Michael eventually wrote the following (way down in the thread of comment #9):

The question is why or whether they [The Palestinians] would be interested in a state for themselves, knowing at this point what it would consist of (not what it might have done). You are eliding the question by saying that they should want it if they have interest in a state on that territory. That is the question. Palestinian nationalism is largely a thing of the 1980s and to some extent 90s. Since then, it has largely been a crutch for the U.S. and Israel’s efforts at peace. Whatever reason Palestinians once had to desire the state on offer has been long since spoilt by war and economic siege. I honestly don’t see what reason they would have to accept what they can now get. It would not even come with any guarantee of security from Israeli interference pursuant to “security interests’ — no Israeli government could ever take that off the table. Given the history, and given that the Palestinian “state” would be effectively demilitarized, the “state” would amount to nothing more than a voluntarily promise of nonintervention from Israel. The cumulative effects of economic isolation and sense that historical wrongs had only been institutionalized would guarantee eventual violence directed at Israel from the new “state,” and the cycle of intervention and retaliation would begin anew.

This is a very important and well articulated point of view.  As a quick review, my own sense of how crippled the Two State Framework is, led me to argue (in the comments) for the out-there idea that the US should take over the West Bank to create a kind of state-tutelage for the Palestinians, cover security for the Israelis, and separate the two populations.  An admittedly somewhat insane idea*, only surpassed in its insanity (I think) by the current state of affairs and its seemingly unstoppable trajectory towards Israel ruling over a stateless ethnic majority disenfranchised politically.  The consequences of an increasingly unstoppable Accidental Empire.

Michael’s argument gains support from Juan Cole, who in the conclusion to a classic takedown of Jeffrey Goldberg (always in good order), says the following:

Does Goldberg have a plan “B”? Because his two-state solution is so 1993. The problem is, it is almost certainly past the point where any such thing is possible, given the size and extent of Israeli colonies in the Palestinian West Bank. Goldberg admits that the only two likely outcomes of the current policies of Binyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman are Apartheid or a one-state solution.  (boldface in original)

For those interested, the best argument I’ve ever read towards a a one state solution is that of Ali Abu Nimah (titled One Country).  The book makes some strong arguments and is definitely worth reading and considering, but I still admit to thinking there are serious potential flaws in the idea.  Flaws that push (as discussed in this interview with Abu Nimah) even people like Jimmy Carter and Noam Chomsky to favor a two state solution.  In that same interview Abu Nimah counters:

What I argue in the book [One Country], of course this isn’t about destroying Israel. It isn’t about turning things over from one day to the next. Palestine-Israel is not the only country that faces this sort of power struggle along ethnic, religious, and other lines. We have to look for structures, and I talk about this in some detail in the book. How they did it in South Africa, where by the way, the same sorts of arguments were made against ending Apartheid and against one person, one vote. We have to look at countries like Belgium, we have to look at Northern Ireland.

There are many models out there for dealing with those sort of things. So that you have one person, one vote, full democracy, full equality, while at same time, ethnic communities, the Israeli-Jewish community, the Palestinian community, will have mechanisms for expressing their national identity, for decision making over issues that concern them. We have to stop thinking this very simplistic, binary way. And this is where I’m trying to take the discussion with this book.

While I generally think the idea of Two States is much more workable in theory, I’m leaning more towards the notion that it is has become unfeasible in practice, however preferred it might be at the hypothetical/policy level.  I think these kinds of discussions need to take place–what do we do if the Two State Solution fails?  What do we do if the Two State Solution is not workable, if there is no realistic path from here to there?

If the Two State Solution is dead (or at least becoming incapacitated with little to no hope of legitimate recovery), then we are left only with the choice of Israeli domination of a (soon to be) ethnic majority without political rights, which would call into question the legitimacy of the state of Israel and continue the horrible, right-less existence of the Palestinian people.  Or one state.  Again that binary choice occurs IF the Two State Solution is dead.  My own view is that The Two State Solution is increasingly on the precipice–while for others we’ve already fallen off that edge.

I think much more work needs to be done on thinking about what safeguards there would be in a One State framework.  Abu Nimah begins that discussion, but I think it needs to go much further.

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* I didn’t know these previous to TEH GOOGLE telling me, but apparently this fellow has argued that the united Israeli-Palestinian state become the 51st State in the US.

I’ve been going back and forth with myself for the past few weeks about why the assassination bothers me so much. Especially as someone who has reconciled himself, however unhappily, to the reality that in some instances state sanctioned violence will be a necessary evil in combating certain geo-political players.

One can’t deny how controlled and contained the whole thing was. As Andrew himself said in his original post on the matter,

In fighting murderous Jihadist terrorists, I have to say I find this kind of surgical execution, however awful, to be morally superior to the collateral deaths of so many innocent children and civilians, as occurred in the Gaza war under the rules of conduct the IDF allowed. It’s also morally more defensible than the US drone attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where civilian casualties are both morally deeply troubling and strategically terrible in a war that I continue to believe is essentially unwinnable.

I can’t disagree with Andrew on any of that, per se. I mean, I’m not prepared to completely forgo the conclusion that this man deserved to die and that the Mossad, if they did indeed carry out the operation, were the right people to make that happen. I can’t disagree with the idea that a method avoiding civilian casualties, innocent children amongst them, is preferable to one that does not.

But it is precisely the “surgical execution” of this operation that gives me pause and makes me shudder. Though I think it is sometimes necessary to use precisely this kind of state sanctioned violence towards certain ends, I correspondingly think that we have a moral obligation to reckon in an unflinching manner with the ramifications of our decision. I believe that no matter what form it happens to take, the use of state sanctioned violence is an ugly thing that ought to cause us grief no matter the seeming righteousness of our cause.

The ugliness of military activity, whether it is in Gaza, Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere, is always easy to spot. It is, essentially, inescapable. These more traditional forms of military might and use of force are honest insofar as they force us to grapple with the implications of our decision.

But the cool and almost bloodless efficacy of this type of operation — and assassination of this kind — it seems almost designed to lull us into a false consciousness of complacency about the tactics we choose to engage in dealing with, admittedly, unavoidable conflict. And in providing such a respite from the penetrating eyes of innocent children, we morally short change ourselves and others by willfully choosing a path of cognitive and ethical blindness and dissonance.

The natural outcome of such cowardice is a kind of self-serving bravado that cultivates slogans like, “Don’t Mess with the Mossad” and Marty Peretz’s borrowed line,

The Mossad did it. And, as Carly Simon sang about James Bond, “nobody does it better.”

Bravado of the like isn’t just offensive in the cavalier dismissiveness of its attitude, it is, in fact, anathema to the character, disposition, and fortitude required to actually bring an end to the generations old warring into which it faces. Bravado of this variety isn’t ultimately aimed at ending one of the world’s most horrific conflicts; indeed, it not so subtly feeds into it, prolongs it, sustains it.

And those penetrating eyes, we don’t lift them from our conscience, nor scrub their blood from our hands. Deep down we all know that, at best, we put them off to another day.

Immigration is offered as an explanation [for Israeli success]:

“A key lesson from Israel is that innovation is not just something that goes on inside companies; it comes from a wider culture that fosters both innovation and entrepreneurship. Israel is a country of immigrants — there are over 70 nationalities represented in this tiny country. Two out of every three Israelis are newcomers, or the children or grandchildren of newcomers. . . . Immigrants are natural risk takers since they were willing to uproot themselves and start over.”

Ah yes, how convenient that Israeli economic success can teach us a politically correct lesson about the importance of allowing more immigrants into the United States.

The thing about Israeli immigration is that it’s mostly composed of high-IQ Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Bloc countries, who share a cultural and racial heritage with Israel’s existing Jewish population. In contrast, United States immigration is mostly low-IQ Hispanics, and most of the high-IQ immigration comes from Asia and they don’t share a cultural background with America’s predominant white European population, nor are they of the same race.

Politically correct? Or factually accurate? It’s worth noting that immigrants are generally more innovative and intelligent than those who stay behind, regardless of their ethnic or geographic origins (emphasis mine):

Geneticists have shown that there is literally such a thing as American DNA, not surprising when nearly all of us are descended from immigrants. We therefore carry an immigrant-specific genotype, a genetic marker expressing itself—in some environments, at least—as energetic risk-taking and competitive self-promotion. Even when famine, warfare, or another calamity strikes, most people stay in their homeland. The self-selecting group that migrates, seldom more than 2 percent, is disproportionally inclined to take chances. They also have above-average intelligence and are quicker decision makers. Something about their dopamine-receptor systems, the neural pathway associated with a taste for novelty and risk, sets them apart from those who stay put.

Of course, the actual science makes no distinction between Ashkenazi Jews and ‘low-IQ Hispanics’, but why let that stop mindless speculation?

The author, wholly committed to making a fool out of himself, follows up with this gem:

The blog post also suggests that military service benefits Israel.

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This is a big red herring. I worked for the U.S. Army as a civilian, and it was the most poorly managed organization I ever worked for. I was able to see firsthand that battlefield experience does not result in skills which are especially useful in white collar office jobs.

Ah, of course. Anecdotal evidence trumps the testimony of various industry insiders. Never mind the fact that the Israeli military is dramatically different from the United States’. Never mind the fact that people who have actually studied Israel’s high tech economy came to similar conclusions:

Jeffrey Goldberg: One of your arguments is that it’s not necessarily Jewish culture that created this, but Israel Defense Force culture, that many of the great entrepreneurs and innovators come out of the Air Force, out of the technical branches of the IDF. And that this is replicable. Is that fair to say?

–

Dan Senor: Shimon Peres told us that Jews have a tendency throughout our history to be dissatisfied. That’s a big theme, so this is obviously a big part of IDF culture. I’m of two minds on how applicable this is to the American military. On the one hand, I feel that the Israeli military is just a more entrepreneurial military than any military I know of or that we’ve studied. I mean, it’s just so much more built around improvisation. The fact that when you’re being promoted in the Israeli military, your subordinates have input, or can have input, in those decisions. So it’s a very entrepreneurial, start-up military. There are very few bosses.  The only way you can cultivate that culture and ethos is if you have very few bosses, because the moment you have a lot of bosses, you have a lot of people who need to justify their existence, and they justify their existence by giving commands. I saw this on military bases I’ve worked on and when I’ve been in government –  the U.S. military is top-heavy, and you have a lot of people standing around giving orders to sort of justify their existence.

Half Sigma’s post is supposed to be a fearless exercise in truth-telling, an unvarnished look at the genetic superiority of certain racial groups. Instead, it’s a laughably thin excuse to trot-out easily debunked racialist theories. It’s not as if you need any particular expertise in genetics or Israeli society to disprove this stuff, either. Behind the author’s self-satisfied ranting about “political correctness” is a post that doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of a few well-placed Google searches.

Grizzlies center Hamed Haddadi , the first NBA player from Iran, and Omri Casspi, the first Israeli player in the league, met at midcourt and shook hands before the game.

But here it is in a nutshell:

The problem with the two-state idea as it has been construed is that it does not truly address what it purports to resolve. It promises to close a conflict that began in 1948, perhaps earlier, yet virtually everything it worries about sprang from the 1967 war. Ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is essential and the conflict will persist until this is addressed. But its roots are far deeper: for Israelis, Palestinian denial of the Jewish state’s legitimacy; for Palestinians, Israel’s responsibility for their large-scale dispossession and dispersal that came with the state’s birth.

This logic is devastating:

If the objective is to end the conflict and settle all claims, these matters will need to be dealt with. They reach back to the two peoples’ most visceral and deep-seated emotions, their longings and anger. For years, the focus has been on fine-tuning percentages of territorial withdrawals, ratios of territorial swaps, and definitions of Jerusalem’s borders. The devil, it turns out, is not in the details. It is in the broader picture.

The problem was built into the structure of the negotiations. It is only a slight exaggeration to describe them as a confidence game, a tacit understanding by all sides to elude the historic core of the matter through disingenuous ambiguity. Palestinians hoped they could achieve their goals even as they persisted in denying the Jewish people’s entitlement to even part of the land; Israelis trusted that if they granted Palestinians some kind of state the whole problem would fade away. The US assumed the role of a willing participant. Others, Europeans included, lazily followed.

A kind of “bipartisan consensus” exists among the leadership of both sides:

Establishing two states would resolve the occupation, but that is only one aspect, albeit an important one, of a problem that arose decades before the occupation began. An Israeli leader will be loath to relinquish territory and permit the emergence of an indisputably sovereign Palestinian state at least as long as suspicion lingers that Palestinians have not genuinely made their peace with the new reality, that they are biding their time, and that a future of renewed strife lies in store.

In turn, a Palestinian leader cannot credibly proclaim that the conflict has come to a close if the solution ignores the genesis of the Palestinian plight and the historic core of its national cause. To adopt such a stand would be tantamount to conceding that the refugees—who make up a majority of the Palestinian population, were once its political vanguard, and could well regain that position—had waged six decades of struggle by mistake and endured six decades of suffering in vain. Internal challenges to such an arrangement might not be immediate. But they would be certain and severe, laying bare the fragility of a supposedly historic accord.

It seems to me the Peace Process has been built (at least since the 80s) on the foundation of the Egyptian-Israeli Camp David Accords.  In that case, you had two already existing states working diplomatically with each other.  One state (Egypt) found a modicum of a victory in the Yom Kippur War.  The Israelis had something to offer in exchange for peace, a deal that was preferable to both sides.  That precedent guided the Clinton-era Jordan-Israel peace deal.

And even during the first Bush administration, then Sec. of State James Baker wanted to make a deal first with Syria along these lines.  The thinking was that if they could get Syria on board, Lebanon would be brought in (via Syria’s de facto control), Jordan would join (which they later did anyway), and Saudi Arabia would at least not stand in the way, if not declare its acceptance of the Israeli state.  The theory was that if all of the Arab states were in that would then push Arafat  to accept the deal–that latter point is a hypothetical one now so it’s impossible to really know.

Whatever the case, that moment is long gone and these faux attempts to revive it are nothing but a case of going through the motions politically, further engendering corrosive cynicism on both sides.

[Read more →]

[KATHRYN JEAN] LOPEZ: What do you mean these wretched refugees benefited from Israel?

GILDER: The key period was between 1967 and 1987 when the Israelis administered the territories after Arabs refused all negotiations with their famous three “nos.” The Arabs were adamant against trading “land for peace” following their defeat in the ’67 war, so Israel inherited the territories.

During this 20-year period under Israeli rule, some 250,000 Israelis settled in the Territories. These were the supposedly predatory settlers. They supplied the infrastructure of power, water, education, and medical care that attracted nearly ten Arab settlers for every one Israeli. During this period, the economy in the territories grew some 25 percent per year, nearly the fastest in the world, and far faster than that of Israel itself, which was still bogged down in socialism. Arab life expectancy rose from 40 to around 70. Their incomes tripled while their population soared. Seven universities and 2,500 factories were established. It was the golden age for Palestinian Arabs.

Ackerman is right to compare this to the contention – occasionally made by retrograde conservatives/modern-day confederate-sympathizers – that American slavery wasn’t so bad, as it brought Africans to America, which is so much more awesome than Africa, or something.  In fact, you can extend this argument to almost any instance of oppression; British domination of India wasn’t a complete wash, after all, Indians benefited from British education, British industry and British culture.  Yes, a few million Indians had to die for “civilization,” but really, higher prices have been paid for less.

That said, I wonder if George Gilder – or any other American neo-colonialist – would make the same argument in support of Britain’s control over the American colonies.  Again, the United States owes much of its early prosperity to British industry and British markets.  Indeed, it goes far deeper than that; the entire American tradition of self-governance grows out of British conceptions of representative government.  It’s always worth remembering that before the American revolutionaries were revolutionaries, they were Englishmen qua Englishmen fighting for their God-given rights as British citizens.  The logic that Gilder uses to justify Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories almost certainly applies to British occupation of the American territories, and I’m honestly curious as to whether he would have opposed revolutionary efforts to sever America from the crown (for what its worth, I probably would have, if I were a land-owning white dude).

“An African-American President with Muslim roots stands before the Muslim world and defends the right of Jews to a nation of their own in their ancestral homeland, and then denounces in vociferous terms the evil of Holocaust denial, and right-wing Israelis go forth and complain that the President is unsympathetic to the housing needs of settlers. Incredible, just incredible.”  ~ Jeffrey Goldberg

I was out for drinks with friends and Israel came up in the conversation.  A friend of mine said that she’d heard somewhere – Fox maybe? – that if you likened Gaza to a Nazi concentration camp you were an anti-Semite, and isn’t that ridiculous?  Can’t we criticize the Israeli government’s policy without being anti-Semitic?

To which, of course, the answer is unequivocally yes. Of course we can (and should) criticize the bad policies of any government, and especially those governments which have close ties to our own.  But what jumped out at me at this point was not the persistent frustration of being poorly labeled by the pro-Israel right (and left) – it was the bad analogy.  It’s simply a bad analogy to compare Israelis (or Zionists) to Nazis.  And along with being a bad analogy, it’s just in poor taste to call Gaza a concentration camp.

Now, I say this for a number of reasons.  First, it gets us nowhere.  In fact, calling the Jewish people Nazi’s is kind of like calling all critics of Israel anti-Semites.  It doesn’t further the debate, it shuts the debate down.  Comparing Gaza to a concentration camp is similarly ineffectual.  Gaza is in bad shape.  The blockade has been really, really bad for the Palestinians there – but they’re not in death camps.  They’re not being gassed or placed into forced labor.  They’re not being exterminated like the Jews were in Auschwitz or Treblinka.  So call it like it is, don’t embellish the bad truth with worse lies.  Then you end up arguing about the lies instead of the truth – and that gets us nowhere. [Read more →]

by max socol

In the bowels of ED Kain’s most recent Israel prophecy, there’s a (pleasantly civil) debate swirling around the security implications of a West Bank withdrawal. As I mentioned there, it reminded me of speaking to Akiva Eldar, the Ha’aretz reporter and author whose anti-settlement politicking has made him a national star, of a sort.

I very much like Eldar and enjoyed his talk. He delivers a persuasive and excellent presentation on just how destructive settlements are — so good, in fact, that I dug out my old docket pad, where I scribbled the notes I took (just below, appropriately, notes from my interview with the party leader of National Union, the radical right-wing settlers’ party that wants to force Palestinians out of the West Bank.) Here they are, for those who are interested: [Read more →]