One more Jewish Voice for Peace

Update 7/7: Haaretz, voice of what's left of the Israeli left, published an astonishing indictment of Israeli society and culture in a staff editorial today:

No less responsible for the murder are those who did not halt, with an iron hand, violence by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian civilians, and who failed to investigate complaints “due to lack of public interest.” The term “Jewish extremists” actually seems more appropriate for the small Jewish minority that is still horrified by these acts of violence and murder. But they too recognize, unfortunately, that they belong to a vengeful, vindictive Jewish tribe whose license to perpetrate horrors is based on the horrors that were done to it.

Prosecuting the murderers is no longer sufficient. There must be a cultural revolution in Israel. Its political leaders and military officers must recognize this injustice and right it. They must begin raising the next generation, at least, on humanist values, and foster a tolerant public discourse. Without these, the Jewish tribe will not be worthy of its own state.

That makes me feel moderate in my little manifesto, originally posted on July 4, below.
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A personal note here that I have joined Jewish Voice for Peace, which "seeks an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem; security and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians; a just solution for Palestinian refugees based on principles established in international law; an end to violence against civilians; and peace and justice for all peoples of the Middle East."  JVP campaigns to induce organizations and investors to divest from companies that profit from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.

As a Jew, I feel a vital chord is struck by the JVP assertion that "we are among the many American Jews who say to the U.S. and Israeli governments: 'Not in our names!'" Not in my name the land theft, the caging of people in cantons via roads to which they're barred access, the legal codification of second class citizenship, the rampant housing discrimination, the mass arrests and consequence-free killings, the disproportionate assaults and bombardments, and the enablement of all of the above by obscene amounts of military aid showered on a first-world country by a U.S. Congress and executive branch forever in the pocket of a toxic combination of Jewish and Evangelical Christian lobbies.

I note that JVP is noncommittal as to the form of a just resolution of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, and that's as it should be. If conditions change to a degree almost unimaginable at the moment, and an Oslo-type two-state solution becomes acceptable to both sides, who would gainsay it?  I have come to believe, though, that a just state in which citizenship is defined by religion and ethnicity is impossible. Ultimately, by course of nonviolent evolution -- perhaps in a hundred years -- I would hope that a single democratic state with no special status accorded to any religion or ethnicity might emerge in present day Israel-Palestine.

Obama denounces Holocaust denial, loses Arab students

The Times Lede blog has a fascinating set of responses to Obama's speech from Arab students. For the most part, they appreciated Obama's courage and directness and gestures of respect; their responses are nuanced and complex.

Deeply disturbing, though, are students' reactions to Obama's discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Three out five students who reacted to this issue rejected Obama's attempt to be even-handed, specifically his parallel treatment of Jewish and Palestinian suffering. One of these three negative reactions was overtly antisemitic, a second implicitly so. All three reacted angrily at what they saw as an insinuation that Israel's existence was justified by Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.

Obama did not say that. But he seemed to. These reactions, prejudiced though they are, highlight a lacuna in Obama's presentation that did register with me* when I heard it:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

There's almost a sleight-of-hand in this passage that sits oddly with its brutal honesty. First, the passive construction "the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries" avoids saying who persecuted them, e.g., perhaps, Muslims as well as Christians. Then comes the statement of Holocaust fact, followed by the assertion that Holocaust denial is poisonous, and then by a claim that Holocaust denial prevents peace -- apparently, Obama seems to imply, by further traumatizing traumatized Israeli minds.

What's missing is a statement of why Israel has a right to exist. Perhaps such a statement should not be necessary. But Obama did come near enough to suggesting that its justification lay in the Holocaust to make the absence of an explicit justification felt. And into that gap rushed the inference that the Holocaust was the reason that Arabs should accept Israel's existence -- which touched a raw nerve in these three students. Here are excerpts from their reactions, starting with a weirdly "doublethought" Holocaust denial:

Tarek Hefni

Tarek Hefni, 20, is a student of computer science at Cairo University from Giza, Egypt

I did not feel very comfortable regarding the two state solution and regarding treating the Holocaust as a fact. It is still a debatable issue and should not be taken as granted....

Lede Blog Editor's Note:We asked Tarek to clarify his objection to President Obama’s statement that the Holocaust is a fact in his speech today in Cairo. Here is what he told us:

I admit a genocide has taken place! That’s a fact. However, the numbers are really doubtful. I also don’t see any relevance between people being killed by other nation and building a homeland in a different land. Again the genocide did take place. I just doubt the numbers.

Kholoud Khalifa Kholoud Khalifa, 22, who majored in journalism at the American University in Cairo and describes herself as an “Egyptian-Austrian Muslim,” watched the speech in Mohandesien, Egypt.

I was troubled by his words regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict and those on democracy. The others were okay, they were expected — violent extremism in all of its forms didn’t really hit a nerve. Iran’s nuclear controversy is just filling white space, but claiming the Holocaust justifies a Jewish homeland and then saying it’s wrong too, what was it? Oh, uttering the same about Jews because it revokes past emotions is atrocious. For 60 years the Palestinians have been displaced, killed and terrorized and it’s disparaging to think of it as a tragic event rather than a genocide. To me, that thought confirms only one thing — his views of Palestinians are no different to those of Zionists.

Riham El Houshi

Where Obama really lost us is Palestine. He didn’t beat around the bush, at least, and made it clear right away that the American bond with Israel was unbreakable.

But he has clearly failed to understand that the problem Muslims have is not seeing both sides of the conflict, but seeing the conflict in historical context. I can safely say that Muslims do not and never will feel responsible for the Holocaust, and do not think it justifies setting up a Jewish state upon Palestinian lands. Lands, which, have shrunk over the decades as settlements have continued to rise and more and more territory has been annexed.

And despite the beauty of the words he used about Jerusalem, it was heavily symbolic talk about a messy issue. Palestinians and Israeli may agree on everything, but they will never relinquish their rights to Jerusalem as the capital of their respective nations.

It must be said, too, that two of the six students published by The Lede accepted Obama's assertion that a two-state solution is necessary. But still, there's a frightening glimpse here of the depth of hatred for Israel among educated young Arabs. Obama, for his part, should be commended for directly confronting Arab anti-semitism. But he needs to rethink the sequencing of fact, logic and association with which he served up this root of bitterness today.

* I must confess to conveniently forgetting this perception while writing the prior post.

UPDATE: The Times reports a Muslim Brotherhood official's reaction very similar to that of the students cited above:

...in Jordan, Rohile Gharaibeh, deputy secretary general for the Islamic Action Front, the political party of the Muslim Brotherhood, rejected any reference to the Holocaust. “The Holocaust was not the doing of the Muslims, it was the Europeans, and it should not come at the cost of the Palestinian people or the Arabs and Muslims,” he said.

More on Obama's speeches:
2029: Look back in wonder
The Gospel according to Obama
What Will.i.am had to work with

An honest broker for Israelis and Palestinians

It's often said that in the Bush years the U.S. lost credibility as an even-handed mediator in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. So among the many extraordinary balancings and tensions confronted in Obama's speech to the Muslim world today, it's worth noting that his paired precis of the plights of Israelis and Palestinians was balanced almost literally to the last syllable:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

Word count for the first paragraph: 108. For the second: 107. That literally equal allocation was surely not entirely conscious, but parallelism it reflects must be deliberate. Nor is it accidental that grievances are cited for Jews, Muslims and Christians. Evoking the religious groups' suffering picks up on a the speech's central theme: conflicts that go back decades and centuries must be confronted, and that they can be resolved on the basis of values shared by all three religions - and by all civilizations.

Indeed, the speech as a whole was based on those principles, laid out at the beginning: speak the truth, confront tensions openly, resolve them on the basis of shared values. Obama laid out hard truths for every interested party, including Israelis and Palestinians:

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.

Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build. The Palestinian Authority must develop its capacity to govern, with institutions that serve the needs of its people. Hamas does have support among some Palestinians, but they also have responsibilities. To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, and to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel's right to exist.

At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.

Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society. And just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel's security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank. Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress.

At present, the force behind this semantic even-handedness comes from the Obama administration's unequivocal insistence that Israeli settlement growth must stop. That's the new element in the equation. How the emerging confrontation with the Netanyahu government on this issue plays out will go a long way toward determining how this speech will be viewed in retrospect.

Phillip Stephens to Obama: Next Year in Jerusalem

Today, a second Wolf-Munch-Rock Award goes to the Financial Times's Phillip Stephens for a superb specimen of the kind of fact-based, non-ideological, think-your-way-to-a-conclusion commentary that sets the FT apart.

Stephens would have the new President believe that brokering an Israeli-Palestinian accord should be his first foreign policy priority. Since that's counter-intuitive on its face, he takes a contrarian route, setting up multiple hurdles to jump his argument over.

First, there's the insane competition for the President's attention:

The challenge for a US president rests in separating the urgent from the important..When he is not taking telephone calls from foreign leaders, we can assume president-elect Barack Obama is already being deluged with both the important and the urgent. Thick intelligence briefings will warn him of this emerging threat here, that rising peril there. His foreign policy advisers will be jostling to fix his focus on every part of the globe.

Next, the apparently more urgent and obviously interlocking other problems in the "multi-dimensional jigsaw of the Islamic world:

Mr Obama is committed to a speedy drawdown of US troops in Iraq; likewise to bolstering the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan and to rooting out al-Qaeda from the tribal areas of Pakistan. Iran promises to test both the new president’s strategic diplomacy and America’s relations with its allies; likewise Afghanistan.

All these problems, of course, are connected. Progress in Afghanistan is contingent on the co-operation of its neighbours – Iran as well as Pakistan. It may be too late to stop Tehran from acquiring the capability to build a nuclear bomb, but a serious effort to persuade it not to start a nuclear arms race will demand recognition of its security interests. On the other hand, the stability of a Shia-led and Iranian-backed government in Iraq will depend on the comfort levels of its Sunni Arab neighbours.

Finally, there's the extreme difficulty of the task itself:

The polls suggest that the Israeli elections are unlikely to deliver a coalition with the authority to strike a land-for-peace bargain with the Palestinians. Benjamin Netanyahu, the hawkish Likud leader, may emerge as prime minister. During his last spell in office Mr Netanyahu sought to derail the Oslo accords. I have heard it said that the one meeting that went badly during Mr Obama’s tour of the Middle East and Europe this year was his encounter with Mr Netanyahu.

For their part, the Palestinians remain divided in spite of the best efforts of Egyptian mediation. Hamas has so far refused to offer the recognition of Israel demanded by the international community. In the absence of a committed interlocutor on the Israeli side, it is hard to see what would prompt Fatah and Hamas to settle their differences.

But here's the alleged payoff:

The largest, and most important, piece in this multi-dimensional jigsaw is the Israel-Palestinian conflict. It is the issue that more than any other shapes attitudes in the region towards the US. On almost everything else, probably the best the incoming president can hope for is to damp the fires. A deal between Israel and the Palestinians would change the game.

Paradoxically, the very factors mitigating against settlement provide the stongest impetus to get it done:

The early years of his presidency will be his best, and quite possibly the last, chance to broker a two-state solution. Facts on the ground – demography, the West Bank barrier, Israeli settlements across swaths of the West Bank, Palestinian radicalism in Gaza – are steadily undermining the bargain that would give Israel security and the Palestinians a state.

Finally, Stephens invokes the enormous worldwide political capital Obama has won to close his own jigsaw puzzle: Obama has the capital; the opportunity in Israel/Palestine is fast waning; it's where he can have the largest impact; and success would change the chemistry of Western/Middle Eastern relations.

For all the formidable obstacles to an agreement, Mr Obama’s heritage and the nature of his victory has bestowed as much authority among Israelis, Palestinians and in the wider Arab world as any US president can ever expect. This precious political capital will diminish over time.

A serious and even-handed effort to promote peace between Israel and the Palestinians would disarm the most serious charge against US policy in the region: that everything it does is rooted in double standards.

A deal would not settle all the problems and conflicts. Nor, of itself, would it repair the relationship between the west and much of the Islamic world. Al-Qaeda and its affiliates would find plenty of other reasons to attack America. Yet the creation of a Palestinian state would change profoundly the dynamics of the Middle East. It would make possible much that now seems beyond all reasonable reach.

As coup de grace, Stephens casts this Herculean task as the best conduit for success in Obama's own terms:

Brokering such an accord would be tough and thankless. Mr Obama might well fail in the attempt. But there lies the existential choice for Mr Bush’s successor. Does he want to patch things up? Or does he want to redraw the strategic map of the Middle East and thereby set a new direction for America’s role in the world? That, in the final analysis, is what will mark out the difference between a competent and a transformational presidency.

Much as I admire this argument's construction, I confess I'm not convinced. As Stephens highlights at the outset, to govern is to triage. So why start here? Why would Obama be less likely to effect a transformational victory in, say, our relations with Iran or in effective aid to Pakistan? It's not possible in 1000 words to take the measure of the relative difficulty of those tasks, and I'm not sure I buy the "change the chemistry" argument. Clinton was an honest broker between Israel and the Palestinians, and that fact did not tamp down Islamist rage. On the other hand, Clinton was not a successful broker. And to end on a crushingly obvious note, success is the sine qua non of (good) transformation.

But where in Stephen's jigsaw is success likeliest?