Peres Drops an Eloquence Bomb on Davos

He's in pretty good form (he starts at about the 39th minute):

This Seems Like the Best News All Year

The rain forests, or reasonable facsimiles of the rain forests, are making a comeback:

These new "secondary" forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest -- an iconic environmental cause -- may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.

Dubai in the Toilet

It's not just the economy, it's the beach as well:

A stretch of the exclusive Jumeirah Beach -- a magnet for Western tourists and home to a string of hotels -- has been closed. "It's a cesspool. Our tests show too many E. coli to count. It's like swimming in a toilet," said Keith Mutch, the manager of the Offshore Sailing Club, which has posted warnings and been forced to cancel regattas.The pollution is a blow to Dubai's reputation as an international holiday destination offering almost guaranteed sunshine and clear seas.

Go Boycott Yourself

Ha'aretz has some fun at the expense of a California-based anti-Israel academic:

Lloyd wrote that to the best of his knowledge, all supporters of the anti-Israel boycott were also opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Asked if logic wouldn't dictate that he and his colleagues boycott themselves, he responded, "Self-boycott is a difficult concept to realize. But speaking for myself, I would have supported and honored such a boycott had it been proposed by my colleagues overseas."

Dude,You Were, Like, in the Shoah?

An unbelievable political ad in an unbelievable country:

J Street, Walt and Mearsheimer, and Jewish Martyrdom

Jon Chait, making sense:

The Nation's Eric Alterman recently wrote that, in the United States, "right-wing Jewish organizations and neoconservative pundits dominate nearly all Middle East discussion." This is a pretty radical claim, one I don't agree with--recent cover stories in both Time and Newsweek have reflected the J Street line -- but one for which you could produce at least some evidence. The sum total of the evidence he did produce was three blog posts appearing in, respectively, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, and Commentary. Alterman, perhaps using hyperbole to compensate for the lack of evidence, called the authors "Thought Police." You may recall that the term "Thought Police" was coined by George Orwell's "1984" to describe a breed of futuristic secret police that would exceed even the draconian methods employed by Stalin and Hitler. Apparently Alterman believes equivalent powers are now wielded by a handful of Zionist bloggers. I'm trying to imagine what Alterman would say if fascism really does come to America. Perhaps he'll think to himself, while hanging from his thumbs in some dungeon, "Well, this is pretty bad, but not as bad as when I was criticized by Commentary online."

Mad Men on the Ambivalence of Zion

Not long ago, per Ta-Nehisi's advice, I started watching the first season of "Mad Men," and it's unbelievably smart, and then, in the episode entitled "Babylon," came the Goldblog bonus prize: The most intelligent discussion of Zionism I've ever seen on cable, basic or premium. The exchange is between Don Draper and Rachel Menken, the Jewish department store heiress. Here's some of it:

Rachel Menken: I'll say one thing about Israelis: don't cross them.

Donald Draper: Well those people at the meeting were definitely Zionists.

RM: Zion just means Israel. It's a very old name. I'm sorry, I'm not an expert on this and something feels strange about being treated like one... I don't know what I can say. I'm American. I'm really not very Jewish. If my mother hadn't died having me, I could have been Marilyn instead of Rachel and no one would know the difference.

DD: What is the difference?

RM: Look, Jews have lived in exile for a long time. First in Babylon and then all over the world -- Shanghai, Brooklyn -- and we've manage to make a go of it. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we thrive at doing business with people who hate us.

DD: I don't hate you.

RM: [with sarcasm] No, individuals are wonderful.

DD: That's not what I meant.

RM: I don't know. A country for 'those people,' as you call us, well, it seems very important.

DD: Then why aren't you there?

RM: My life is here. My grandfather came from Russia, now I have a store on 5th Avenue. I'll visit, but I don't have to live there. Just has to be. For me, it's more of an idea than a place.

DD: Utopia?

RM: Maybe. They taught us at Barnard about that word -- utopia. The Greeks had two meanings for it: eutopos meaning 'the good place' and outopos, meaning 'the place that cannot be.'

Chertoff: Terrorism is Polio, and TSA is the Vaccine

We're all getting polio, in other words.

Joel Johnson has a telling interview with Chertoff:

So, you know, it's a little bit like getting vaccinated against a dangerous illness. You know, we all took polio vaccine when we were kids. Maybe you may not be old enough. (Laughter.) I can't tell you that if I hadn't taken the vaccine, I would have gotten polio. But I can tell you that it is a sensible thing to do. And that's kind of how I view TSA.

Johnson adds:

Secretary Chertoff used this same analogy in his interview with Threat Level in August. It implies that terrorism can be cured through prevention, which is obviously not possible.

Hisham Melhem On His Big Scoop, and Big Changes Coming

My brother Hisham Melhem of al-Arabiya television scored an important interview with Barack Obama yesterday, so I called him to say Mazel Tov and to ask him if he thinks the interview signals a shift in rhetoric or a shift in substance.  Here's what he had to say:

Jeffrey Goldberg: What have you been hearing so far about the interview?

Hisham Melhem: I think many people in the Muslim world, ordinary people, were, judging by our website, sensed a different tone, that Obama was trying to reach out to them.

JG: George W. Bush called Islam a "religion of peace" in a mosque right after 9/11, though.

HM: What George Bush did initially was great. He went to a mosque, he listened to Brent Scowcroft, but later on, with his inability to make distinctions between groups like al-Qaeda on the one hand and Hamas and Hezbollah on the other, with many other things, the tone changed. Let's be clear: A president named Barack Hussein Obama sees the world differently from a president named George W. Bush, in part because of his biography, in part because of intellect. He senses that maybe America is less Western-centric than it used to be. The world is no longer Europe and North America.

JG: Did you sense any important shift in the way he thinks about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute?

HM: He talked about Israelis making sacrifices and that Israelis and Palestinians endure pain the same way. I'm not willing to say there is a shift in substance, but there is a shift in approach on the tone vis-à-vis Palestinian suffering. He showed that he understands the need for dignity and a place to call their own. And there will be a different approach, in the sense that sending George Mitchell is an important thing. He has talked both about Palestinian violence and Israeli settlement.

JG: But come back to substance: He's not abandoning Israel, he's maintaining a hard line on Pakistan --

HM: Look, in the long run, he is telling the Muslim world that it's going to have a difficult time demonizing him.  He's saying, "I'm willing to disagree with the people of the Muslim world respectfully." He was miffed and angry by Zawahiri and Bin Laden, the way they speak of him. And he jumped on it and dealt with it. There's a subtle shift here on how he looks at the war on al-Qaeda and the groups that collaborate with it. He doesn't put Hamas and Hezbollah in the same category as al-Qaeda. Is there going to be disappointment later? We're bound to have disappointments, but the main message is that a new wind is blowing. He's closing down Guantanamo, sending Mitchell, pulling out of Iraq, and maybe I'm dreaming but I hope he would show Palestinians and Israelis tough love, both of them. Do you want to tell me that Bin Laden and all these nuts are not going to be nervous about him?

I Think Michael Goldfarb Might Just Be a Little Crazy

From an interview with the former McCain campaign hatchet-man:

"It's unbelievable the way the media has covered this and the way has been played -- which is partly from the bullshit inside the campaign. When you have The New Yorker write a story about how Sarah Palin was selected... well, that was like Jane Goodall going in and writing about fucking apes mating in the jungle--they don't know what's going on. They're writing from another planet. I like Sarah Palin, I think she was a very attractive candidate, but I think she made a lot of mistakes. But so did Biden."

First, Jane Goodall did groundbreaking work on ape-fucking. She was also the first scientist to observe chimpanzees using tools, which changed the way humans understand their primate cousins. So if The New Yorker is to Sarah Palin what Jane Goodall is to ape-fucking, then The New Yorker obviously did a fine job covering the campaign.

Second, is this guy nuts, or what?

UPDATE, 6:46 P.M. -- According to Patrick Appel, Goldfarb may be echoing, consciously or subconsciously, Michelle Malkin, who told David Remnick once that she would be disinclined to sit for a New Yorker profile: "I have neither the time nor inclination to sit down with your staff Jane Goodall and serve as an anthropological specimen for The New Yorker's readership. If I want to play ape for amusement, I'll do it for my kids."

This doesn't change the fact that he seems nuts.

The Cliche Expert Visits Gaza

This is v. funny. Read the whole thing:

Q: So you've been south. What did you see there?

A: Collateral damage.

Q: Collateral to what?

A: To Israel's right to defend itself.

Q: And what else?

A: To courageous Palestinian resistance against Zionist imperialism.

Q: What targets were hit?

A: Homes, schools, hospitals, military installations, and firing positions.

Q: How do you tell one from the other?

A: If you are Palestinian, you don't bother.

Q: And if you are Israeli?

A: You shoot anyway.

Q: Could you be more specific? If you are a Hamas guerilla fighter, what is a legitimate military target?

A: Every outpost of Zionist imperialism.

Q: And what is an illegitimate civilian target?

A: Come again?

Can We Get the Sequencing Right, Please?

This story is typical. The Wall Street Journal teases a wire report about the bomb attack that killed an Israeli soldier today this way: "Gaza Violence Threatens Ceasefire." The AP story carried by the Journal reports: "The Israeli military said one soldier was killed and three were wounded in a bomb attack Tuesday morning on the Gaza-Israel border, while Hamas said one of its members had been wounded in an Israeli airstrike."

It takes a while to find out that the bomb attack on the Israeli soldiers came first. Just sayin'. 

The Four Questions: Martin Indyk on the Failure of Peacemaking

Martin Indyk's new book, Innocent Abroad, about the failures of American peacemaking in the Middle East, is an incisive, honest (sometimes caustically so), and -- I know this might sound strange when talking about a 528-page book about a peace process that ultimately went nowhere -- compulsively readable tour of the recent, and tragic, past.  I asked Martin four questions (actually six, but I like calling this feature the Four Questions) about his book, and his work. Here is our exchange:

Jeffrey Goldberg: When I was listening to Barack Obama talk about the events of the past month, particularly when he spoke of Hamas, it almost sounded as if he were giving us George Bush's understanding of the Middle East. Do you see significant change coming down the road?

Martin Indyk: I too was struck by how close Obama stuck to requirements enunciated by Bush: the need for a two-state solution to the Palestinian problem; Israel's need for security and its right to defend itself; Hamas's need to recognize Israel, forswear violence, and accept previous agreements; and the need to support the Palestinian Authority (particularly as the primary vehicle for channeling aid to Gazans in the wake of the latest conflict). But Obama's appointment of George Mitchell as Middle East peace envoy and his immediate dispatch of this heavy-hitter to the region, together with his promise of sustained, persistent American diplomatic engagement, highlight his differences with Bush who preferred to sit back and leave the parties to their own devices. This return to energetic peacemaking diplomacy of the kind the United States undertook in the 1990s actually makes Barack Obama sound more like Bill Clinton than George Bush. The peace process is back!

JG: Name the single thing American negotiators could do differently that might produce a better outcome than the one you experienced.

MI: If you confine me to one thing, I would say they have to hold both sides to their commitments: the Palestinians have to stop the violence and terrorism and dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism; and Israel has to stop the settlement activity (including natural growth) and dismantle the unauthorized settlement outposts. These are not moral equivalents but they are equivalent in the damage they have done to the hope of peace and the viability of a two-state solution. Nothing did more to undermine Clinton's peacemaking efforts so it was no coincidence that at the end of the Clinton Administration George Mitchell made the same recommendations in his report on the origins of the intifada. Those recommendations were incorporated in the Road Map which the Government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority accepted and committed to implement.

JG: Could the Jews in the settlements east of the security barrier be removed by force without sparking civil war?

MI: I don't believe that force would be necessary if the evacuation is presented to the Israeli public as part of a package that would include the following elements: financial compensation equal to that provided to the Gaza settlers; resettlement in the blocs that would be incorporated into Israel by agreement with the Palestinians; an end to the territorial claims of the Palestinians; security arrangements that ensure that all violence and terrorism against Israelis ceases; international guarantees of freedom of access for Israelis to Jewish holy places in Judea and Samaria; and peace with all the Arab states.

JG: Would the Palestinians respond to a reversal of the settlement project by marginalizing Hamas?

MI: Hamas enjoys popular support in the West Bank as well as Gaza because it has been seen to be more effective and less corrupt than Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. Under its current leadership Fatah is incapable of reforming itself and as long as that is the case Hamas will enjoy an advantage. However, the Palestinian Authority under non- Fatah PM Salam Fayyad is showing that it can establish order and promote economic development in the West Bank. This has improved its credibility and is one reason that Hamas decided to break the ceasefire in Gaza (because they felt they were losing ground politically). In the wake of the Gaza war, a real West Bank settlements freeze and the dismantlement of unauthorized outposts would do more than anything else to enhance the PA's credibility because it would show in a tangible way that moderation pays where violence only brings devastating destruction.

JG: You say George W. Bush is at fault for ignoring the conflict until well into his second term. But he inherited an intifada, a Sharon government and the controversy over the Karine-A, a boat full of weapons dispatched by Iran to help Yasser Arafat. What was he supposed to do, given these unhappy realities?

MI: I was Bush's ambassador in Israel for his first six months in office, which coincided with Sharon's. What he should have done was intervene to stop the violence and terrorism of the intifada. Remember the intifada had only been raging for three months when he entered the White House (it continued for five years on his watch). Sharon was willing to deal with Arafat - he sent his son Omri to meet with him as a manifestation of that, telling me that Arafat would understand the gesture of sending him his first born son. He was willing to freeze all settlement activity for six months if the violence stopped. When Hamas bombed the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv in June, 2001, killing 19 Israeli teenagers, which signaled the advent of suicide bombing, Sharon did not retaliate. In the face of ever-increasing Palestinian terrorism, Sharon actually waited for 15 months before he sent the Israeli army into the West Bank to reoccupy Palestinian cities and towns. He was waiting all that time for Bush to intervene and pressure Arafat to stop the terrorism. But Bush was determined to remain detached, explaining to me at the time that "there was no Nobel peace prize to be had here."

JG: Does the road to peace run through Jerusalem, or Tehran?

MI: I don't believe Tehran can veto peace if Israel and the Arabs are committed to making it. But Iran certainly has the ability to subvert the process of peacemaking through support for its violent opponents - Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestine Islamic Jihad. Iran would have real problems maintaining that support if the Syrians, who provide the conduit, were to make peace with Israel. That is why it is so important to advance on the Palestinian and Syrian tracks simultaneously while making clear to Iran that if it wants to become a supporter of peace it is welcome, but if it wants to oppose peace it will be isolating itself. During the Clinton years we chose to isolate Iran; this time around Iran should be the one that has to make that choice.

JG:Which is the more durable Middle East problem: The Arab-Israeli dispute, or the Sunni-Shia dispute?

MI: History has already rendered that judgment in favor of the Sunni-Shia dispute which has been waged for hundreds of years and shows no signs of abatement. If one takes the long view of history, the Arab-Israeli conflict has actually progressed toward resolution, notwithstanding the regular interruptions caused by the eruption of wars and intifadas. The proof of that lies in the steady progression of Arab states which have made peace with Israel, starting with Egypt in the 1980s, Jordan in the 1990s, and the offer of peace from the 23 Arab states of the Arab League in the first decade of the 21st century. Slowly, incredibly painfully, and accompanied by violence, heartbreaking setbacks and misery, Arabs and Israelis are coming to terms with each other. But when you look at the progress that has been made over the last three decades it has only been produced by the active diplomatic intervention of the United States, working with courageous leaders like Anwar Sadat, Menachem Begin, King Hussein, and Yitzhak Rabin - leaders who were willing to say "enough of bloodshed!" and break the mold of conflict. Such leaders do not appear to be present today on either side. But it's the nature of the Middle East that something always turns up, and it's not always bad.

Israel's Secret Weapon

Antelope. 

Egypt Endorses Netanyahu for Prime Minister

According to this report, Egypt is warning Hamas to cut a ceasefire deal with the Olmert government now, because it will find it far more difficult to deal with Bibi Netanyahu, who is the leading candidate for prime minister in the upcoming election. If I were a Bibi adviser, I'd take this gift and run with it. 

Best Name for Participant in a Sex Scandal

Beau Breedlove. You couldn't make it up. And by the way, what's with Portland?

Seth Lipsky, the Right Man at the Right Time

Ben Smith endorses Seth Lipsky for Bill Kristol's slot. So do I. He could be the new Safire. Seth has the most interesting mind in journalism. He's conservative, of course, but mostly what he is is unpredictable, and the page could use some unpredictability.  Plus, he wears fedoras. The Times could definitely use someone who wears a fedora. My colleague at The Atlantic, Ross Douthat, is also said to be a contender for the conservative set-aside slot, but I'm not endorsing him mainly because I want him around here.
 

NYT: It Turns Out Wal-Mart is Actually Okay

The Times tells us that Wal-Mart is now made up of employee-loving tree-huggers.

I suppose the reporters haven't been to the crappiest Wal-Mart in America. And they don't grok the insidiousness of its PR machine.

Bad News for Sheikh Hassan Mearsheimer

Despite the best efforts of the al-Manar commentator Sheikh Mearsheimer, Americans still support Israel, according to a new CNN poll:

Sixty percent of Americans in the nationwide survey said they were sympathetic toward the Israelis, compared with 17 percent who supported the Palestinians, CNN reported today on its Web site. A recent European poll showed that 23 percent of French people said the Palestinian Hamas group was primarily responsible for the war while 18 percent mainly blamed Israel.

Settler Rabbi to Soldiers: Fight Like Samson

Writings by Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a leading light of the settlement movement, were distributed to soldiers fighting in Gaza. In one such pamphlet, he wrote:

The following questions are posed in one publication: "Is it possible to compare today's Palestinians to the Philistines of the past? And if so, is it possible to apply lessons today from the military tactics of Samson and David?" Rabbi Aviner is again quoted as saying: "A comparison is possible because the Philistines of the past were not natives and had invaded from a foreign land ... They invaded the Land of Israel, a land that did not belong to them and claimed political ownership over our country ... Today the problem is the same."

One small objection: Samson's campaign didn't end very well for Samson. One larger objection: Why are settler rabbis instructing the IDF? The settlers, as I've noted before, are the avant-garde of binationalism, which is to say, the destruction of Israel, so why are they being allowed to influence the way soldiers think?

Pat Buchanan: Israel = Nazi Germany

The tricky thing about the superannuated Jew-baiter Pat Buchanan is that he usually takes his vitriol right up to the line, but not over, if for no other reason than to preserve his relationship with MSNBC. Sometimes, though, he slips, as he did in this blog post. It has to be read to be believed. 

The Atlantic, Home to Top Liberals

Congratulations to Fallows and Sullivan for being named to the Liberal Top 25 by, of all things, Forbes. This is not quite as prestigious as being named a Top 50 Jew. But given the Forbes list, it's sort of the same thing.

Sheikh Hassan Mearsheimer's Latest Thoughts

Al-Manar, the Hezbollah website and television station, reprints Mearsheimer's latest anti-Israel screed, this one more unhinged than usual.  Al-Manar warns readers that the "views expressed are the author's alone." I suppose the warning is necessary because Hezbollah finds Mearsheimer's views too stupid to fully endorse. The argument of the piece is that the perfidious Zionists still seek a "Greater Israel." Anyone who has spent more than ten minutes studying the beliefs of Rabin, Sharon, Olmert, Livni and Barak knows that this is bunk, but why would Mearsheimer care about facts? He has proven his distaste for reality already.

Happy News in the Atlantic Family

Michael Bennet, the brother of James Bennet, our editor, was sworn in yesterday as Colorado's junior senator, replacing Ken Salazar. Lest James now think that he is, as they say, all that, I would remind him that my brother Orrin also serves in the United States Senate.
 

Time Magazine Finds Middle East Peace Very Simple

Leon Wieseltier makes note of a particularly absurd statement in the Time Magazine cover story on the future of Israel:

"Nowhere in Time's piece, or in any of the other pieces in any of the other journals that express all the proper anxieties about what the Israeli army can and cannot accomplish in Gaza, is a more effective way of putting an end to Hamas's aggressions proposed. And nowhere in this piece is there any indignation about Hamas, about its vision or its violence. It appears that Hamas is so outrageous that it no longer provokes outrage. Its madness is accepted factually, in a sexy spirit of realism. The piece concludes with this: "Israel eventually will have to pull back to the 1967 borders and dismantle many of the settlements on the Palestinian side, no matter how loudly its ultra-religious parties protest. Only then will the Palestinians and the other Arab states agree to a durable peace. It's as simple as that."

A great sage once taught: He who claims to know the answer to the Middle East dispute doesn't even know the question.

I'm a two-stater, and have been so for some time, but I have never believed with anything approaching certainty that the creation of a Palestinian state would bring about an end to Muslim demands for all of Palestine. The wise men of Time Magazine should acquaint themselves with Faisal Husseini's parting words: "We may lose or win [tactically] but our eyes will continue to aspire to the strategic goal, namely, to Palestine from the river to the sea. Whatever we get now cannot make us forget this supreme truth." Or they should read Yasser Arafat's speech in South Africa shortly after Oslo, or, for that matter, with what Marwan Barghouti told me about the next phase of the conflict.

For reasons of demography, security and morality, Israel should negotiate its way out of the West Bank. But would this mark the end of the conflict? Only a fool says yes.

 

How Many Palestinians Died in Gaza?

The dispute begins. These arguments are as inevitable as the tides, and given urgency by past incidents in which Palestinian death tolls have been inflated (see: Jenin) and incidents in which the deaths attributed to Israel were not, in fact, caused by Israel (see: Fallows).

David Grossman on the Gaza War

David Grossman, the subject of my Atlantic cover story on the future of Israel (along with the almost-gone and already unlamented Ehud Olmert) calls for open engagement with all Palestinians:

We must speak to the Palestinians: That is the most important conclusion from the most recent round of bloodshed. We must speak also to those who do not recognize our right to exist here. Instead of ignoring Hamas at this time, we would do better to take advantage of the new reality that has been created by beginning a dialogue with them immediately, one that would allow us to reach an accord with the whole of the Palestinian people. We must speak to them and begin to acknowledge that reality is not one hermetic story that we, and the Palestinians, too, have been telling ourselves for generations. Reality is not just the story we are locked into, a story made up, in no small measure, of fantasies, wishful thinking and nightmares.

Lincoln and the Pressure he Faced

Read this Jay Winik op-ed from The Wall Street Journal all the way through. Or should I say, please read this Jay Winik op-ed from The Wall Street Journal all the way through. It's just fascinating. Winik reminds us that the pressure on Lincoln was just extraordinary, more extraordinary than any other president ever experienced:

Early on, Lincoln learned that tumult is inherent in governing. Mr. Obama has already declared that he doesn't want "drama" within his cabinet and staff, but Lincoln's experience suggests that he should expect precisely that. From the outset of his administration, Lincoln's secretary of state, William Seward, a former senator from New York, was assiduously scheming against his president. Where Lincoln saw civil war as inevitable, Seward was freelancing, calling for negotiations with the South and privately telling Confederates that their differences could be peacefully resolved.

Security Theater Comes to Inauguration

Blogging is going to be light (lighter than usual, I should say) because we're bringing the kids inside the hermetically sealed safety zone tonight, and sleeping over in someone's office in order to avoid the Metro crush tomorrow morning. I sure as hell hope it's a good parade.

Least Surprising News of the War

Fatah might have helped Israel kill Siad Siam, the unpleasant fellow who was in charge of persecuting Fatah men in Gaza, according to Khaled Abu Toameh. Let's put it this way: It's a perfectly plausible thing for Hamas to believe. 

The Horror of War

Here is a link to my friend Dina Kraft's article on the Gaza doctor -- a colleague of many Israelis -- who lost three daughters when a tank shell hit his house. Message to the e-mailers on my right: Yes, you're correct, I sympathize with this man, and yes, I'm aware he's not a Zionist. And to the e-mailers on the left: I know you find it hard to believe, but many Jews don't actually like to watch Palestinians being slaughtered.  

Security Theater Debuts on ABC, Where it Belongs

Jeffrey Rosen on taking security theater to a whole new level: Welcome to ABC's understanding of the Department of Homeland Security:

The strongest case against the Department of Homeland Security is that it's not really about homeland security at all. Rather than catch terrorists, DHS officers at the border spend most of their time arresting people for drug and immigration offenses instead. So it's not exactly surprising--even though it's surely unintentional--that ABC's new primetime show, "Homeland Security USA," confirms the false promise of DHS.

Ed Zwick on Passivity, Jewish Power, and Hamas

Ed Zwick's new film, Defiance, about the Bielski partisans of World War II, is everything Schindler's List is not. For one thing, it's about Jews. Schindler's List was a story of Christian redemption; the Jews were simply there to be acted upon. In Defiance, which tells the true story of a group of Jewish partisans who sheltered hundreds of men, women and children in the Byelorussian woods, Jews take charge of history. Defiance is in some ways a corrective to the conventional understanding of Jewish behavior in the Holocaust. For some critics, too much of a corrective: A.O. Scott writes that "in setting out to overturn historical stereotypes of Jewish passivity, Mr. Zwick... ends up affirming them." I wasn't struck the same way by Defiance: the Bielski partisans weren't the only Jews to fight back against their murderers -- Jewish resistance in World War II is still a story insufficiently told. And I wasn't left with the impression that Zwick believes survival was within reach for most Jews who perished.

But why am I defending Zwick? Let him do it his own self. We spoke by phone recently, and we talked about Jewish muscle and Jewish passivity, Europe and Zionism, and whether Defiance is Hebrew for Glory. Here is an edited transcript of our talk:

Jeffrey Goldberg: You're opening in Europe. We've heard a lot of talk in Europe comparing what Israel does in the Occupied Territories to what the Nazis did to the Jews. Are you worried about the way the movie will be understood in Europe right now?

Edward Zwick: You know, the argument comparing what the Jews are doing and what the Nazis did is just such a preposterous exaggeration, because one when one uses the word genocide, you have to ask: If Israel were interested in genocide than they have more than the means necessary to accomplish such a thing, and given that, in context, they're using a certain amount of restraint. Yes, I know the word "restraint" is hard to talk about, given what's happening in Gaza, but it is a type of restraint. What I'm responding to is equivalence. Words are important. Genocide is a word thrown around too easily. This is happening now in Poland and Lithuania. There's an attempt to make an equivalence between alleged war crimes of the Bielskis and the Holocaust.

JG: Do you see any equivalence between Israel and Hamas?

EZ: What I see is that there is a double standard, that on one side you have an organization dedicated to creating the maximum amount of destruction and horror, and doing it in a way that is deliberately bloody-minded and terrorizing. On the other hand you have an extremely powerful state with all the means at its disposal to create a horrifying result, and yet trying, despite the resulting horrible casualties, nonetheless seeming to use extraordinary restraint. It's really an interesting contradiction.

JG: Let's talk about Jewish self-defense. In Schindler's List, the Jews are the sheep and Schindler is the shepherd. Here, they're fighters.

EZ: I think this has been a long odyssey. In the context of this, I've read a lot about Orde Wingate, or the Jewish battalions in World War I, but I think it might have been Leon Wieseltier who led me back to read the Book of Judges or the Book of Joshua to see just how much of a warrior culture this always was. The notion of self-defense is implicit in the David and Goliath story, in the Maccabee story, in the Bar Kochba story. It was all there. I would say that Schindler's List, as powerful as it was, seemed to have continued with a particular iconography of victimization and passivity. That was the iconography with which I had grown up and to which I had grown accustomed.

JG: Was Defiance meant as a corrective?

EZ: I have to say I took some exception to that A.O. Scott review. His reading seems to say that the kind of heroism that I'm describing was missing from the Jewish response to the Holocaust, and that I'm saying that if only everyone acted like the Bielskis, the Jews would have survived. This is a canard. The Jews were massacred, if you will, by the Germans not because they didn't resist but because they couldn't resist. The French army, the Polish army, were defeated, and they were actual armies. Amid the siege, there were pockets of resistance, and it is worth telling about, whether it is in London, or Denmark or Belgium or wherever. But twenty million people died in the Gulag, two million in the Cambodian genocide. Genocide is something humans are very good at. To escape it is a tribute to honor and luck, and to help other people escape it is an honor. But the fact that you don't escape it is not a negative verdict on your honor.

JG: It was, for some early Zionists, a critique of European Jewry, that they were passive.

EZ: I just don't see it. It's like Milk. Milk doesn't imply that all gay men who stayed in the closet were cowards. Defiance is just one movie that seeks to add necessary complexity to the portrait of what happened, because the portrait has been monolithic.

JG: Do you think you should have portrayed the inevitable massacre of most Jews more vividly?

EZ: One makes a choice. My choice was to be very subjective. We never see the Germans. They're seen from afar. There is never this omniscient scene when the commander says, 'We'll root them out of the forests.' I let the Germans exist as a specter. They're shadows in the snow. The closest I come to this sort of scene is where they're with the Judenrat and talking about the fact that if anyone leaves the ghetto, there will be reprisals. All of the arguments in that scene are thing we've heard about and read about, which is to say, if we wait, time is on our side, these people are people who have endured pogroms over the years. That's the closest I felt I could come to providing a realistic context for these people's experience. And I tried to give the Judenrat a strong argument for waiting.

JG: Let's talk about Jewish toughness and its currency.

EZ: History does seem to have its uses. There are reasons why certain stories become known at certain moments and others not, that happen to do with the contextual moment in which they are learned.  And I suspect that there are several reasons why this story wasn't better known in popular culture. One of which had to do with survivors, and there's always some survivor's guilt. Another is that they did things that were probably pretty horrible. I tried to show some of that, the execution of a German. This may also be something that has to do with Israel. The role of Israel in the political imagination at this point.

JG: Is this a Zionist movie? I mean, any movie about Jewish self-defense can be interpreted that way.

EZ: This is a movie about its moment. Any movie that aspires to be more than that is going to be in big trouble. This is about these four men and what they did. It would be a misreading of my intentions to say that this is celebrating a kind of reactionary position. That's not it. What I believed is that this is about the strength of the victims. These are people who are imagining that they are going to die at any minute in that forest and so what is triumphant to me about this movie is that they kept alive something that was uniquely theirs as a culture.

JG: The film does have a kind of Zionist arc, but maybe it's not a Zionist movie. After all, the Bielskis end up in Brooklyn after the war.

EZ: One bit of history: At least one of the brothers, if not two, went to Israel first and fought in the War of Independence before they came to Brooklyn.

JG: Do you hope or imagine that just as young African-American watching Glory felt pride, that Jewish people watching this will leave feeling pride about what happened in the forest?

EZ: The most interesting calls I've had thus far have been from people I know who are talking about watching the movie with their children. It's not just about their children's responses, it's their desire to show it to them. Whether or not a movie digs into the culture is an interesting question. Glory, when it came out, did not find its way into the African-American community right away. It did not capture the imagination of that community for one or two years. My hope for this is that it would be added to the literature. I remember when I was making Glory, I had a visit from the Congressional Black Caucus and they wanted to talk about my intentions. And they said, all we care about is that these people not be portrayed as a monolith. With the Holocaust, there's a danger of having this overwhelming set of images that resulted unintentionally in that kind of monolithic understanding. So, yes, I would hope that this movie becomes something that Jews would look at and come away with some additional understanding of their experience.

JG: Pride?

EZ: Definitely pride. There is pride to be taken in all the different aspects of people's response to the Holocaust. There was bravery. You read about people in the worst of circumstances who found courage in a thousand different ways. But this is a more explicit way, represented in this film, and not to have included that in our understanding, I think, is an omission, a significant omission, and this goes back to my response to the New York Times review.

JG: So, are you one who has discovered lessons of the Holocaust?

EZ: I don't consider myself capable of that. I can look at one corner of the Byelorussian woods and see what it means to me. It certainly means to me that people with nothing, anticipating dying at any moment, nonetheless built schools and found love, marriages that lasted sixty years and that they lived fully and maintained their humanity in an extraordinary way. Someone wanted to deny them their humanity and they refused to have their humanity denied.

Well, This Certainly Seems Like News

General Hayden says Iran nears a decision on whether to build a nuclear warhead.

Department of Extremist Propaganda, Hamas Division

Some of my readers apparently believe that I'm hyping the more pungently anti-Semitic aspects of Hezbollah and Hamas philosophy. So as a public service, I thought I would periodically post excerpts from their writings, in order to let people judge for themselves. Here is a paragraph from Article 28 of the Hamas charter:

The Zionist invasion is a cruel invasion, which has no scruples whatsoever; it uses every vicious and vile method to achieve its goals. In its infiltration and espionage operations, it greatly relies on secret organizations which grew out of it, such as the Freemasons, the Rotary Clubs, the Lions and other such espionage groups. All these organizations, covert or overt, work for the interests of Zionism and under its direction, and their aim is to break societies, undermine values, destroy people's honor, create moral degeneration and annihilate Islam. [Zionism] is behind all types of trafficking in drugs and alcohol, so as to make it easier for it to take control and expand.

Another Hamas Leader Succumbs

Hamas ain't Hezbollah, that's for sure. Said Siam is the latest Hamas leader to be made dead by Israel. I've never thought assassinations work for any lengthy period of time -- if they did, the assassinations of Sheikh Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi should have hurt Hamas, and they didn't -- but Siam's death does suggest that Hamas doesn't have the discipline of a group like Hezbollah, and that it is vulnerable to Israeli pressure in ways that Hezbollah isn't. I'm reasonably sure, when this conflict is over, that we'll learn that Fatah helped Israel with the targetting of both Siam and Nizar Rayyan. Both men were associated with the most virulently anti-Fatah faction of Hamas.  

Gerecht: It's Possible to Moderate Jihadists By Force

In my Times op-ed yesterday, I wrote that:

There is a fixed idea among some Israeli leaders that Hamas can be bombed into moderation. This is a false and dangerous notion. It is true that Hamas can be deterred militarily for a time, but tanks cannot defeat deeply felt belief.

Reuel Gerecht writes in to tell me that I'm completely wrong:

Actually, Islamic history teaches just the opposite. If you start with the Kharijites and move forward (and I can happily give  you a list running from the Azariqa, the worst of the Khawarij, who very much resemble the most radical of the Sunnis today, to the 7ners, to the Qizilbash--my all-time favorites, to the Mahdists, to the Iranian death-wish believers of the Iran-Iraq war), it is military defeat that produces the fatigue and the spiritual deflation that leads to acquiescence (and, sometimes, reflection). I prefer "acquiescence" to "moderation". The latter arrives, but the English implies a certain thoughtfulness that shouldn't be underscored. Unless you throttle the ifratiyyun--the militants--on the battlefield, they will come back at you.

Now, whether the Israelis--and the Americans behind them--have the stomach and patience for this, is a different question. But decisive military defeat is history's great "moderator". (Just ask the Germans.) Unfortunately, as you have often said, the Middle East is a tough neighborhood, and Islam isn't a faith that has produced many men who are widely esteemed for their abiding love of peace and brotherhood with non-Muslims. (A Muslim Jeffrey Goldberg, a former prison guard of Jews who tries to understand the "other" with sincere curiosity and not a small amount of affection, seems surreal.) Israel's present fundamentalist enemies will surely be the most tenacious foes the Jewish State has ever had.  Barring a '67-like trauma for fundamentalists (you want the Hamas and Hizbollah leadership to feel like Nasir), its hard to see this turning round. Perhaps the Palestinians will turn on Hamas.  (If they do so, it will in great part be because Israel's tanks, planes, and foot-soldiers made a convincing argument.) The only way we are likely to know is next time at the urns. It's very hard imagining Fatah downing Hamas in a fight.

Jane Mayer on Being Immortalized by the Pro-Torture "24"

So I happened to see the beginning of "24" on Sunday night -- I stopped watching it a while ago, after Los Angeles was nuked for the third time -- and there, grilling Jack Bauer, was a self-righteous and squirrelly senator named Blaine Mayer. Get it? Blaine Mayer?

Anyway, I e-mailed my friend and ex-colleague Jane Mayer, who sliced and diced "24" a couple of years ago in The New Yorker, and asked what it felt like to be immortalized on television's leading pro-torture show. She wrote back:
 

"Well, there's kind of a balancing sensation. The elevation to the U.S. Senate is a nice start to the year, but the sex change is a bit disappointing, since if I have to be male, I was hoping for a younger, more fit body, and a better head of hair.  It does however fulfill one of my greatest fantasies, which is that I have long had subpoena envy."

I asked her if she thought Joel Surnow was behind this:

"I don't think Surnow is really the instigator here, since he's largely moved on to other brilliant work, such as the unending search for a successful right-wing humor show.  Howard Gordon is the main creative force at "24" now. He's said he invented "Blaine Mayer" to "amuse" himself. He's a Princeton grad, and conflicted "moderate" Democrat, who seems in real life to be a very likeable guy, but one who is having trouble rationalizing the truth that his professional and economic successes are derived from mainlining political poison into America's bloodstream. If he was honest about the debate over torture, he'd cast the critics of Jack Bauer as the heroes of the show, and they would be the stand-up military men, the proud FBI agents, and the lawyers inside and outside the government who have risked their careers to say that as a country, we're better than this. They're the real protectors of America."

"I notice by the way that the ratings for the season opener tanked. The show lost a third of its audience. The zeitgeist has changed. At the moment, fear has migrated to the economic sphere.  If they move quickly, maybe they can start waterboarding Hank Paulson."

Not So Much Sympathy for Hamas on the West Bank

Avi Issacharoff reports that a demonstration in Ramallah was canceled for lack of protesters. This doesn't mean, of course, that Fatah is necessarily growing in popularity in the West Bank. It means that Palestinians, like many Israelis, are fed up with their politicians.

Adolf Hitler Has a New Home

Adolf Hitler, Jr., that is.

Wait, Democrats Invented Rendition?

Eli Lake has the scoop on Panetta:

President-elect Barack Obama's choice for CIA director, Leon Panetta, served as White House chief of staff during the time the Clinton administration accelerated a practice of kidnapping terrorist suspects and sending them to countries with records of torturing prisoners, human rights organizations and former U.S. officials say.

The Challenge for Fatah

Isabel Kershner's article today in the Times outlines the difficulties Fatah faces in running the West Bank, much less Gaza. There's only a small chance Fatah will help bring about a viable Palestinian state. But it's the only Palestinian party that even wants to try. 

The Delusions of Ehud Olmert

Ari Shavit offers a diagnosis:

After two weeks in which he conducted the campaign against Hamas in a responsible, restrained manner, an arrogant, smug braggart burst out of him. After two weeks in which he seemed to have internalized the lessons of the Second Lebanon War, the licentious leader of that failed war took over. But the problem isn't only in the prime minister's boastful statements, but in his arrogant approach. An approach saying that this is a wonderful war. An approach whispering that this wonderful war can go on longer and longer, an approach leading Olmert to seriously consider expanding the war, taking over the Philadelphi route and conquering Rafah.

Megan McArdle Still Works at the Atlantic

This will come as a surprise to many of you, after her post yesterday on the Israel lobby in which she stated: "It will not do my career much good to say it, but here goes.  America has an influential Israel lobby in large part because of ethnic affinity."

The Atlantic's owner, the well-known Zionist extremist David Bradley, has yet to punish Megan, but he undoubtedly will.  Interestingly, he has yet to take action against me, for criticizing AIPAC in a New York Times op-ed last year. I don't know how to explain this. Maybe it's because it's not, in fact, an act of journalistic martyrdom to criticize the Israel lobby. Maybe it actually advances your career. It certainly worked for Stephen Walt.

Why Israel Can't Make Peace With Hamas

This is the subject of my New York Times op-ed today. Which you should read. Please.

Ariel Sharon Predicts the Future

From his 1989 autobiography Warrior:

Gaza, at this point, is our southern security belt. What will we do once we withdraw from Gaza and find, as we inevitably will, that Arafat or his successors have stepped in and that squads of terrorists are again operating from there into Israel, murdering and destroying? What will we do when the Katyusha fire starts hitting Sderot, four miles from the Gaza district, and Ashkelon, nine miles from Gaza, and Kiryat Gat, fourteen miles from Gaza. A Katyusha is nothing more than a metal tube seven feet long, easily transportable, virtually undetectable. The simplest of them has a fifteen-mile range, the more sophisticated can reach twenty-five miles. Will the television pictures showing us shelling Gaza in return be more palatable than those that showed us in front of Beirut, or less upsetting than those of Israeli troops battling West Bank rioters? Or what shall we do if the U.N. or  multinational forces are positioned around Gaza and there is still terrorism? Shall we hit the Italians, or the British, or the Americans?

The Damage Done

Bob Woodward reports today that a senior Bush Administration official has concluded that a Saudi national, the so-called 20th hijacker, was tortured at Guantanamo. Once, a few years ago, an Egyptian friend wrote to me despondent over the fact that America practiced torture. "You have to be better than us. That is how you'll win," he said. Torturing people is a way to convince Arabs living under authoritarian regimes that we're no better than their own corrupt rulers. God willing, it will soon stop.

America as an Honest Broker

Pete Wehner doesn't like this piece, about America's role in Middle East peacemaking, by Will Marshall and Jim Arkedis of the Progressive Policy Institute, but it doesn't bother me much: I think, as Obama has said, that an American president should help Israel make the hard decisions it needs to make in order to stay a Jewish democracy. One way of doing this is not putting up with illegal settlement activity anymore. 

Does "Black Hawk Down" Portray an American War Crime?

At least nine hundred people, maybe half of them civilians, have been killed in Gaza so far, the overwhelming majority presumably killed by Israel (some people, more than we probably know right now, have been killed by Hamas, mainly Fatah activists in revenge killings). This number, nine hundred, is large, and it brought to mind another conflict between a Western army and a Muslim insurgency, the one portrayed in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down." Roughly one thousand Somalis were killed by American forces over the twenty hours or so of the First Battle of Mogadishu (eighteen American soldiers, of course, were also killed).

I couldn't get an accurate read on how many of those Somalis were civilians, so I called my colleague, Mark Bowden, who wrote the book. He said that eighty percent of the Somali deaths were of civilian. Eighty percent! Roughly eight hundred people.  I asked Bowden if he thought this meant that American forces in Somalia had committed war crimes. Andrew has been leading an interesting discussion about whether or not Israeli actions in Gaza constitute war crimes, and I've been trying to place Israeli actions in a broader context. Bowden agreed to help me by providing his own understanding of civilian deaths in asymmetric warfare. Here's some of what he had to say:

"If you feel the need to go to war against an enemy that is not as powerful as you are, one of the tactics of the weaker party is to hide among civilians, and use the global media to advertise the horror of the onslaught. People on the receiving end of the bombs greatly exaggerate the casualties and get photographers to take the most gruesome of pictures, and at the same time, the people in charge of the stronger power try to minimize the number of casualties. If you live in a democracy, then public opinion really matters, and reports of dead children swells the criticism of the war. If you live in a dictatorship, then you don't care what the people think. Israel is a democracy and it cares about the way the rest of the world feels.  It gets hurt by killing civilians, so for moral and practical reasons, they're trying very hard to avoid it."

"I believe that culpability for these casualties is very much with Hamas. Take this leader, Nizar Rayyan, who was killed with many of his children. He knew he was a target. If I knew that I was a target, I sure as hell wouldn't have my children near me. It's a horrible and cynical choice he made. But if your enemy is a sophisticated manipulator of public opinion, then this is one of the many downsides of choosing to go to war. Israel knows that."

"The parallel with Mogadishu is that gunmen in that battle hid behind walls of civilians and were aware of the restraint of the (Army) Rangers. These gunmen literally shot over the heads of civilians, or between their legs. They used women and children for this. It's mind-boggling. Some of the Rangers shot civilians, some of them inadvertently and some of them advertently. They made the choice to shoot at crowds. When a ten-year-old is running at your vehicle with an AK-47, do you shoot the kid? Yes, you shoot the kid. You have to survive. When push comes to shove, faced with the horrible dilemma with a gunman facing you, yes, you shoot. It's not just a choice about your own life. If you don't shoot, you're saying that your mission isn't important, and the lives of your fellow soldiers aren't important."

Can People Die From Ambivalence?

Bradley Burston asks the question.

A Bizarre International Fetish

Reader Jack Feder thinks my assessment of Efraim Karsh is harsh:

It does not seem to me that Mr. Karsh is implying that Israel can do no wrong. His whole point, with which I strongly agree is that there is a bizarre international fetish about the alleged immorality of Israel that no other entity on the international stage is subject to. Of course any nation at war makes mistakes. War is indeed hell. But, if forced to make the choice, I would rather be in an Israeli military-created hell where there is far more attention paid to the danger to civilians than in any other conflict I am aware of. Cell phone calls to the enemy to leave houses? Restraint over a 6 year period in which 6000 rockets fell? It is ludicrous that the Israeli far left and the Western Europeans so viciously attack the Israeli effort at self defense and fail to spend any energy on the far worse depredations of other nations. They show a moral shallowness that frankly eliminates their arguments from the realm of serious political or philosophical debate.

That is not to say that questions of strategic or tactical wisdom are similarly the work of the morally deranged. Many in Israel across the spectrum and elsewhere question the strategic or tactical wisdom of the current war or at least the continuation of it. I for one do not. But I understand and share some of the concerns of those that do.

 

Nasrallah: Israel Still Collapsing

Al-Manar TV reports that Israel's day of reckoning has once again arrived:

Instead of restoring the image of the "invincible army" that had lost during the Second Lebanon War in July 2006, Israel has proved, now more than ever, that "it is weaker than a spider's web,"  as Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has always said.

Karsh, Totten, Levy and Sullivan on Israeli "War Crimes"

Sounds like a law firm in Queens.

Efraim Karsh explains the Western obsession with Israeli behavior: 

The extraordinary international preoccupation with the Palestinians is a corollary of their interaction with Israel, the only Jewish state to exist since biblical times, a reflected glow of the millenarian obsession with the Jews in the Christian and the Muslim worlds. Had their dispute been with an Arab, Muslim, or any other adversary, it would have attracted a fraction of the interest that it presently does.

On the other hand (the very other hand), Gideon Levy feels the world has been too lenient with Israel. He expects war crimes investigations of Olmert, Barak and Livni:

Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni will stand at the forefront of the guilty. Two of them are candidates for prime minister, the third is a candidate for criminal indictment.
It is inconceivable that they not be held to account for the bloodshed. Olmert is the only Israeli prime minister who sent his army to two wars of choice, all during one of the briefest terms in office. The man who made a number of courageous statements about peace late in his tenure has orchestrated no fewer than two wars.

I'm somewhere in the vast middle. Karsh's view discounts the idea that Israel, a sovereign state, is capable of doing wrong. Levy makes Israel a scapegoat. Unlike Andrew, I don't think Israel is committing war crimes. Israel is fighting an enemy that intentionally seeks to kill  civilians; in the course of fighting Hamas, Israel does some stupid and brutal things, but, by Andrew's standard, every act of self-defense by a Western nation against Islamist insurgents is a war crime. For the record, I don't think that Israeli tanks can create moderation in Gaza, and I can't quite fathom the idea that Israeli politicians would be so quick to insert ground troops into a territory they previously were quite desperate to leave. But I'm with Michael Totten on these questions:

There is a non-hysterical case to be made against Israel's war in Gaza. The fact that people are being killed in the war is not it. Innocents as well as combatants die in every war. If you have nothing to object to besides that, then you should oppose the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan for the same reason. That war is also being fought "disproportionately." Far more innocent civilians have been killed over there than in Gaza. No doubt the rage among some in the Islamic world at the sight of those innocents killed encourages them to join the fight against us.

And Afghanistan isn't currently shooting rockets at the United States.

Nearly every argument I have read and heard about Israel's war in Gaza applies ten-fold to the war in Afghanistan. Yet many, if not most, of the very same people who deploy those arguments support the war in Afghanistan.

How the Jews Are Taking Over Bollywood

Okay, maybe just one Jew. And maybe that one Jew, who happens to be my goombah David Segal, co-founder, with yours truly, of the Jewish Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, whose name we changed to Jewsrock.org after the actual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame sued us, did not actually take over anything. But he did work as an extra in Mumbai:

You could call Imran a freelance talent scout for the film industry of India, except--as our interview suggests--he's not looking for talent. He's looking for white people. Bollywood requires a few dozen Western extras every day, to add vérité to crowd scenes in ostensibly exotic locales. Imran's job is to find foreigners and chaperon them to Film City, an expansive badlands of rocks and shrubs at the northern edge of this megalopolis, where most of India's movies are made. I got his phone number through a reporter in Delhi, but usually he finds you, trolling local tourist sites.

Nixon's Plan for Israel to Invade Syria

Shmuel Rosner has pulled a fascinating snippet of history from the archives. He highlights one telling conversation between the then-Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Yitzhak Rabin and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.

Transcript of a Telephone Conversation Between the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger) and the Israeli Ambassador (Rabin), September 21, 7:05 p.m.

K: There is a point of clarification I want to raise with you. What did you tell [diplomat Joe] Sisco this afternoon about the alternate plan we mentioned to you this afternoon, the alternate courses of operations? [namely, attacking Syria.]

R: He raised the question. He said they estimated that Jordan didn't want ground operations in Jordan and he asked about the possibility of carrying out diversionary action in Syria. He asked my opinion. I made it very clear that diversionary operations cannot achieve anything unless the purpose is to eliminate the forces in Jordan.

K: I want to get one thing clear. Did I understand you correctly when we talked this afternoon that if a major operation was carried out in Syria, from a military point of view this was a feasible operation? You and I have to be meticulous in our understandings for this reason. What you tell me I report to the President. When another version is reported, my version must be the correct one. Otherwise there is no sense in my talking to you. I reported my understanding of the conversation this afternoon -- from a purely military point of view you expressed the thought that this might be an effective and probably the effective way of doing it.

R: Exactly.

K: We were told this evening that it was your judgment that from a military point of view it was not feasible [Kissinger refers to the report on the Sisco conversation].

R: This time it is recorded. He [Sisco] talked about diversionary tactics. I went into detail and explained to him. I said to him you don't have diversionary...

K: You don't have to explain any more than that.

R: It is unbelievable.

K: The only essential thing is that any time you deviate, even in the slightest -- which you didn't do... I want to know when I say in a meeting "It is my belief that this is the Israeli point of view," I want to be exactly right.

Ariel Sharon on the Complexity of Gaza

My new aide-de-camp, Joshua Miller, reminded me the other day that Ariel Sharon is still alive. Go figure. The man's certainly a fighter, a fact that can be seen in this not entirely-perspicacious profile of him from 2001. Not entirely-perspicacious, because I didn't imagine at the time that Sharon was capable of absorbing the demographic realities that eventually led him to order the withdrawals from Gaza. Joshua, who is very energetic, reread Sharon's autobiography, Warrior, and dug out these interesting and tragic observations:

When I did look at Gaza, with whatever distracted attention I could spare [from the War of Attrition], the complexity of the problem overwhelmed me. There were so many people there, so many ways for the terrorists to hide in those dense groves or melt into the population, so many targets for them to hit. I couldn't begin to get a handle on it.

When Sharon was assigned by Moshe Dayan to rid Gaza of all terrorists, he began by spending two months walking through the refugee camps and the orange groves of Gaza, he wrote.

I'd get up in the morning, pack a lunch and a canteen of water, take my chief of intelligence and chief of operations, and head off to that day's sector. I did it methodically, walking every square yard of each camp and each grove.

Sharon spent seven months in Gaza and, according to him, the operation was hugely successful, leading to the death or capture of just about all of the PLO terrorists in the Strip.
When government members came to examine his work, he told them that the only effective way to control the area was to build settlements.

Standing with the cabinet members on a high hill of dunes, I pointed out exactly what I thought we needed. If in the future we wanted in any way to control this area, we would need to establish a Jewish presence now. Otherwise we would have no motivation to be there during difficult times later on.

But beyond settlements, Sharon also had a plan for Gaza's residents:

Currently the district is packed with towns, refugee camps, and orange groves...but Gaza does not have to be squalid and overcrowded. With a comprehensive program of planning, rehabilitation, and building it could be transformed into a modern urban residential area. ... Remaking Gaza would be a humanitarian achievement of the first order. The consequences such a project would have for peace in the region can hardly be exaggerated.

Below is a story from the Nov. 14, 1978, New York Times, which reports on a key moment in Israel's fateful, and fatal, encounter with Gaza:

What is the Goal of the Israel Incursion?

This is the question, and I'm sorry if I've missed something, but have we received a clear answer from the Israeli government? If the goal is to destroy the Hamas government in Gaza, well, this is not something so easily destroyed. I thought Israel learned a lesson from the 1982 Lebanon invasion: You can't inflict political change on your enemies by force. You can defeat your enemies, yes, you can blow up their rocket launchers and destroy their smuggling tunnels, but you can't make them into something they're not. Israeli Military Intelligence seems to understand this better than Prime Minister Olmert, according to Ha'aretz.

The Values of Journalism and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Shmuel Rosner highlights an interesting observation from the former editor of Ha'aretz, Hanoch Marmari, who once said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict "has created a real crisis of values for journalism. I believe I can compress the enormous volume of coverage and comment into four cardinal sins: obsessiveness, prejudice, condescension and ignorance."

Israeli War Crimes?

Andrew suggests that Israel should be worried when it finds itself being accused of committing war crimes in the Wall Street Journal, and he links to an op-ed there by one George Bisharat, as proof. George Bisharat is a Palestinian-American professor of law in San Francisco who is an advocate of what is known euphemistically as the "one-state solution," which is to say, the elimination of Israel. So Bisharat's op-ed is not quite the momentous event it seems to be at first blush.

Somalia-by-the-Sea?

Press accounts suggest that Israel is on the verge of escalating its operations in Gaza. This means a penetration of Gaza City and other densely-populated areas. It's not immediately clear to me what Israel will gain from such an escalation. Obviously, if the army were to invade the cities, it is because it believes that it can strike a decisive, even fatal, blow to Hamas, and there are reports out there that Hamas is already collapsing. But the question for Israeli planners is this: Do you seriously believe that Fatah, the main constituent of the weak Palestinian Authority, can simply be inserted into Gaza, and run it effectively? The people of Gaza would turn on them so ferociously that the internecine struggles between Fatah and Hamas of the past two years would look like, well, a cakewalk.

If Ehud Barak had as his goal cutting off north Gaza from the rocket supplies in southern Gaza, then he may have achieved this already. If the goal was to blow up smuggling tunnels, and kill Nizar Rayyan, then those goals have been achieved. But what is the goal now? You can't kill Hamas entirely; it's Iranian-supported, yes, but it is a homegrown, populist movement. If Fatah tries to remove Hamas from the hearts of its supporters, it will fail miserably. Then what? Somalia-by-the-Sea?

Good News from Palestine

No, really. The good news comes in the form of a bell that isn't ringing: The West Bank is more-or-less quiet. In the first two uprisings, the violence spread quickly from one half of the future state of Palestine to the other. Today, this isn't happening. I asked Walter Isaacson, who is the chairman of the U.S.-Palestinian Partnership, why he thought this was so. Walter, who by day runs the Aspen Institute, points to the work of the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, who is growing the West Bank economy at a remarkable rate.

 "There has been double-digit growth in the economy, and people have a stake in the future because of what Salam Fayyad and others have done to improve conditions there," Walter said. "And Israelis have responded by encouraging economic development. I think that people in the West Bank have a clear sense of what peace would bring them, and that's a prosperous state. If you just let all these engineers in the Palestinian territories and in Israel form joint start-ups, you'll see a vision of the future. Success is not achieved just with secret talks about politics but by laying a groundwork for prosperity."

What was true before the Gaza incursion remains true now: The best hope for a two-state solution is a vibrant West Bank that could serve as a role model for the people of Gaza.

Glenn Greenwald on Reporting in Gaza

An unusual conversation took place the other day on the Hugh Hewitt show: Hugh and his guest, Glenn Greenwald, got to talking about reporting from Gaza, and, among other things, my name was invoked as an example of a Jewish journalist who reported from Gaza and lived to tell the tale:

Hugh Hewitt: You think you could file for Salon from Gaza and go about your work for say six, eight, ten weeks? I don't. I think they'd kill you.

Glenn Greenwald: It depends. I mean, it's probably, you're probably right that especially now, Western journalists, Jewish journalists, would not be welcome in Gaza for reasons that aren't that difficult to understand. But there have been plenty of Western journalists and Jewish journalists. I mean, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic's spent lots and lots of time in Gaza safely.

HH: Written a good book about it, too.

GG: Yeah, exactly. So I think my view of the Palestinians and the Gazans is not all that dissimilar to my view of most societies that are involved in really ugly, long term, entrenched warfare, which is most of the people in this society overwhelmingly are decent people who want peace and to raise their children in a safe and prosperous environment, and there are extremists within this society who are dangerous and violent, and who are bad and need to be marginalized.

This undoubtedly marks the first time Hugh Hewitt has ever praised a book chosen by The Progressive as a favorite book of the year, but that's not the point: I want to address a couple of mistaken suppositions in the conversation. The first is Hugh's, the idea that Glenn Greenwald would get killed for reporting in Gaza. (The assumption built in to this, of course, is that bloggers like Greenwald report from the field.) I don't think he would be killed for reporting in Gaza. It's a dangerous place, yes, and reporters have been kidnapped from time to time. I was kidnapped in Gaza, though not by Hamas, and the editor of this fine magazine, when he was reporting from Gaza for the Times, was once almost kidnapped in Gaza, and only broke free of his would-be captors because of his kung fu fighting skills.

If Greenwald told the whole truth -- say, he reported the fact that Hamas places rocket launchers in schoolyards and mosques -- he might get his ass kicked out of Gaza, but Hamas wouldn't hurt him. It's a more sophisticated organization than that. So Greenwald is also wrong to assume that Hamas would take its anger out on Jewish reporters. This is not to say that Hamas isn't an anti-Semitic organization. It is. But it sees Jewish reporters, just as it sees other reporters, as capable of delivering its message to the West.

On Greenwald's larger point, I would say that I have to agree (surprise). Gaza is in the grip of a suicide cult, but most of the people I know in Gaza want their children to live, not to die. 

Another Great Idea From a Settler Leader

The last time I interviewed the superannuated settler fire-breather Elyakim HaEtzni, he was wearing sweatpants up to his belly-button, and mismatched slippers. But he's ready to fight Hamas to the last Israeli, and ready to have other Israelis live forever in conditions of chaos:  The goal of the war, he writes, is for Israel "to smash Hamas, and to neutralize its motivation to fire rockets at us - but not to liquidate them completely; Hamas should rather remain, together with Fatah, as two Palestinian terrorist gangs that will prevent each other from becoming a state!"

Joe the Plumber, As Qualified As Many Mideast Reporters

Pajamas TV is sending Joe Wurzelbacher, A/K/A '"Joe the Plumber," to Israel to cover the conflict in Gaza. Eric Trager sees the pitfalls:

It seems as though Joe will only contribute to the very problem that so many in the blogosphere have harped on for so long-namely, that Middle East reporters frequently arrive in the region with no frame of reference and/or obscene biases.  Indeed, will Joe be any more capable than the average MSM correspondent of reading an Israeli newspaper; or interpreting a mosque sermon on Palestinian television; or assessing the strategic significance of a given Israeli operation or Hamas rocket-attack?  It seems highly improbable, to say the least.

A couple of years ago, during the previous iteration of the Iran-Israel war, I was standing on the Lebanese border with a group of American reporters. Overhead, Israeli Apaches were firing rockets at Hezbollah positions. One of the reporters looked up and asked, "Is that an airplane or a helicopter?" Man, that was embarrassing.

The Jewish State vs. Weekly Newsmagazines

Time magazine asks the question, "Can Israel Survive Gaza?" It's a little bit of an overwrought piece, but interesting (I'm also known for overwrought pieces about Israel). But it got me thinking: Which one will last longer: Israel, or Time magazine? I'm betting on Israel.

Hamas Continues to Execute Fatah Men

According to Amira Hass, who can be trusted on this because she cordially detests Israel.

The Moral Responsibilities of Israeli Soldiers

Dear Soldier,
Here's the thing. You've got to help the children. You're not Hamas. You're better than Hamas. So act it. I once asked Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, the late, unlamented Hamas leader, if he would help an injured Jewish child if  he came across one lying on the street. He said no. And he was a pediatrician by training!

You're not Rantisi. So when you operate, operate with the children in mind. It's a burden Hamas has placed on you -- it's no joy to fight an enemy who hides behind his children. But that's what you're facing. And when you come across scenes like the one described in this Washington Post story, help the children. Yes, I'm sure the Red Cross makes things up from time to time -- they don't like you and never have -- and I'm sure some of the Palestinian self-reporting isn't accurate, but, really -- horrible things still happen, and it's your responsiblity to protect innocent people, not make their lives even more miserable. I would refer you to this Jewish prayer for the children of Gaza. Understand its message!

Obama on What a President Must Do to Help Israel

This is from my May interview with President-Elect Obama on the subject of the Middle East. I hope this means that Obama will sit down with the next Israeli prime minister and talk about the self-destructiveness of settlements, in addition to talking about the destructiveness of Hamas:

Obama: I want to solve the problem, and so my job in being a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth and say if Israel is building settlements without any regard to the effects that this has on the peace process, then we're going to be stuck in the same status quo that we've been stuck in for decades now, and that won't lift that existential dread that David Grossman described in your article.

I Think This is What's Known as Self-Marginalizing Behavior

A Good Idea For Israel, Which It Probably Won't Take

I saw Sally Quinn, an adjunct member of my Torah study group, last night, and she had a smart idea: Why not erect a massive tent hospital in Sderot, staff it with Israeli army doctors, and treat the Palestinian wounded there? Israel is taking in some of the Palestinian wounded, but not enough of them. And Israel, as those of you who have been there know, has a lot of doctors. Sally's idea would be, at the same time, the right thing to do and a public relations coup. I told her I'm more cynical than she is -- that these sorts of sensible ideas don't get done, for whatever reason, but it would be nice to be proven wrong by the government of Israel.

 

What Does al-Qaeda Gain in Gaza?

A lot, according to Marc Lynch, a/k/a Abu Aardvark, who moved his blog to the Foreign Policy  website:

Israel's assault on Gaza has really created an almost unbelievable no-lose situation for al-Qaeda. If Hamas "wins", then al-Qaeda gets to share in the benefits of the political losses incurred by its Western and Arab enemies (Zawahiri mentions Mubarak and the Saudis in this tape, but not the Jordanians) and can try to take advantage of the political upheavals which could follow. If Hamas "loses", al-Qaeda still wins. It will shed no tears at seeing one of its bitterest and most dangerous rivals take a beating at Israel's hands or losing control of a government that they have consistently decried as illegitimate and misguided.

Michael Weiss at Jewcy takes on Abu Aardvark, and wins on points, I think:

What Lynch doesn't acknowledge -- at least not in this post -- is that Al Qaeda's flagging popularity is due in large part to its military and political defeat in Iraq,  where it (foolishly) decided to create a cynosure of Islamist terror and test out the prospects of a neo-caliphate. If it should try to do this again, and in the one place it can ill afford to have Muslims grow more disillusioned with its activities, might we expect the realist school to indulge us with the following headline: "and the winner is... America!"?

A Jewish Prayer for the Children of Gaza

This is a typical Bradley Burston effort, beautifully-written and deeply moral. He'll get some criticism from the right for this, but he should take it is a compliment. He's a Jew in full.  Here's the link, and here's an excerpt:

Lord who is the creator of all children, hear our prayer this accursed day. God whom we call Blessed, turn your face to these, the children of Gaza, that they may know your blessings, and your shelter, that they may know light and warmth, where there is now only blackness and smoke, and a cold which cuts and clenches the skin.

Almighty who makes exceptions, which we call miracles, make an exception of the children of Gaza. Shield them from us and from their own. Spare them. Heal them. Let them stand in safety. Deliver them from hunger and horror and fury and grief. Deliver them from us, and from their own.

In Addition to Gaza, the Jews Control Hollywood

Jack Shafer pointed me to this very funny Joel Stein column. The key point:

As a proud Jew, I want America to know about our accomplishment. Yes, we control Hollywood. Without us, you'd be flipping between "The 700 Club" and "Davey and Goliath" on TV all day.

I believe this is the subject of the next book by Walt and Mearsheimer.

David Rothkopf Takes Stephen Walt to School

Ouch. That new Foreign Policy website is craaazy. Everyone over here at The Atlantic gets along, Alhamdullilah. Not so over at Foreign Policy. Of course, they've hired the egregious Stephen Walt as a blogger, so it was only a matter of time before one of their commonsense bloggers, in this case the perspicacious David Rothkopf, took him down. An excerpt:

Walt continues his, how shall I put it, crusade?, jihad?...against this nefarious lobby and U.S. support for Israel on this website. He has sketched out a thought experiment in which he posits what might happen were it a few orthodox Jews fighting for their freedom in Gaza rather than the Palestinians. He has quoted George Orwell to make the point that he feels we are overlooking Israeli abuses against the Palestinians. He has suggested that the media is making Israel's case for it. (Please let me know where I can tune in to that. Mostly I get the opposite. Sometimes I think, the BBC ought to rename itself Death-to-Israel TV. I am often glad my college French is not good enough to watch the nightly news from Paris.)

In short, he has become as biased a pleader of special interests as he accuses the Israel Lobby of being. And as such he has become a member of the anti-Israel Lobby, a group that is every bit as vocal and at the moment seems to be even more empowered than the its counterpart. Members include Jimmy Carter and his former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, celebrity activists like Richard Gere, and many members of the media. Like the members of the Israel Lobby, they found their case on some very reasonable assertions. The Palestinians should have a state of their own and their plight is dismal. It is also a terrible tragedy that so many are the innocent victims of the conflict between Israel and, at the moment, Hamas.  

Misinformation about the 2005 Gaza Withdrawal

I love Daniel Levy -- we're brothers in Zionism, after all -- but sometimes he drives me nuts. Andrew links without comment to Daniel's recent post informing the world that Ariel Sharon was not seeking peace when he withdrew from Gaza in 2005:

One frequently hears the claim that Israel left Gaza in 2005 in order to build peace but all it received was terror.  I appreciate the Gaza evacuation of 2005 and how difficult it was  and I in no way condone the launching of rockets against civilian targets from Gaza but the unilateral nature of the Gaza withdrawal was a mistake (and I said it at the time) and I don't appreciate this rewriting of history.  Israel at the time did not evacuate Gaza as part of the peace process.

Well, yes, of course. Ariel Sharon did not evacuate Gaza to serve the Oslo peace process. But he evacuated Gaza all the same. His motivation is not as interesting to me as the colossal reality. Yes, it was wrong to do unilaterally -- I agree with Daniel on that -- but he did it! And Daniel knows as well as I do that Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert, hoped to do the same thing across much of the West Bank. But what stopped him? Palestinian rockets from Gaza, a special gift from Hamas. Palestinians interested in a two-state solution would have viewed the withdrawal in 2005 as a first, important step toward independence. They would have used the billions in aid money that flowed to Gaza to build schools and hospitals and roads and farms on the abandoned land of the Jewish settlements. But they turned those ruined settlements into rocket launching pads. Sharon was wrong to pull out of Gaza without extracting concessions from the Palestinians, and he should have done it in the framework of a negotiation, but that doesn't change the fact that he gave the Palestinians of Gaza what they said they wanted.  

Another Voice of Reason

From the overflowing inbox:

Mr. Goldberg-

Had Israel's supporters not spent decades propping Israel up as some kind of Moral Utopia, this wouldn't be happening.

IOW, Israel and its partisans  have no one to blame but themselves for becoming just another wehrmacht death-machine.

regards,

Jamie Dyer
Charlottesville, Va.

That's right -- the Gaza incursion and the Holocaust are the same thing.

The World's Pornographic Interest in Jewish Moral Failure

Okay, yesterday I was depressed. Today, I'm just pissed off. It's absolutely astonishing to me how interested the world is in Israel's failings. This is the source of a bitter but hilarious observation I once heard a Kurdish leader make: He was complaining to me that his people were cursed, and I asked him what he meant: Cursed by geography, cursed by their proximity to Kurd-hating Arabs, what? He said the Kurds were cursed because they didn't have Jewish enemies. Only with Jewish enemies would the world pay attention to their plight.

For the record: I defend Israel's right to defend itself, but I fear that Gaza will quickly become a quagmire. I fear for the lives of Israelis, obviously, but I also fear for the lives of Palestinian civilians -- I have friends there, in harm's way -- in part because the Israeli army (and I say this from personal experience) can be a big, rough bulldozer of an army, and in part (large part) because Hamas terrorists unblinkingly and ostentatiously use their own civilians as human shields. I've seen this up-close, and it's repulsive. One story the media isn't telling, because it's impossible to get this story in these circumstances (especially because Israel stupidly won't allow foreign reporters into Gaza) is how much resentment the Hamas policy of using Palestinians as human shields causes among Gaza civilians. Early reports indicate that Hamas mortar teams were firing from the UN School. This shouldn't surprise anyone.

One more thing, speaking of pornography -- we've all seen endless pictures of dead Palestinian children now. It's a terrible, ghastly, horrible thing, the deaths of children, and for the parents it doesn't matter if they were killed by accident or by mistake. But ask yourselves this: Why are these pictures so omnipresent? I'll tell you why, again from firsthand, and repeated, experience: Hamas (and the Aksa Brigades, and Islamic Jihad, the whole bunch) prevents the burial, or even preparation of the bodies for burial, until the bodies are used as props in the Palestinian Passion Play. Once, in Khan Younis, I actually saw gunmen unwrap a shrouded body, carry it a hundred yards and position it atop a pile of rubble -- and then wait a half-hour until photographers showed. It was one of the more horrible things I've seen in my life. And it's typical of Hamas. If reporters would probe deeper, they'd learn the awful truth of Hamas. But Palestinian moral failings are not of great interest to many people. 

That Michael Scheuer Sure is One Crazy Jew-Hater

According to a very interesting story by National Journal writer Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr., Michael Scheuer, the man the CIA counted on to catch Osama Bin-Laden, had this to say about Israel:

Israel is not only an unnecessary and self-made liability for the United States, it is an untreated and spreading cancer on our domestic politics, foreign policy, and national security.

In my experience, the only people who refer to Jews, or to the Jewish state, as a "cancer" are the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. Comparing Jews to diseases or pathogens went out of style in about 1945, in fact. Nice going there, Mike.

Memo to Stephen Walt: Don't Argue with Douthat; You'll Lose

Ross takes apart Stephen "The Jews Cause All Wars" Walt, so I don't have to.

A Warning to Jewish Parents Everywhere From Hamas

Mahmoud Zahar, the Hamas leader, issued a warning this week to Jewish parents: Your children, he said, are targets:

"They have legitimised the murder of their own children by killing the children of Palestine," Mahmoud Zahar said in a televised broadcast recorded at a secret location. "They have legitimised the killing of their people all over the world by killing our people."

Put aside Zahar's chutzpah -- Hamas has been happily killing Jewish children for years. What's important is that he is making an explicit plea to jihadists everywhere to take matters into their own hands and kill Jews.  Any Jewish school or synagogue or JCC anywhere in the world that doesn't take this seriously is beyond negligent. This is not a time for panic, just preparation.

Why I'm Not Blogging More About Gaza

Andrew Sullivan just asked me (live, not on e-mail; bloggers at the Atlantic actually talk to each other) why I haven't been posting more on Gaza. The simple answer is that I'm busy reporting, and I hope to head to the Middle East soon, to personally broker a cease-fire, or at least get some writing done, and see some friends.

The more complicated answer was provided by Marc Ambinder, who analyzed my personal situation correctly: Gaza has overdetermined me into paralysis. His point: I actually feel too close to this problem, a problem that symbolizes all problems. It's true: I have friends in Gaza about whom I worry a great deal; I've seen many people killed in Gaza; I've served in the Israeli Army in Gaza; I've been kidnapped in Gaza; I've reported for years from Gaza; I hope my former army doesn't kill the wrong people in Gaza; I hope Israeli soldiers all leave Gaza alive; I know they'll be back in Gaza; I think this operation will work; and I have no actual hope that it will work for very long, because nothing works for very long in the Middle East. Gaza is where dreams of reconciliation go to die. Gaza is where the dream of Palestinian statehood goes to die; Gaza is where the Zionist dream might yet die. Or, more to the point, might be murdered. I'm not a J Street moral-equivalence sort of guy. Yes, Israel makes constant mistakes, which I note rather frequently, but this conflict reminds me once again that Israel is up against an implacable force, namely, an interpretation of Islam that disallows the idea of Jewish national equality.
 
My paralysis isn't an analytical paralysis. It's the paralysis that comes from thinking that maybe there's no way out. Not out of Gaza, out of the whole thing.

J Street Pushes Back

The lobbying group calls foul after Rabbi Eric Yoffie's criticism:

Our position on the crisis reflects our support for Israel, our hope for its security and our sympathy with the ongoing suffering of the people on both sides in this conflict. It is hard for us to understand how the leading reform rabbi in North America could call our effort to articulate a nuanced view on these difficult issues "morally deficient." If our views are "naïve" and "morally deficient", then so are the views of scores of Israeli journalists, security analysts, distinguished authors, and retired IDF officers who have posed the same questions about the Gaza attack as we have.

J Street Blows It

According the chief rabbi of American Reform Judaism, the (liberal) Eric Yoffie, J Street, the left-wing alternative to AIPAC, is showing signs of moral deficiency and appalling naivete. The lobbying group, he writes in the Forward, "could find no moral difference between the actions of Hamas and other Palestinian militants, who have launched more than 5,000 rockets and mortar shells at Israeli civilians in the past three years, and the long-delayed response of Israel, which finally lost patience and responded to the pleas of its battered citizens in the south."

 "Neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a monopoly on right or wrong," (J Street) said, and it suggested that there was no reason and no way to judge between them: "While there is nothing 'right' in raining rockets on Israeli families or dispatching suicide bombers, there is nothing 'right' in punishing a million and a half already-suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them."

These words are deeply distressing because they are morally deficient, profoundly out of touch with Jewish sentiment and also appallingly naïve. A cease-fire instituted by Hamas would be welcome, and Israel would be quick to respond. A cease-fire imposed on Israel would allow Hamas to escape the consequences of its actions yet again and would lead in short order to the renewal of its campaign of terror. Hamas, it should be noted, is not a government; it is a terrorist gang. And as long as the thugs of Hamas can act with impunity, no Israeli government of the right or the left will agree to a two-state solution or any other kind of peace. Doves take note: To be a dove of influence, you must be a realist, firm in your principles but shorn of all illusions.

Nizar Rayyan of Hamas on God's Hatred of Jews

Nizzar Rayyan, the Hamas leader who was killed, along with two of his wives and several of his children, in an Israeli bombing raid earlier this week, was one of the more bellicose Hamas leaders I have known. I saw him last in Gaza two years ago, at a mosque in the Jabalya Refugee Camp, where I spent quite a lot of time (my book Prisoners explains why).

He was one of the more Islamically-learned Hamas leaders I've met (Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was learned as well, I think, but he was very hard to understand; Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who was the least pleasant of all the Hamas leaders I've known, was not very learned at all). In particular, Rayyan was interested in the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, with a special interest in hadith that painted Jews in a negative light.  Rayyan and I discussed the writing of Ibn Taymiyya, the Muslim scholar who lived seven hundred years ago, and who is the intellectual forefather of Sunni radicalism today (it was Ibn Taymiyya who elevated jihad to a kind-of sixth pillar of Islam). Like Ibn Taymiyya, Rayyan was preoccupied with Muslim apostasy. He never quite said so, but I could sense that he thought of Abu Mazen and the other leaders of the Palestinian Authority as traitors not only to the cause of Palestine, but to Islam itself. "You cannot be loyal to Allah and to the CIA at the same time," he said of his P.A. enemies.
 
There are things I didn't know about Rayyan, such as that he had four wives - a fact that tells you something about the culture of Hamas - but I knew that he was sincere in his devotion to the cause of Israel's annhilation. The question I wrestle with constantly is whether Hamas is truly, theologically implacable. That is to say, whether the organization can remain true to its understanding of Islamic law and God's word and yet enter into a long-term non-aggression treaty with Israel.  I tend to think not, though I've noticed over the years a certain plasticity of belief among some Hamas ideologues. Also, this is the Middle East, so anything is possible.
 
There was no flexibility with Rayyan. This is what he said when I asked him if he could envision a 50-year hudna (or cease-fire) with Israel: "The only reason to have a hudna is to prepare yourself for the final battle. We don't need 50 years to prepare ourselves for the final battle with Israel." There is no chance, he said, that true Islam would ever allow a Jewish state to survive in the Muslim Middle East. "Israel is an impossibility. It is an offense against God."

I asked him if he believed, as some Hamas theologians do (and certainly as many Hezbollah leaders do) that Jews are the "sons of pigs and apes." He gave me an interesting answer that reflects a myopic reading of the Koran. "Allah changed disobedient Jews into apes and pigs, it is true, but he specifically said these apes and pigs did not have the ability to reproduce. So it is not literally true that Jews today are descended from pigs and apes, but it is true that some of the ancestors of Jews were transformed into pigs and apes, and it is true that Allah continually makes the Jews pay for their crimes in many different ways. They are a cursed people."

What are our crimes? I asked Rayyan. "You are murderers of the prophets and you have closed your ears to the Messenger of Allah," he said. "Jews tried to kill the Prophet, peace be unto him. All throughout history, you have stood in opposition to the word of God."
 

Megan is Sick of the Middle East

So am I, sort of. But every time I try to get out, they pull me back in. From Megan:

I'm of Northern Irish descent, and I grew up in New York City in a mostly Jewish high school, and so as you can imagine, I've heard all the arguments about who's really to blame about a zillion times.  And all I get out of it in the end is that the whole thing makes me sick and sad.  I don't see any untainted victims.  I see a bunch of people who have been stomped on by history beating up each other in revenge for past wrongs that can't be righted, lashing out whenever they think they can get away with it without losing the foreign funding that allows them to continue the fun.  And I don't ever blog about it because one is not allowed to have an opinion on the matter--no matter what I say, I'll be excusing terrorism or, irrelevantly, the holocaust, or shilling for western imperialism.