fate of an entire people rests on a handful of fighters and volunteers. They must secure the uprightness of our world in one short hour. In such moments, they have no one to ask, no one to turn to. The commanders on the spot determine the fate of the battle.”

BENJAMIN Netanyahu faces the daunting task of maintaining Israel’s relationship with the United States, while at the same time forestalling Iran’s nuclear program. If Iran gains nuclear capacity, Israel will have judged him a failure as prime minister; if he does serious damage to his country’s standing in Washington, he will have failed as well. Mr. Netanyahu may be able to convince Mr. Obama that Iran poses an Amalek-sized threat to Israel, but he will have a much more difficult time convincing him that Iran poses an existential threat to America. It is certainly true that a nuclear Iran is not in the best interests of the United States. It would mean, among other things, the probable beginning of a nuclear arms race in the world’s most volatile region, and it would mean that the 30-year-struggle between America and Iran for domination of the Persian Gulf will be over, with Persia the victor. But the short-term costs, in particular, for an American strike — or an American-approved Israeli strike — could be appallingly high.

As the crisis worsens, Mr. Obama will find his options few, and those that exist will require him to bring to bear all his talents of persuasion. In his effort to engage Iran, he will need to promise a complete end to its international isolation in exchange for a halt to its nuclear program. But at the same time, he must be ready to threaten Iran with total estrangement from the West — the limiting of its gas imports, the choking-off of its banking system — if it continues its nuclear program. To do this, he must convince Europe, China and Russia that a nuclear Iran will be catastrophic for Middle East stability as well as for their own economies. If he’s unwilling to take military action against Iran, President Obama might soon enough be forced to design a containment strategy meant to scare a nuclear Iran into something resembling quiescence. Talk of containing Iran after it acquires a nuclear capacity, however, does not make the Israelis (or Iran’s Arab adversaries, for that matter) happy and, in fact, might push them closer to executing a military strike.

The president, who has shown he understands the special dread Israelis feel about their precarious existence, surely knows this. Last year, during his campaign, he told me, “I know that that there are those who would argue that in some ways America has become a safe refuge for the Jewish people, but if you’ve gone through the Holocaust, then that does not offer the same sense of confidence and security as the idea that the Jewish people can take care of themselves no matter what happens.”

Mr. Netanyahu says he supports Mr. Obama’s plan to engage the Iranians. He also supports the tightening of sanctions on the regime, if engagement doesn’t work. But there should be little doubt that, by the end of this year, if no progress is made, Mr. Netanyahu will seriously consider attacking Iran. His military advisers tell me they believe an attack, even an attack conducted without American help or permission, would have a reasonably high chance of setting back the Iranian program for two to five years. Around the world, this would be an extraordinarily unpopular step, but Mr. Netanyahu knows he would have much of the Israeli public behind him.

Even the man who delivered the eulogy at his brother’s funeral, the far more dovish Shimon Peres, has assimilated the lessons Benzion taught his sons. When I visited recently with Mr. Peres, who is now Israel’s president, I asked him if there is a chance that his country has over-learned the lessons of Jewish history. He answered, “If we have to make a mistake of overreaction or underreaction, I think I prefer the overreaction.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic, is the author of “Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror.”

Obama in 2012, after he fails to deal with Iran
By Ari Shavit

Even now, in November 2012, it is hard not to think back with elation on Barack Obama's first year as president of the United States. In his first 100 days in the White House, the energetic president took a series of daring steps that extricated the American economy from its worst crisis since the 1930s. Immediately after that he put an end to torture, indicted Dick Cheney, convened a Middle East peace conference and made historic reconciliation visits to Havana, Damascus and Tehran. Obama's economic and foreign policies were both based on a moral worldview that inspired Americans and non-Americans alike. After years of despair and cynicism, the 44th president proposed a new national and international agenda based on dialogue, demilitarization, justice and peace.

The first signs that something was wrong had already appeared at the end of that first year of grace. Nevertheless, Washington was astounded when, in the summer of 2010, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that he was expelling international inspectors and galloping full-tilt toward the production of nuclear weapons. The shock turned to horror on the eve of Christmas 2010, when Iran's spiritual leader, Ali Khamenei, stated that his country had its first three nuclear warheads - aimed at Riyadh, Cairo and Tel Aviv.Spring 2011 was dramatic. First a mutual defense treaty and an agreement to collaborate on oil exports were signed between Tehran and the fragile Baghdad government. Then Kuwait, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Dubai bowed their heads and signed treaties that made them protectorates of the rising Shi'ite state. Saudi Arabia took the opposite approach: In May 2011, it announced that it had purchased nuclear weapons from Pakistan both for itself and for its ally Egypt. But Egypt's sudden nuclearization failed to appease the Muslim Brotherhood. Mass demonstrations forced President Hosni Mubarak to resign shortly after he suspended the peace agreement with Israel.

By Thanksgiving 2011, the situation was clear. Jordan's King Abdullah left for exile in London. Hezbollah took control of Beirut and a bloody war of attrition erupted between Israel and the Palestinians. The unrest in western Asia had repercussions on the rest of the international arena: Afghanistan went up in flames, Pakistan collapsed and Russia raised its head. In view of Washington's helplessness, some European states began to lean increasingly toward China. When the price of oil rose above $200 a barrel, the American economy plunged into another deep recession. Obama had no chance in the snows of Iowa in 2012.

So with Oprah Winfrey wiping a tear at his side, the most promising president ever announced he would not run for a second term.What went wrong? Where did Obama go astray? In retrospect, the answer is clear and simple. In the summer of 2009, the president had to make the most courageous decision of his life: to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Granted, opting for confrontation would have been incompatible with the DNA of the liberal Democrat from Chicago. Ironically, however, only such a decision could have saved his legacy and advanced the noble values he believed in. Only that decision could have led to a comprehensive peace in the Middle East. If Obama had decided three years ago to impose a political-economic siege on Tehran, he would have changed the course of history. The Roosevelt of the 21st century would have prevented regional chaos, a worldwide nuclear arms race and an American decline.Yesterday, immediately after television networks announced the sweeping Republican victory of November 2012, close friends gathered around the outgoing president. They found him sad but sober. Obama had no doubts: Had he known at the beginning of his term what he knows now, he would have made a different strategic decision about Iran's nuclear program. If only it were possible to go back, the pensive president told his humbled chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. If only he could have made a different decision in the summer of 2009.

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Nation Building for Palestine: From the Bottom Up

Ari Shavit on why there is some reason to be hopeful about prospects in the Middle East, if lessons are learned and new collaborations are strengthened. And why nation building from the bottom up is perhaps the best hope for the eventual creation of a Palestinian state.
david brumer

Nation building for Palestine
Ari Shavit

Not everything is bad. True: The situation in Pakistan is deteriorating from day to day. True: Iran is continuing to gallop toward nuclearization. True: The new U.S. administration has yet to find its strategic path. True: Benjamin Netanyahu is still holed up in a bunker, outside of which bizarre coalition partners wait in ambush. But there is good news in the diplomatic world surrounding Israel. The first piece of good news is Egypt. The strategic alliance between Egypt and Israel has never been as strong. Egypt is not Hadash and it is not Gush Shalom. It is not a hostage to self-righteous concepts of political correctness. The Egyptians see the Middle Eastern jungle as it is and understand that, in this jungle, Israel is a sister. If Israel is harmed, Egypt will be hit. If Israel is hit, President Hosni Mubarak's Egypt will be lost. That's why Israel and Egypt worked in coordination during Operation Cast Lead. That's why Israel and Egypt will also work together in the diplomatic campaign to stop Iran.

The second piece of good news is Jordan, Saudi Arabia and most of the Gulf emirates. Many royal families that were established under the inspiration of Lawrence of Arabia know they are on the brink. Kings, princes and emirs know they are living on the slopes of a volcano. They have absolutely no interest in the settlements. They are no more disturbed by the occupation than is Israeli Tourism Minister Stas Misezhnikov of Yisrael Beiteinu. Therefore, if the right rope bridge is tossed at them they will be happy to cross the river. There is no limit to the possible cooperation between the modernization of Dubai and Abu Dhabi and the modernity of Tel Aviv. Between the Gulf's blue waters and the Israeli coast's blue waters, the sky's the limit.


The third piece of good news is Quartet envoy Tony Blair. The man who brought peace to Northern Ireland does not draw his concept of reality from the post-Zionism of Sheikh Munis. Because he is British, he is practical. Because he is practical, he knows that peace is not a theological issue. Blair understands that the way to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is from the bottom up. Not to force a Geneva-style piece of paper on both sides, but to build a down-to-earth process that will shape a different economic, diplomatic and security reality.

The fourth piece of good news is Benjamin Netanyahu. Yes, Netanyahu is afraid of Iran. He sees a similarity between the weakness of the democracies in 1939 and the weakness of the democracies in 2009. But the prime minister understands that an opportunity exists on the other side of the threat. He understands that the way to fight the risk is to create a chance for something better. On the prime minister's desk sit fascinating plans designed to change the face of the Middle East. Netanyahu is determined to progress where President Shimon Peres was stopped. Missing now is a new diplomatic concept that weaves all the good news together with one scarlet thread. Missing is a new strategic idea that will provide a common horizon for moderate Arabs and moderate Israelis.

This idea could be Blair's: nation building - an ambitious international project of Americans, Europeans, Japanese, Egyptians, Jordanians, Saudis, residents of the Gulf emirates, Palestinians and Israelis that will build the Palestinian nation from the foundations. The idea of nation building is not a substitute for the two-state concept; it complements it. It is designed to turn an impractical dream of peace into a serious work plan, which in the end will make the dream come true. The idea is meant to build the Palestinian state properly, over time, from the bottom up. It is capable of consolidating the coalition of the Middle East's sane nations around one mission and one vision. The chances are good that the United States will be attentive to Blair's vision.

U.S. President Barack Obama's strategy in Iraq is nation building. Obama's strategy in Afghanistan is nation building. There is no reason why his strategy in Palestine should not be nation building. If Netanyahu and Mubarak agree at Sharm el-Sheikh that they intend to stop Iran and build Palestine, we can reasonably assume they will find a partner in Obama. If that happens, the three leaders will provide the Middle East with a new, correct and realistic agenda.

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