The Gaza Offensive from Gaza

While the much-anticipated Gaza offensive by the IDF is far from operational, it appears that the Palestinians are planning an offensive of their own against Israel. We will find out in a few hours how Hamas's attempts to replicate last month's border-breaching action turn out. Unlike the well-planned events that transpired on the Egyptian border with Gaza in January, however, any such actions at the Erez crossing and other sites will lack the crucial element of surprise. It remains to be seen how the world would react to such a mass demonstration. It is likely to increase pressure on Israel to lift the blockade on Gaza, although the chaotic scenes on the Egyptian border did not exactly bolster the reputation of the Hamas government on the international scene.

A staged "popular" mass action, choreographed for international cameras, perhaps involving the deaths of a few civilians sent to the fence will provide plenty of ammunition for those long opposed to Israel's blockade of Gaza. From the beginning of this embargo, which followed the election of Hamas in January 2006, the blockade has been denounced for its injustice; the fence on Israel's southern border has been denounced as a "cage" and an "apartheid wall." Such condemnations are ludicrous. There is nothing immoral about Israel's blockade of the Hamas government in Gaza. We are talking about a fence that basically runs along armistice lines - the route of the border is not in dispute, except among those who oppose the existence of the Israeli state in toto. No state has an obligation to open its borders to non-citizens, let alone to those from a hostile country. It is quite telling that no one has ever described the blockades of Israel by the Arab states as "apartheid."

I may be wrong, but the practice of sending civilians to deliberately violate the sovereignty of a neighboring state seems to me unprecedented. It is, however, indicative of the mechanisms of rule employed by Hamas in Gaza and previously by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, it did so with the expectation that the Palestinians would establish sovereignty in the territory and perhaps focus on building institutions resembling those of an independent state.

With Israeli forces and settlements gone, it seemed to many Israeli and international observers that the key motivations for armed struggle would be eliminated. But the Palestinians have done nothing of the sort. Instead, the terrorist organizations and later the Hamas government have banked on a kind of anarchic, anti-sovereignty to legitimate their authority and rule. From the beginning of this new state of affairs, Hamas has fostered all the attempts to improve the qassam rockets and launching operations that daily terrorize the residents of the western Negev. No real effort has been undertaken to better the economic situation of ordinary Gazans. The only improvement that Hamas rule has achieved is entirely destructive - the various gangs of terrorists have become better at firing rockets at Israeli civilians. I refer to this as "anti-sovereignty," because the Hamas government has deliberately abstained from establishing a monopoly of violence, instead fostering a competitive atmosphere of factions whose sole reason for existence is the violation of Israel's sovereignty, by continually endangering Israeli civilians.

A sign in Sderot (Photo)
("Boom"; "We want to sleep in peace!"; "Stop the qassam [sic]!")

In other words, the Hamas government cannot be expected to act like a rational state. This government thrives on the state of siege and tension that it prolongs with every qassam launch. Its domestic and international support rests on the misery of its population, which is attributed entirely to Israel - despite the fact that the occupation ended two years ago. The obvious parallel to the situation which the Hamas government is aiming for is that of post-withdrawal southern Lebanon. How one deals with such an entity - on the military, economic, and diplomatic fronts - is still an open question.

Squeezing the Central Bank

Stanley Fischer (Photo)

A coalition of populist (or demagogic) forces is pressuring Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer to lower interest rates (see Ha'aretz). Those pushing for the change are the Israeli Manufacturers' Association, which is suffering because of the high shekel, on the one hand, and parliamentarians ranging from Shelly Yachimovich (Labor) to Amnon Cohen (Shas). They want to see a reduction in interest rates to help workers in the export industry. If implemented, their agenda would set Israel back two decades. This kind of short-sighted intervention in fiscal policy by politicians, concerned about upcoming elections rather than the long-term economic growth of the country, will severely undermine investors' confidence in the Israeli market. The Central Bank's role is to check inflation by maintaining a strong currency; it should not be instrument of particular economic and social sectors. The export industry will have to adjust, just like the exporters in other countries who have experienced increases in the value of their currency against the dollar.

Legislators Propose Bills to Ban Gay Pride Parades in Jerusalem

Shas MK Nissim Ze'ev (Photo: Knesset)

Earlier today, two bills were presented for first reading by the Israeli parliament, both of which attempt to prevent gay parades from being held within the city of Jerusalem, by amending the municipality's Basic Law from above. One parliamentarian, MK Nissim Ze'ev of Shas (about which more below) condemned the homosexual community for "carrying out the self-destruction of Israeli society and the Jewish people" (Ha'aretz).

Much of our last discussion of the gay pride parade in Jerusalem focused on the opposition of the "ultra-Orthodox" or haredim, as they are called in Hebrew. I realize that for people less familiar with Israeli society and the Jewish world, there is bound to be some confusion about which particular groups this term encompasses. Hence, I hope that those who understand will excuse the rather long excursus on Israel's political and religious landscape that follows.

Until relatively recently, the term "haredim" ("trembling ones") referred almost exclusively to the various black-clad Hasidic and "Lithuanian" groups (Note: the term "Lithuanian," refers to those who identify with opponents of the Hasidic movement; the division between hasidim and their opponents dates to the late 18th century), most of whom either rejected the Zionist state or had an ambivalent attitude toward it best described as "non-Zionism." The main political organ of these groups is the United Torah Judaism party, which is a coalition of the Hasidic Agudat Yisrael and the Lithuanian Degel ha-Torah, and has 6 seats in the Israeli Knesset.

In the past three decades, we have also seen an increase in another kind of "haredi" or ultra-Orthodox population, which has found its political expression in Shas, a party which derives its guidance from rabbinic luminaries of various mizrahi (Middle Eastern Jewish) communities. This party, however, also draws much of its support from "traditional" and even secular mizrahim, having marketed itself as a party opposing Ashkenazi hegemony in Israel. It currently has 12 representatives in the Knesset, and is a member of the governing coalition.

In addition to these two groups, another constituency involved in the opposition against the gay pride parade was the national-religious or "knit kippah" camp. This sector, which is today identified as the ideological backbone of the settlement movement, is religious (sometimes "ultra-Orthodox") but embraced the state (at least until the evacuation of settlements from Gaza) and interprets the Zionist movement in religious, messianic terms. Its main political organ today is the National Union - National Religious Party, which has 9 seats.

When I watched the documentary about the Jerusalem gay pride parade discussed earlier, I noticed that the approaches used by these various sectors differ significantly from one another. For example, the national religious camp used language much closer to that of the Christian right in America, as I think I noted earlier. Shas, it seems to me, is using more populist language that appeals to "tradition." I think it is not an accident that the haredi parties are keeping a low profile, and that they are probably not going to become involved in this. They do not see this as an issue to gain votes or to mobilize the ultra-Orthodox. Their caution also reflects a distrust of modern party politics and mass organization (i.e., democratization).

A Jewish State

Theodor Herzl's 1896 work The Jewish State (or the "State of the Jews")

Most Jewish Israelis and most Jews living in the diaspora take it for granted that Israel is "a Jewish state." This particular description does not elicit a great deal of controversy for them; it seems obvious and relatively unproblematic. For many Arabs, whether Christian, Muslim, or atheist, and for many Muslims living outside the Middle East, however, the phrase seems unacceptable, and usually provokes an exclamation of disbelief that such a thing should be possible. To them it seems prima facie racist. Likewise, while most Jews see Zionism as the political expression of a belief in Jewish self-determination, dating to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for many Arabs and Muslims it is a fascist, genocidal, and/or racist ideology with none of the legitimacy granted to other nationalist movements, including Pan-Arabism.

To me, this discord invites two different lines of inquiry.

1. Of course, arguments must be made for and against. Indeed, I myself have been forced to engage in such arguments ad nauseam, a fact that at this point in my life tends to fill me with resentment as soon as I hear yet another person challenging me to resist their conversionary or enlightening zeal.


2. However, a different line of inquiry would proceed more phenomenologically (I think). It would ask: what do all these different people mean when they talk about a "Jewish state"? Further, it would try to investigate why some people sees this self-description as unproblematic, while others vigorously oppose it; it would, moreover, ask the same thing about the desire of many Jews (in Israel and elsewhere) to have the Palestinians as well as others accept the definition of Israel as a Jewish state. This would be a study of fears, hopes, and their consequences.

To kick things off on the first line of inquiry, I will cite the remarks of John Mearsheimer, made at a lecture delivered at UC Berkeley in late October 2006, which succinctly characterize the realist position when it comes to this question. So as not to be accused of taking things out of context, I have included the entire paragraph of remarks:

We think that the fact that there’s a Jewish state is a good thing given the history of antisemitism and our understanding of how the world works. Here in the US, we have a melting pot society. This is not a Christian or Anglo-Saxon state. It’s a liberal state. There is no one ethnic or religious group that dominates; it’s a melting pot. I don’t like the idea of living in state dominated by one culture. But around world, there are lots of states where people identify themselves largely in terms of culture – take Japan: most people there consider themselves to be Japanese. Same is true with Israel – it’s a Jewish state; the same is true for Germany. It’s not the way I like to do business; but it’s perfectly legitimate way to do it in the international system today. I believe in national self-determination. Zionism is a form of nationalism and perfectly legitimate one. There is nothing wrong with having a Jewish state. We are arguing that Palestinians are also entitled to have a state of their own. If there’s national self-determination for the Jews, it should also exist for the Palestinians. The principal obstacle to establishing Palestinian state at this time is Israel. Israel is interested in colonizing the West Bank and giving the Palestinians nothing more than a few enclaves, keeping them disconnected, controlling borders, air and water. As long as that’s the case, the Palestinians won't have a viable state. The same logic that leads us to support a Jewish state leads us to support a Palestinian state.

Obama the Christian

(Photo: Wikipedia)

In recent days, "accusations" that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is a Muslim (as if this were a crime) have emerged again, ahead of the South Carolina primary. These "allegations" first surfaced in anonymous emails, some of which were sent to Jewish organizations. Apparently, those sending them out believed that since all Jews hate Muslims, these revelations would dissuade Jews from voting for Obama - whether in primaries or perhaps in a presidential election. In the wake of these emails, all of the major American Jewish organizations issued a condemnation of the "smear campaign" (see for example this press release by the AJC). What disturbed me at the time was that no one made a point of saying that "although Senator Obama is not a Muslim but a practicing Christian, the implication that a Muslim is not fit to serve as the president of the U.S. is horrifying and goes against the principles of the American constitution."

A few days ago, I saw Obama himself responding directly to the accusations in televised interview aired on CNN's Situation Room. The day before, I had seen him emphasize his belief in Jesus Christ during the debate with his competitors in the Democratic primaries, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. He made a point during that debate of saying that he attends church services and believes in Christianity. During the interview the next day, which may originally have aired on "CBN" (Christian Broadcasting Network), he responded angrily about the smear campaign calling him a crypto-Muslim, something which he found deeply offensive as a sincere Christian. I can certainly understand someone being offended at having their religious beliefs mischaracterized, but again, I found it strange that he was so zealous in distancing himself from the suggestion that he might be a Muslim. Maybe this is the realistic, smart politician thinking. But if Obama couldn't do it, for whatever reasons, then someone else should have stood up and said unequivocally that even if Obama WERE a Muslim, no person's faith qualifies or disqualifies her from running for public office.

Of course, the reality is that for many Americans the faith of a presidential candidate apparently does matter. Mitt Romney's Mormonism is an issue for many evangelical voters. What I find alarming is that Obama's response to the "allegations" might actually reinforce this kind of bigotry. Someone has to stand up to it and show some courage. Why couldn't any of the other candidates say: "I do not think that being Muslim would make a candidate less suited for office than being Christian."

Secularism, Critique, Blasphemy, and the 2006 Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade

Two of the posters ("pashkavilim") shown above are part of the campaign against the gay pride parade in Jerusalem. The one on the right reproduces a headline from Ha'aretz which states that "Religious leaders have warned that the Pride Parade in Jerusalem will cause bloodshed." The second one, on the left-hand side, is from Ma'ariv and cites Shimon Peres as saying that "The homos have crossed the line." I took this photograph in Jerusalem in late June 2006. As always: click to enlarge.

Last Saturday, I had the opportunity to see the New York premiere of "Jerusalem is Proud to Present" (ירושלים גאה להציג, 2007) as part of the Jewish Film Festival at Walter Reade theater. In Israel, it has been shown on Channel 2 and Channel 8 and screened at various film festivals.

This latest documentary by the Israeli director Nitzan Gilady ("In Satmar Custody," 2003) is about the attempts to hold a Gay Pride Parade (מצעד הגאווה) in Jerusalem in the summer of 2006, as part of the international "World Pride" celebrations. The parade, which was to go through the city center, had originally been scheduled for August 6. It was postponed several times, in part because of the war still raging in early August, and in part because of the fears that police would not be able to protect marchers from the wrath of religious protesters. Ultimately, the "march" was held as a rally in a closed stadium, guarded by thousands of police officers, on November 10.

Gilady's film begins with a surreal press conference attended by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious leaders in Jerusalem, watching clips from previous gay pride parades in other parts of the world, and denouncing the planned event as an abomination. Throughout, it gives space to both supporters and opponents of the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade, though it is clear that Gilady, who said after the screening that he had only recently come out to his parents, has chosen a position.

One one side, we see the activists and members of the Jerusalem Open House (English). They include the first openly gay Jerusalem city councilor, Sa'ar Netanel (Meretz), elected at the same time as its first ultra-Orthodox mayor, Uri Lupoliansky; Adam Russo, the victim of a stabbing attack at the first gay pride parade in Jerusalem on June 30, 2005 (the assailant was eventually convicted of attempted murder); Noa Sattat, the director of the Open House; and Boodi, a 19-year-old drag queen from Ramallah, who performs at Jerusalem's only gay club, Shushan (now closed), and eventually seeks asylum in the U.S. after being kidnapped by Hamas militants.

Arrayed against them, we see Mina Fenton, a national-religious municipal politician who not only organizes a group of American-born settler women using her bad English and crude sense of taste (the Americans seem slightly more attentive to public opinion) but also solicits support in Arabic from a hijab-clad by-passer. We also encounter a Brooklyn expatriate, Rabbi Yehuda Levin, a dogged opponent of the "gay political elite." Less openly involved than these somewhat ridiculous figures, are the various religious leaders of Jerusalem - the Christian clergymen, the Muslim sheikhs, and the Sephardi and Ashkenazi rabbis. Finally, we see the anonymous masses of rioting ultra-Orthodox protesters.

As the date of the parade approaches, tensions rise and the incitement on the part of the opponents of the parade becomes ever more murderous. The director and Sa'ar Netanel find themselves surrounded in a car by a mob of haredi hooligans, beating on the windows. What follows is footage from various news channels of several days of rioting in the city by young ultra-Orthodox men. Traffic blockades are set up, dumpsters set on fire, and stones thrown. The police respond mercilessly with water cannons and beatings. One foreign commentator calls it the "intifada of the ultra-Orthodox."

The rhetoric of the Open House activists is unapologetically secularist. Netanel speaks of the forces of "darkness," and the black masses of haredi men who appear in the film, anonymous and often in conditions of near-darkness, only reinforce this rhetoric without problematizing it in any way. For Netanel and others, this is a battle of democracy against theocracy, of tolerance against bigotry, of liberalism against religious fanaticism, of progress against backwardness.

The "ultra-Orthodox" intifada invites comparison with the riots that swept across the Muslim world following the Danish cartoon controversy. In both cases, the aggrieved parties - religious believers -responded with violence to what they saw as symbolic desecration (of the Prophet or of the Holy City). The "perpetrators" of these blasphemies, however, presented their actions as a matter of inherent rights and freedoms, which had to be vigorously asserted.

Last October, I attended a colloquium at UC Berkeley's Townsend Center for the Humanities, which posed the question: Is Critique Secular? The first panel discussion of the day featured a paper read by Talal Asad (Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center) called "Reflections on Blasphemy and Secular Criticism," with local superstar professors Wendy Brown (Political Science), Judith Butler (Rhetoric), and Saba Mahmood (Anthropology) responding.

In his paper, Talal Asad argued that

The conflict that many Euro-Americans saw in the Danish cartoons scandal was between the West and Islam, each championing opposing values: democracy, secularism, liberty, and reason on the one side, and on the other the many opposites – tyranny, religion, authority, and unreason (Asad 3).

Referring to secular critique itself as a kind of violence, Asad, while claiming to stake out a position beyond the normative, blasted "Western secularists" who can conceive of blasphemy only as "a constraint on the freedom of speech guaranteed by Western principles and by the pursuit of reason so central to Western culture."

Asad wants us to see blasphemy "not simply as a bid for free speech against irrational taboos but as violence done to human relations that are invested with great value" (Asad 16). I may be wrong, but my intuition is that while such an argument finds an audience in the Western academy when the violent protesters are Muslims upset about an insult to Muhammad, it seems to lose a lot of its force when those rioting against blasphemy are ultra-Orthodox Jews upset about the "desecration" of Jerusalem by homosexuals.

INS Hanit

The Israeli Navy Ship Hanit ("Spear")

There is an excellent article by the ever-dependable Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff detailing, for the first time, the "intelligence failure" (it was more complicated than that), which led to the near-sinking of the INS Hanit by Hizbullah on the night of July 14, 2006. Readers will recall the discussion with Hazbani about this a few months ago.

The article also makes interesting points about the intense qassam firing of the past week.

Lame Ducking It

The Two-State Solution (Image by Makaristos)

In the wake of Annapolis, we heard mostly skepticism and derision about the latest US-backed drive for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. The naysayers would do well, however, to take note of the statements by President George Bush on his visit to Israel and the Palestinian Authority this week. This lame duck president does not have anything to lose on the domestic scene. In fact, he is better off immersing himself in the kinds of foreign policy ventures that will not entangle him with Congress. The announcement by national security adviser Stephen Hadley, following a speech by the president today, that Bush would be returning to the region before the end of his term is a definite signal that he means business.

The vision of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement that Bush endorsed adheres to the historic American line, as well as that of most of the international community. It is the vision of two nation-states, living side-by-side, with monetary compensation for the Palestinian refugees and their descendants. It runs decidedly counter to the dreams of a "one-state solution," which seek to turn Israel-Palestine into a staging ground for utopian experiments.

Putting Sderot on the Map

Map from Wikipedia

Steven Erlanger's story on the front page of today's New York Times (print edition) is, to my knowledge, the first time that the plight of the southern town's residents has made it there. The qassam attacks from Gaza began before the withdrawal of August 2005, but they have intensified greatly since. Erlanger's piece, accompanied by photographs of children peering at the destruction caused by the rockets, gives voice to the parents, sons, and daughters of the town, whose suffering has received relatively little attention until now.

There are some who try to relativize the qassam attacks, by pointing to the primitive construction of the rockets, their inaccuracy, and the low number of deaths that they have caused so far. They inevitably follow up with a comparison of the qassam to the F-15, with its deadly strikes on Gaza. This kind of comparison provides the relativizers with poetic justification, just like the image of rock throwers confronting tanks (in reality, they are more likely to face soldiers). We are entreated to view the struggle as one of heroic resistance fighters with limited resources confronting an awesome machine marshaling infinitely stronger state and military power. Or better yet, we are told that the rocket attacks resist "the occupation."

Such comparisons obscure the particularity of the terror that Sderot's residents experience every day. It is easy to remark, upon reading about one of Erlanger's teenage protagonists Razi, who "has seen 15 therapists" since seeing a rocket explode in front of his eyes, that Razi, unlike the children of Gaza at least has a therapist. This is a cynical and cruel game. The suffering experienced by Razi and all of Sderot's residents is not just and it is not unavoidable. It is the outcome of a deliberate strategy to terrorize civilians, which should be condemned as loudly as Israeli air strikes which kill innocent Palestinians.

The qassam attacks are all too often depicted as pin-point blows against the "powerful" by those sanctified as essential "victims." The reality of course is that they are aimed at one of Israel's poorest and most defenseless populations.

In this post, I have deliberately avoided the "causes" of the qassam problem and any discussion of its solution. I do not know whether the qassam attacks are being used for tactical or strategic purposes. These are issues I hope to address soon.

An American in Tel Aviv

Will Bynum playing for the Golden State Warriors (Photo:nba.com).

I've always been curious about the life of an NBA castoff plying his craft on Israel's hardwood. Now Maccabi Tel Aviv's Will Bynum has given us a glimpse. When I was in the country a year ago, the press was pumping up Bynum as one of -- if not the dominant player in Israeli hoops. The former Chicago playground legend and Georgia Tech/U. of Arizona standout seemed to have found a home in TA after a brief NBA sojourn that included time spent here in the Bay Area in the employ of the Golden State Warriors. Bynum is likely to find his new home rather less hospitable after an incident that took place early Saturday morning outside a nightclub called the "G-Spot" in Tel Aviv. Apparently, Bynum and former Philadelphia 76-er Vonteego Cummings were out celebrating Bynum's 25th birthday with Bynum's brother and, potentially, a larger cadre of pro-ballers that frequent the hip-hop club. Bynum's party clashed with a group from Dimona, members of the Hebrew Israelite Community in Dimona, according to the police. The Dimona-ites claim Bynum made a pass at a woman in their crowd. An initial scuffle was settled, but Bynum and his boys found an angry pack of "youths" in the parking lot when they later left the club. Bynum seems to have dashed to his car with Cummings and driven directly at one of his attackers. A 22 year-old man survived the collision, but was severely injured, leaving bloodstains on Bynum's vehicle.

I'm often struck by how hostile clubs and bars are -- an atmosphere I'm less and less comfortable in. This may sound banal, but I, for one, am continually astonished. So was this incident just good old-fashioned drinkin' and fightin' à la Americaine? I'm not sure. I would love to have been a fly on the wall. What was the dynamic here? A Boston Celtics fan blog ludicrously misread this as "Zionist" vs. Other. Some, understandably in light of a spate of recent attacks on pro athletes, see this as further evidence that heckling now involves bodily harm. And the American media hasn't picked up on the fact that, the Hebrew Israelites are, well, basically American, with an African-American pedigree that goes back to the inner circle of Marcus Garvey. Or maybe I'm making precisely the same mistake of mislabeling that Bynum and Vonteego made. Either way, the story should have been material for a perversely imaginative American writer like Ralph Ellison or Chester Himes.

The Iranian Nuclear Program

The snippet of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released on December 3 was a blow to those supporting tighter sanctions against Iran. The report, based on data from sixteen American agencies as well as shared information from the larger intelligence community - most significantly from the United Kingdom, but also from France, Italy, and even Israel (see Melman's piece in Ha'aretz) - argued that "in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program." For many of those who opposed stricter measures against Iran (Russia and China) and those luke-warm about more meaningful steps (Germany), the report was welcome ammunition in the international war of words. A number of analysts declared that this American own-goal had wiped the military option off the table.

On the other hand, British intelligence sources disputed the veracity of the report, attributing the conclusions to the U.S. intelligence agents' misinterpretation of Iranian decoy conversations. Meanwhile, Israeli officials, most notably Defense Minister Ehud Barak, have vehemently criticized the American conclusions. Some American as well as Israeli commentators have raised the specter of a U.S. betrayal of its ally.

Of course, any hardline posturing by Barak should be evaluated with an eye to the domestic political front. The Labor Party defense minister in Olmert's government is trying as much as possible to profit from opportunities that the Iranian crisis as well as the ongoing qassam fire from Gaza provide him as he distinguishes his security record from that of Kadima and the Prime Minister. Nevertheless, no one is playing around merely to gain approval ratings. Israel is right to challenge the NIE and the interpretations of it advanced by those who have long been intent on throwing sticks in the spokes of the sanctions-wheel.

Iran did not stop its work out of humanitarian convictions about the evils of nuclear weapons. The regime fears both a preemptive military attack and international isolation. But it also knows the rewards that it would gain from reaching nuclear status. The Iranians, are thus going to do everything possible to continue covert work that would enable them to produce a nuclear weapon within a short period of time, even with a frozen nuclear program. As the NIE acknowledges, Iran is "keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons (NIE, p. 9)."

Unfortunately, the NIE undermines the very mechanisms that led to increased international pressure against the Iranian regime. Without the credible threat of an American military option, the incentives for such states as Russia, China, or even Germany to support tougher sanctions against Iran decline dramatically. Where there were once two sticks - sanctions and a military strike - only one of these remains today. If the world refuses to see a nuclear Iran as a problem, Israel has no choice but to devote all its resources to developing a credible answer to the challenge.

It does not matter whether or not Iran is a "rational" actor. Iran's rise to the nuclear powers' club would be disastrous for American as well as Israeli interests in the region. This is not a moral argument about who deserves to have nuclear weapons but a simple statement of the geopolitics involved. There are some who think that the Middle East will be a better place with the Islamic Republic projecting hard power in the Gulf and in the Levant. Others appear to be longing for a day when the U.S. is no longer able to secure the world's most important oil shipping lanes without the cooperation of other powers. They will regret this when it is too late.

I have to agree with Rosner that this report should never have been published. It may very well have taken the winds out of the diplomatic struggle against Iran's drive for nuclear weapons.

Will Annapolis Surprise Us All?

When making predictions about developments in the Middle East, I have learned to follow a simple formula over the past half-decade: imagine the worst and multiply that by two. At first glance, there seems little reason to deviate from that rule when thinking about what the Annapolis Summit, which begins on Tuesday, November 27, will bestow upon us. But pessimism is easy, so let us look deeper and find at least a few positive indicators. Annapolis may yet surprise us all.

The Americans - President Bush and Secretary of State Rice - desperately need a victory. They will be pushing down hard on the Israelis to make symbolic concessions, and to give the Arab states and Fatah something to write home about. Israeli Prime Minister Olmert, for his part, seems to have prepared the ground for some bigger concession. So far, he has faced relatively little opposition. Despite a few whispering campaigns and speeches, the far right has not been able to mobilize its mass base to preempt Olmert.

One of the bigger concessions that Olmert could offer may not be related to the Palestinians at all. Rather, it may involve some overture on the Syrian side of things. There is no doubt that Syria's participation at the summit is highly significant. It may yet prove disastrous, but the potential exists for a big move forward.

Meanwhile, the Saudis' main concern, whatever their rhetoric, these days is Iran. Together with Egypt and Jordan, they will seek to reverse the Iranians' impressive muscle-flexing in the Gulf region as well as in the Levant. They have no choice but to turn the summit into something that can be exchanged on the market of Sunni public opinion.

The Palestinians, i.e., Abbas, Fayad, and the Fatah gang, can least afford to fail. They need to use the summit as an opportunity to gain solid commitments to Fatah rule in the West Bank. This will be more important to them than adherence to settlement freezes - as important as these are to the long-term viability of a Palestinian state.

Of course, Annapolis will not end the qassam strikes from Gaza on Sderot. Nor will it stop the IDF incursions into and roadblocks in the West Bank. However, the summit may very well initiate a major shift in the US's public commitments to the creation of a Palestinian state. We may witness something similar to President Bush's historic June 24, 2002 speech, but this time with a pro-Abbas tilt.

The Benevolent Empire Strikes Back

What makes an empire great? What makes it really great – more durable and expansive than its rivals? What makes an empire a “hyper power,” the center of things in a unipolar world? Yale law professor Amy Chua wanted to know, and so she studied world history’s “hyper powers.” The label owes its origin to a Frenchman, who in 1999 uttered it in an anti-imperial – or at least, anti-American, tirade. But in Chua’s new book, Day of Empire, it’s drained of any prejudice. Her definition, which to me, sitting in on her lecture today on the campus of UC Berkeley, seemed a bit loose, focuses on scale – these empires aren’t on the Aztec scale, but on the Roman, Persian, or Mongol – and, on economic and military preeminence. She argues that radical tolerance or pluralism is the foundation upon which any hyper power stands, bearing in mind that what was progressive in early modern Holland won’t pass muster with liberals today.

From her public comments, and from what one can read in this LA Times review, Chua’s attempt to analyze ancient and modern empires comprehensively, while admirable and ambitious, appears to miss the mark. I asked her whether her notion of “strategic tolerance” could indeed be applied equally well to a decentralized ancient empire, which bows to local custom and rule as a matter of practicality – say, the Achaemenid Persians in a place like Upper Egypt – as to a modern empire, like the American, which might, in the interest of gaining a competitive advantage over the Chinese, selectively offer visas to highly skilled foreign nationals to keep them from setting up shop in Hong Kong. She answered that colleagues had warned her of the brutality of pedants and specialists, had charged that she wouldn’t be comparing apples and oranges, but apples and nuclear power plants, and still, alas, she had carried on, secure in the notion that “tolerance” is a flexible yet coherent concept, the “glue” of each of these societies, and, ultimately, what for us should paste them all together. I’m jealous. Would that I were a lawyer and not an ancient historian.

Defunct are the empires of the past; a simple fact, perhaps a justification for shallow study, but also the source of an unmistakable fear of the future that animated Chua’s talk and spread to the crowd. In the western tradition, one finds the idea that empires rise and fall cyclically as far back as Herodotus. Chua faces off with a more difficult problem, encountered by a later Greek historian, Polybius, who took for granted that empires rise and fall, but somehow sensed that Rome was different, that the empire under which he lived was both born of time’s perennial cycle and transcended it. Chua wanted today to look to the future, and in her lawyerly way, to imply that the United States can escape the fate of past empires that failed to negotiate between the extremes of excessive tolerance, whereby internal cohesion suffers, and the backlash of intolerance that, she argues, often seems to follow an externally produced catastrophe on the scale of 9/11.

Chua is a Chinese-American, the daughter of a Berkeley computer science professor. And so it seemed fitting that her comments looked forward to an American clash with China, and also seemed to juxtapose the absorption of Asian immigrants here on the Pacific Rim in California with a failed approach to immigration and integration for Hispanics here and across the country. She tempered optimism on China by pointing to Chinese ethnic chauvinism. But she also fastened upon Jews, repeatedly, as the quintessential beneficiary of imperial tolerance, arguing that hyper powers that took in Jews invariably profited big time. I couldn’t help but wonder if she was driving at the conclusion that what some have called market-oriented ethnic minorities are better positioned than others to profit from the tolerance of hyper powers, and, in turn, fuel the growth of their hosts. In fact, in response to my question, Chua almost seemed to bemoan the ideological restraints that prevent modern, liberal, democratic empires from more effectively cherry picking the kinds of immigrants they desire.

The Middle East had to fit in somewhere. Chua elicited chuckles by pointing out that Coca-Cola and American blockbusters won’t turn a Palestinian into an American – or a pro-American; or that the US isn’t about to draw an army of civil servants from the Iraqi population, à la the British in India. Her more serious point, and, I think, one of the major arguments of her book, is that the US had better not impose its values and culture on Middle Eastern nations. That wouldn’t be tolerant. Instead, it would spell the beginning of the end of America’s reign as hyper power. Given that she very much left open the question of whether or not American hegemony, or even hyper power per se, is a good thing, I couldn’t help feeling that she wanted to have her cake and eat it too. Tolerance and pluralism, no doubt, are by Chua’s reckoning, good things. And the powers that practice them, get rewarded. (Here, Stanford’s Josiah Ober, the preeminent historian and theorist of classical Athenian democracy, would wholeheartedly agree). Then why, one wonders, shouldn’t the West be intolerant about intolerance in the Middle East? To protect our competitive advantage? In other words, is hyper power a zero-sum game; we keep tolerance and pluralism to ourselves and thereby retain our dominance? If instead, tolerance is a universal good, an engine of economic growth, the fons et origo of happiness, why shouldn’t we be pushing with Thomas Friedman for the pope to visit Saudi Arabia? Liberal values may prove just as much a casualty of the neocon putsch as the tragic loss of human life in Iraq.

Delayed Reaction

Blogging about a Mearsheimer and Walt lecture a couple of weeks after the fact is a little odd, I know. The atmosphere surrounding this controversial and vaguely filial scholarly pairing usually elicits rapid fire rejoinders (think Alan Dershowitz on the Kennedy School website), easy labels, and point-by-point refutations. In my case, I’ve delayed posting my reaction to the talk Amos and I took in recently at Boalt Hall, Berkeley’s law school, not only because I’m busy, but because I’m rather uncomfortable with the blitz-style polemics one hears from some of M&W’s opponents.

Emotion, not dispassionate, scholarly curiosity, sells these professors’ book -- and prolongs their fifteen minutes of fame. And, frankly, I didn’t walk out of their talk very emotional. (Though the cry of, “Don’t taze me,” from an unruly audience member who was escorted out by the police, and the dark epiphany of a committed Darwinist during Q&A insured that I wasn’t unfazed). Much of what was said was reasonable, and, when young Walt spoke, well reasoned. That the pro-Israel lobby in Washington is a singularly efficacious interest group, with an enormous budget, and access to the inner circles of the Bush administration, isn’t something worth debating. These are the people who were eating at now disgraced – once wildly successful – lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s D.C. restaurant, and, sometimes, from his trough. As a case study in the sociology of the Beltway, The Israel Lobby, will probably read well. Then again, Mearsheimer did accuse the “Lobby” of driving former Rhode Island Senator Lincoln Chafee from office. As Walter Russell Mead points out in an excellent review of the book in Foreign Affairs, these guys tend to display a surprisingly naïve view of the American political system. Chafee was a moderate Republican from the northeast in the age of Karl Rove and Tom Delay, the men who've polarized politics. The evaporating congressional Center pushed him out, not the machinations of pro-Israel hawks!

That particular accusation is one that sexes up, even if it doesn’t strengthen M&W’s message. Moreover, it’s symptomatic of a larger attempt at inflating their story. They’re on much shakier ground as they move from their description and analysis of the “Israel Lobby,” broadly construed, to greater claims about the history of US foreign policy and contemporary international relations – this despite the fact that the two are eminently qualified to discuss those matters. One of their weakest claims has always been that the Israel Lobby got us (Americans) into Iraq. From what I understand, this is a claim that was toned down considerably along the way from article to book, but I still left their lecture utterly confused. The state of Israel and the Lobby – notice the conflation – were “two of the main driving forces” behind the war, they told the crowd in Berkeley. Their evidence? The Israeli population was gung-ho, with polls bearing out their support for the invasion. And the Lobby? Well, they brag – a lot. M&W place an inordinate weight on the boasts of AIPAC, et al., who claim to have had the ear of key neocons in Bush’s inner circle, (this being a major criticism of Mead).

Thankfully, in my opinion, the whims of the Israeli populace, in search of their psychological reprieve, and the puffed-up ambitions of a few Washington lobbyists aren’t enough to produce the greatest foreign policy disaster in American history. This country is having a hell of a time facing up to the debacle of Iraq. With so many culpable, it’s shocking how few are owning up. Those responsible are not just those who cheered on, nor only those who gave the Administration a pass out of political cowardice, but all those who lay down because they thought it would be easy. The most disheartening thing about M&W’s book is that it offers all these people amnesty, the comfort of a villain with real agency. AIPAC took us to war, not the Hillary Clinton’s of the world or the average American. We didn’t do it! Cindy Sheehan’s cry of, “My son died in Iraq for Israel” gets an academic imprimatur.

Finally, and here I’m indebted to a real political scientist, Asaf, M&W came off a bit disingenuous in their claim to be undermining with this book years of work that advanced “realist” theories of international relations. For Mearsheimer, this was something of a punch line: our book discredits us! In a way, the profs provide here an answer to the question, “Why this issue?” They didn’t take it on out of malice. They have no axe to grind. The absurdity of the matter is self-evident. According to realist orthodoxy, as I understand it, states operate rationally, and the United States, in the case of its relationship with Israel, has long been acting like an entirely irrational player in the world system. I don’t think M&W risk losing many realist diehards with this book. On the contrary, this is what Greek rhetoricians called auxesis – amplification. In a world of rational relationships this irrational alliance has no place. The most important challenge of M&W’s serious critics thus won’t be stubbornly making “the case for Israel,” but making anew the case American-Israeli cooperation in a brave, scary new world.