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Today's would-be Haman

Technorati Tags: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Haman

I am beginning to think that the criteria used by the editors of the NY Times for evaluating op-eds about the Mideast are these:

Is it weird enough? Is it far enough removed from reality? Is it bad enough for Israel?

Today there’s one by a Tel Aviv University psychologist, Dr. Carlo Strenger, who advocates “diplomatic therapy” for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

The trauma is mutual and multilayered. The Palestinians have never been able to mourn what they call the Nakba, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in 1948. Their ethos of national liberation was based on the idea that all refugees would be able to return to their homes in Jaffa, Ramle and Lod. Letting go of this dream, a condition for the two-state solution, requires a process of mourning that has been made almost impossible by the humiliation of the occupation and the force of Israeli retaliation, culminating in the Gaza war last year.

Trauma is not the Palestinians’ alone: Israeli Jews live under a fear of annihilation that overshadows any consideration of compromise. Many critics of Israel believe that such a statement is a cheap ploy to justify colonial ambitions, but right or wrong this is the reality of the country’s collective psyche. Israelis still look back at the attacks by Arab armies in 1948, 1967 and 1973 as moments when they could have been wiped out, and this fear is revived today by the possibility of Iran’s acquiring nuclear weapons.

Where to start? How about the bias implicit in Strenger’s exposition: were all the Palestinian refugees expelled? Some were, certainly. But many left voluntarily to escape the chaos of the war that their leadership had a great part in bringing about; and most of the responsibility for their inability to return lies with the Arab nations.

Regarding the Jews, what exactly is the point of suggesting that their fear of annihilation may be unreasonable — worse, “a cheap ploy to justify colonial ambitions?” Are the Hizballah, Syrian and Iranian missiles chopped liver? Strenger does not suggest that the Arab nakba tales might be exaggerated, so why are Jewish fears?

Furthermore, it’s gratuitously false to say that the recent Gaza war was “retaliation.” That’s pure Goldstone.

But OK, he’s a psychologist, not a historian, and what’s important for therapy is not what is in reality, but what’s in the patient’s head. So Palestinian Arab fantasies are as important as historical facts. The nakba stories with their imaginary or exaggerated massacres, rapes, etc. are as important as the very real history of Arab war and terrorism against Israel, the treachery of Arafat in the Oslo period and the murderous ambitions of Hamas.

How can the therapist help calm this anger and fear? There’s a problem, and of course it’s Israel’s fault: the “humiliation of the occupation” and Israeli “retaliation” have made it impossible for the Palestinians to ‘mourn’ (it seems to me that they’ve been mourning violently since 1948 and what they haven’t been able to do is get even. But that’s just me). The implication is that to enable this mourning, Israel has to leave the territories and stop defending itself.

Strenger also brings up the issue of religion, so that he can equate the danger from “Israel’s ideological Right” to the well-armed, Iranian funded, antisemitic, genocidal fanatics of Hamas who rule 40% of the Palestinian Arab population. Is he kidding?

So what does diplomatic therapy look like?

As in Northern Ireland, the sponsoring parties, presumably the members of the so-called quartet — the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and the United States — should maintain a permanent peace conference that will convene until an agreement is reached. And the quartet needs to find ways to engage all parties in the region, most of all the Arab League, but also Hamas and possibly, at some point, Iran.

Strenger proposes, therefore, that the borderline-hostile Quartet (only the US can be called even ambiguously pro-Israel) maintain a permanent institution designed to beat Israel until the Palestinians and others are satisfied with the result! And look at those others: the Arab League, which fought to prevent the creation of Israel and has been implacably opposed to its existence ever since; Hamas, which explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of its Jewish inhabitants; and Iran, whose President called (yesterday) for the “nonexistence of the Zionist entity,” which is directly responsible for the last two wars fought by Israel, and is preparing the ground now for the next.

This is a therapy group? It sounds more like a lynch mob. But Strenger thinks there will be a catharsis:

An open-ended process would allow Palestinians to voice their rage and pain about what they have gone through and to express their need for Israel to recognize its part in the Nakba. In the same way patients progress by talking about their traumas, a therapeutic process may lead the Palestinians to realize that they have not just been passive victims, that they have made decisions, ranging from rejection of the American partition plan in 1947 to the use of suicide bombers since the 1990s, that have driven back the possibility of peace.

Likewise, Israel’s Jews need to be able to voice their fear that Arabs will never accept the existence of Israel, and that the two-state solution is just a step toward its destruction. Therapeutic diplomacy will help them gradually accept their share of the responsibility for the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948. In this way both parties can come to realize that accepting the other’s narrative and point of view does not mean annihilation.

I expect that the Palestinians will voice their rage and pain, something that they are expert at and do all the time. But why should this cause them to stop thinking of themselves as passive victims? It seems to me that the more they express their rage, the more convinced of their victim status they get. And they’ll get a lot of reinforcement from the other group members.

Israelis, for the most part, do accept that some Arabs were expelled in 1948, and that some of them were innocent people who suffered needlessly. They do not in general (except for those like Strenger) think that they must accept the responsibility for everything bad that happened to the Palestinians, they do not accept the Palestinian definition of the ‘crime’ that they are accused of, and they most assuredly don’t agree that they must accept 4-5 million hostile Arabs who claim to be descendants of  all of the original refugees in order to atone for it.

With all due respect, I don’t see a two-sided process of reconciliation here. I see only more pressure for Israel to make still more concessions, to move closer to the Arab position — which has not budged a centimeter since 1948 — until it finally gives up on the idea of Jewish self-determination.

It’s not therapy, it’s therapist-assisted national suicide!

Technorati Tags: Carlo Strenger, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel, TelAviv University

…because I’m too lazy to write something serious!

An Israeli cabinet minister is more likely to face prosecution in the United Kingdom nowadays than a terrorist who has murdered Israeli civilians. — Barry Rubin, 2/22

What was disproportionate this time? Was there a disproportionate use of passports? — Tzipi Livni, 2/24

The Goldstone Report seems to be objective and well-grounded — Diego López Garrido, the secretary of state for the European Union in the Spanish Foreign Ministry, 2/25

A Middle East without Zionism is a divine promise… Time is on the side of the peoples of the region. The Zionist entity is nearing the threshold of nonexistence. Its raison d’être is finished, and its path is a dead end. If Israel wants to repeat the mistakes of the past, the death of the Zionist entity is certain… This time, all the nations of the region will stand fast in the face of the [Zionist regime], and will uproot it. — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Damascus (tr. MEMRI) 2/25

Iran, like Syria and Lebanon, will from now on not permit [a situation] in which any of them will fight alone in the [upcoming] war that Tel Aviv has for some time been trying to involve the U.S. in… — Muhammad Sadeq Al-Husseini, columnist for Syrian state daily Tishreen (tr. MEMRI), 2/24

The most important thing gleaned from the report by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) circulated on Feb. 18, which states that Iran may indeed be bent on developing a nuclear bomb, is not new information about Iran. It is that for years the United Nations apparatus lied about what they knew and actively stood in the way of efforts to prevent the world’s most dangerous regime from acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapon. Anne Bayefsky, Eye on the UN, 2/22

Hating Israel as a unique aggressor is simply predicated on five unspoken truths: 1) rampant anti-Semitism (one can hate Jews by the loftier notion of being “anti-Zionist”; 2) fear of radical Islamic terrorists; there are apparently no radical Tibetans hijacking planes or blowing up Madrid train stations due to Spanish ties with communist China; 3) oil, oil, oil. The Cypriots cannot enlist the Greeks to withhold 500 billion barrels of oil in the Aegean from world markets. If such a fantasy were true, Nicosia would be on the front pages; 4) Israel is Western, like the U.S., and in a most un-Western neighborhood, so hating Israel is a mechanism of hating the U.S. on the cheap; 5) demography. If there were a billion-person Orthodox community energized by a half-billion Greek-speakers, we most certainly would wish to solve the “Cyprus crisis”. — Victor Davis Hanson, 2/5

Technorati Tags: Israel

By Victor Rosenthal

I’m still thinking about the phenomenon of left-wing anti-Zionist Jews.

Let’s skip the doctrinaire Marxists stuck in their closed system like Noam Chomsky, the opportunists like Jeremy Ben-Ami, the mentally unbalanced like Norman Finklestein and those obsessed by hatred like Philip Weiss (note that some of the above fall into more than one category).

Let’s talk about the non-pathological ones who have nevertheless come to think that the existence of a Jewish state is fundamentally unjust. Sometimes they even say that Jewish ethics precludes Zionism.

A good example is Rabbi Brant Rosen. A reconstructionist rabbi, he calls himself a member of the “co-existence community.”  This sounds like a good thing; Jews and Arabs should co-exist. But Rosen’s approach turns out to be one-sided.

He stopped celebrating Yom ha’Atzmaut last year because, in his words,

As a Jew, as someone who has identified with Israel for his entire life, it is profoundly painful to me to admit the honest truth of this day: that Israel’s founding is inextricably bound up with its dispossession of the indigenous inhabitants of the land. In the end, Yom Ha’atzmaut and what the Palestinian people refer to as the Nakba are two inseparable sides of the same coin. And I simply cannot separate these two realities any more.

Obviously there are some serious historical issues buried here. ‘Indigenous’ carries a lot of freight. Were Arabs who came to Ottoman Palestine in the 1830’s from Egypt with Muhammed Ali so much more ‘indigenous’ than the Zionists of the 1890’s? What about Arabs who arrived after the turn of the 20th century to take advantage of economic development fertilized by Jews? What about the Jews who had been in ‘Palestine’ since the exit of the crusaders?

Another important word is ‘dispossession’. We know that some Arabs were forced from their homes in 1948; but we also know that some villages were centers of murder and terrorism waged against the nearby Jewish communities for decades. We know also that the Arab leadership of the time was not prepared to compromise over territory, choosing war instead. And the Jews were up against the wall with nowhere else to go.

For Rabbi Rosen, the sin of the birth of the state was that the Jews won that war, with the consequence that many Arabs left their homes and could not get back — some because they were expelled, many simply to escape the war zone. Objectively there were few massacres. What do you think would have happened had the Arabs won?

Rosen also seems to stop at the nakba. He doesn’t discuss the weaponization of the refugees by the Arab states, abetted by the West in the form of UNRWA, or the viciousness of Arab ‘resistance’, usually taking the shape of terrorism aimed at the civilian population of Israel. He ignores the “Three No’s.” He doesn’t talk about Yasser Arafat’s use of terror throughout the Oslo period, his building an educational and media system designed to create hatred and prevent reconciliation, his misrepresentation of the Camp David and Taba offers, and his rejection of them in favor of still more death and destruction. In general, Rosen doesn’t hold Arabs responsible for bad decisions and wrong actions.

I think this is a key point. He sees these things as irrelevant because in his view the nakba was so unjust that any means are permitted to reverse it. The crime was committed by the Jews in 1947-8 and must be atoned for before there can be co-existence.

But how to atone? Rabbi Rosen quotes approvingly from an article by Amaya Galili of Zochrot, which I’ll talk about another time. Galili says,

Accepting responsibility for the nakba and its ongoing consequences obligates me to ask hard questions about the establishment of Israeli society, particularly about how we live today. I want to accept responsibility, to correct this reality, to change it. Not say, “There’s no choice. This is how we’ve survived for 61 years, and that’s how we’ll keep surviving.” It’s not enough for me just to “survive.” I want to live in a society that is aware of its past, and uses it to build a future that can include all the inhabitants of the country and all its refugees.

Galili and Rosen want Israeli Jews to ‘correct reality’. It’s funny; it would seem to me that Oslo was just such an attempt. But of course it was not enough, just like Olmert’s 2008 offer wasn’t enough, because only reversing the nakba — which means granting an Arab right of return and ending the Jewishness of the state — could be. Only Israel’s un-winning the War of Independence would be enough for them.

So despite Rosen’s attempt to suggest that he wants justice for both sides, he allows just one side to define ‘justice’. While he is capable of seeing the nakba as a disaster for the Arabs, he can’t seem to see the years of terrorism against Jews in the Mideast — before and after 1948 — as a disaster for the victims. When he asks the Jews to ‘take responsibility’, he wants them to take all the responsibility, as if the Arabs have been entirely passive for the last 100 years.

This is not the position of someone who thinks that both Jews and Arabs have similar rights as humans and that fairness is the highest virtue. This is the position of a partisan of one side, who will be satisfied with nothing less than complete, total victory. It is identical with the Arab rejectionist point of view that has prevented co-existence for all of these years.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Arabs, Brant Rosen

Many commentators (including me) have been worried about the possibility of a new regional war in the Mideast, possibly triggered by a US or Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, or by Hizballah launching its massive rocket collection at Israel. But recently I’ve come to think that war is unlikely in the near future.

Everyone pretty much agrees that a preemptive US attack is not in the cards.

Anne Applebaum, in the Washington Post, writes:

[Barack Obama] will not bomb Iran’s nuclear installations for precisely the same reasons that George W. Bush did not bomb Iran’s nuclear installations: Because we don’t know exactly where they all are, because we don’t know whether such a raid could stop the Iranian nuclear program for more than a few months, and because Iran’s threatened response — against Israelis and U.S. troops, via Iranian allies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and Lebanon — isn’t one we want to cope with at this moment. Nor do we want the higher oil prices that would instantly follow. No American president doing a sober calculation would start a war of choice now, while U.S. troops are actively engaged on two other fronts, and no American president could expect public support for more than a nanosecond.

She left out one other important point: the US is relatively low on the list of those who are directly threatened by the Iranian bomb. Said list looks something like this:

1. Sunni Arab regimes (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Gulf states, Jordan), Lebanese Christians, etc.
2. Israel
3. Europe
4. The US

So while a nuclear Iran will be very bad for us in the long run — we’ll get those high oil prices anyway — we are not digging up our backyards to build shelters, as they are (figuratively) doing in Israel.

Note that I put the conservative Arab regimes first on the list. Barry Rubin explains, here, that that the Arabs correctly think that whatever happens, they will be losers:

If the United States … or Israel attacks Iran to destroy its nuclear weapons’ facilities, Iran and its allies will unleash a wider conflict … that will suck in the Arabs. But if no one stops Iran from getting weapons, the Arabs will suffer even more from Iranian imperialism, both direct and through fomenting revolutionary upheaval.

What about a preemptive Israeli attack? It’s also unlikely at this stage. Israel knows that an effective attack would be difficult and uncertain, and the Iranian retaliation painful, so it will act only to prevent a direct nuclear threat from Iran. Most analysts do not believe that there is such a threat yet, and there will not be for at least another year.

The warlike talk coming from Ahmadinejad and his proxies has lately been increasing in volume. But this could have two very different meanings:

• Ahmadinejad may think the time is actually ripe for a regional war to eliminate Israel, or
• he is trying to scare the US and Israel in order to deter them from taking military action against his weapons program.

I think the latter is more likely. My reasoning is as follows:

Hizballah could attack Israel, if it gets a green light from Iran. But Israel has made clear to Iran and Syria that they would not get off unscathed if this happens. Since it would not have anything to lose once the rockets start flying, Israel would certainly make a point of hitting Iranian nuclear facilities, which Iran very much wishes to preserve.

More important, if Iran were forced to respond in turn by taking actions that would affect the oil supply like blocking the strait of Hormuz, or if it were to attack American troops in the Mideast, it would be very hard for the US to keep from responding, no matter who is President. While the US would never invade Iran, a sustained bombing campaign against nuclear and other military targets — which the US, unlike Israel, is very capable of waging — would set the Iranian program back years and possibly bring about regime change.

Ahmadinejad understands all this. He also knows that Hizballah, Syria and Hamas together could do a lot of damage but probably do not represent an existential threat to Israel.  So it is not in his interest to initiate a conflict at whose end he will find himself much weaker and maybe out of power. Iran controls Hizballah tightly. So, barring accidents, he will keep the reins tight.

What I think is that the Iranian regime’s present goal, above all else, is to obtain the nuclear capability that will enable it to dominate the region, through aggression and subversion under the nuclear umbrella. This is the main fear of the Arab regimes that Rubin alludes to. Therefore a war with Israel — or worse, the US — is not to Iran’s advantage today.

I also don’t think that the peripheral players, like Russia, want to see it either. Russia continues to temporize about delivering the A-300 antiaircraft system that it has sold to Iran, probably because its delivery would make an Israeli attack more likely.

Of course, once Iran has attained its goal of becoming a true nuclear power, everything changes. But that won’t happen this year.

Technorati Tags: Iran