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Is Israel a settler colony like South Africa?: A guest column
This blog is fortunate to get regular contributions from Tom Mitchell, a scholar who has carefully analyzed the similarities and differences between Israel, South Africa and Northern Ireland. He sent me a summary of a longer article. I thought I would publish it, as people on the far left often claim that there is little difference between South Africa under apartheid and contemporary Israel. And people on the right deny that there is any similarity. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between. In addition. peaceniks like me often point to the reconciliation achieved in Northern Ireland as a sign of hope and a shining example for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Tom offers some insights into the similarities and differences.
Tom is the author if Native vs. Settler: Ethnic Conflict in Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland, and South Africa, published in 2000 by Greenwood Press. He then took some of the unused material from that book and wrote a second one, Indispensable Traitors: Liberal Parties in Settler Conflicts, also published by Greenwood two years later. Below is the summary of an article published in the Journal of Conflict Studies in the Winter 2004 issue. It is scholarly and not polemical, which means some of you will have no use for it, but I hope the rest if you dive in and follow his analysis.
ISRAELI POLITICS AS SETTLER POLITICS
Conventional wisdom in much of Western academia is that Israel is a settler colony, and that this means that it is another apartheid state a/la South Africa. Below is analysis showing why I believe that the first half of this equation is true, but the second half is false. The strategies employed to bring peace in South Africa and Northern Ireland were very different, so it is important to determine which one Israel more closely resembles. This determines why we should go with mediation and not sanctions.
Israel’s politics is characterized by the following six main features:
1) Numerous political parties are in the Knesset, which in turn results in weak coalition governments.
2) There are powerful religious parties with no equivalent in the West and comparable to Islamic parties in the Third World (Indonesia, Turkey).
3) Israeli politics is populated with many former senior military officers, creating a class of Arab-fighter politicians comparable to native-fighter politicians in the U.S. and S. Africa.
4) In the past, there were two important parties (Herut, Ahdut Ha’Avoda) that were paramilitary parties. Their descendants are the two main Israeli parties today.
5) The Arab question or native question has been the main issue in Israeli politics, dividing parties of the left and right since before independence.
6) In Israel, Jews and Arabs have a different legal status under formal law constituting a legal distinction between settlers and natives.These six features can be divided into two groups: the first two, which are not features of settler societies, and the last four, which are features of settler societies. The combination of the last four features makes Israeli politics a variant of settler politics—the political features that are typical of independent settler colonies such as the United States, South Africa, etc. that are also democracies.
When looking for settler societies to compare Israel with, I looked for societies that were a) democratic; b) involved in prolonged conflict with the native population; and c) either independent or at least autonomous. This last requirement eliminated nearly all of the dependent settler colonies that were run by local representatives of the European settler power rather than by the local settlers.
I found three societies that could usefully be compared with Israel: Northern Ireland, antebellum America, and South Africa. Each of these three societies is useful for comparing with a different aspect of Israel.
Northern Ireland exhibits all of the above six features except for number 3 (because the UK is responsible for its security). The United States exhibited traits 3,5, and 6, and briefly had a multiparty system between 1828 and 1860 but no coalition governments. South Africa exhibited traits 3, 5, and 6 and had a genuine multiparty system from 1910 to 1950 and had two stable two-party coalition governments in the interwar period. Thus, if one looks at it, Israel has more of these settler traits than any of the three societies being compared with it. Northern Ireland lacks a native-fighter politician class, while both the U.S. and S. Africa lack paramilitary parties.
Northern Ireland can most usefully be compared with Israel when examining the peace process with the Palestinians and interparty and intraparty dynamics. Because it is only a province of the UK, it has no foreign policy and so cannot be used for comparison of foreign policy with Israel. But because the Arab-fighter politician class is such an important feature in Israeli politics, comparisons of Israel with Northern Ireland need to supplemented with either the U.S. or S. Africa. .
South Africa can be divided into three main periods: the period of the Boer republics from 1860-1900; the Union of South Africa from 1910-1950; and the Republic of South Africa from 1961-1994. African-fighter politicians were most important in the South African Republic (ZAR or Transvaal), particularly from 1881 to 1900. But the ZAR had a weak two-party system rather than a multiparty system, had no standing army, and had less than 10,000 men voting in its presidential elections during this period. So it is clearly not suitable for comparison with Israel.
Military politicians were also important in the Union of South Africa, which did have a three- to four-party system, a standing army, and a much larger population. There were no military conflicts with the native population of South Africa, however, during this period. Politics was centered on ethnic disputes between Afrikaners and English-speakers rather than on the native question. During the Republic of South Africa under apartheid, there was only one elected African-fighter politician, General Magnus Malan. This indicates that South Africa is not a particularly useful supplementary case for looking at internal politics in Israel.
The U.S. had a weak three-party system from 1828 to 1848, with the third party being mainly represented at the local and state levels rather than the federal level, present only in the North, and combining with one or both of the two main parties to form new parties. With its presidential system. it completely lacked coalition governments. But the U.S. did have a party, the Whigs, that was dependent on the charisma of former generals to head its tickets. And it did carry out transfer of the native population, the Indians of the East to the West. This latter subject comes up off and on in Israeli politics since the 1940s. The Whigs can usefully be compared to Labor, the Democrats to the Likud, and the third parties (Antimasons, Liberty Party, Free Soil Party) to Mapam and Meretz. The Know Nothings or American Party of 1854-57 can also be compared to Tommy Lapid’s Shinui Party both as a nativist party and with its sudden success and sudden collapse. Beyond that party comparisons are not available.
South Africa is useful for comparing with Israel’s regional defense policy. South Africa and Israel both were/are peripheral countries in conflict with the core of their region. In the Middle East the core is Arab states. In sub-Saharan Africa the core is made up of independent African states and the white settler colonies were the periphery. South Africa and Israel had similar strategies of supporting minority peoples in the Arab countries and black neighbors such as the Kurds in Iraq and Christians in Lebanon and Sudan, and the Ndebele in Zimbabwe and various minority peoples in Namibia. Both countries also engaged in numerous cross-border raids and invasions. In this regard it is useful to compare Israeli policy in Lebanon and South African policy in Angola.
Between 1967 and the mid-1990s Israel was dependent on migrant Palestinian labor from the territories in the same way that white South Africa was dependent on black labor from the homelands (bantustans). But this migrant Palestinian labor is much reduced today as a result of Israeli recruitment of East Asian and East European workers in reaction to the Islamist terrorist campaign of the 1990s and the Al-Aksa Intifada.
Likud plans for a Palestinian state under Sharon could also fairly be compared to South Africa’s bantustan system. Any plans for leaving a Palestinian state made up of several non-contiguous parts can be compared to most of the South African homelands in particular the KwaZulu and Bophutatswana homelands. With the above in my opinion, the usefulness of the South African comparison has exhausted itself.
The purpose of making these comparisons is not to delegitimize Israel. It should be borne in mind that the Israeli Jews are not only settlers but also returned natives, that is the original population of the country that returned with the support of the international community. So in its origins Israel is a unique settler society. But as a result of the ongoing native-settler conflict with the Palestinians, Israel developed features typical of other settler societies.
The comparisons are not meant to replace traditional methods of political analysis of Israeli politics and policy, but to augment them. When radio telescopes, X-ray telescopes and infrared telescopes were developed, astronomers did not stop using optical telescopes but merely used these new instruments to give a fuller picture of distant galaxies and our own galaxy. I make these comparisons in the same spirit. If Dan will indulge me, I will explore the lessons of Northern Ireland and the U.S. for Israel in two further pieces.
Topics: Israel, apartheid | 21 Comments »
By Dan Fleshler | March 31, 2008
Why most checkpoints are unnecessary: a primer
When my previous post about the checkpoint at Sheikh Sa’eb was published in July, in slightly different form, I received an angry email from a friend of a friend. An excerpt:
“If the IDF says we need all of them [the checkpoints], who are you to say they’re wrong? Where do you get off giving military advice to Israeli generals from your liberal American playpen? [Israelis] need the checkpoints and they need the wall just where they are, thank you. If the killers stop coming after them, Israelis won’t need the checkpoints and the wall. End of story.”
Love that phrase, “liberal American playpen…”
Today, Sadie Goldman and Jason Proetorius over at Israel Policy Forum supplied a response. They have come up with an excellent explanation of the checkpoints and barriers, the VAST MAJORITY OF WHICH ARE THERE TO MAKE LIFE EASIER FOR ISRAELI SETTLERS, and have nothing to do with protecting anyone in Israel proper. More and more Israeli security experts who have outgrown their playpens think Israel should eliminate most –although not all– of them. Here’s their analysis, quoted in full:
Understanding Checkpoints
By Sadie Goldman with Jason Proetorius and IPF Staff
One of the most onerous aspects of the situation in the West Bank is the system of checkpoints which block Palestinians from getting to work, school, hospital or even to visit friends a few miles (sometimes a few blocks) away without being stopped and delayed, often for hours. This is well-known here in the United States, especially because the Bush administration has made clear that it wants many of the checkpoints removed.
Less understood is that very few checkpoints separate Israel from the Palestinian areas. The overwhelming majority of them are internal barriers which serve not to protect Israel from terrorists but simply to ease life for settlers and to make Palestinian lives miserable. In fact, no one suggests taking down any checkpoint or border crossing that separates Israel from the West Bank or Gaza. The entire controversy is over the internal checkpoints and their onerous effects on Palestinians trying to get about their lives. Terrible as the situation is, some people find humor in it, so ridiculous is the rationale for aspects of the checkpoint system.
A Hummous Hut employee is stopped by a soldier who misunderstands “hummous” for “Hamas.” A woman driving with her dog is stopped at a checkpoint and explains that, while she does not have papers to enter Jerusalem, her dog does. These light-hearted vignettes—from the 2005 Oscar winning short film “a West Bank story” and Suad Amiry’s book Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, respectively—use humor to explain the physical barriers scattered throughout the West Bank in simple, human terms.
For Israelis, the reason for instituting roadblocks and checkpoints since the beginning of the second intifada in which over a thousand Israelis were killed is also simple and human—to stop suicide bombers from entering Israel. “The method of roadblocks has proven itself,” Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak told a group of soldiers on February st. “There is no way to effectively fight terrorism without actual daily control of the area,” he said.
However, according to a group of twelve retired Israeli generals, some of whom were involved in setting up West Bank barriers, the system of over 560 roadblocks and checkpoints, which increased by 50% in two and a half years, needlessly harms Palestinians and ineffectively protects Israelis. (According to the Israeli human rights group, B’tselem, as of November 2007 there were 99 permanent checkpoints, 36 of which were on Israel’s border and 63 within the West Bank. The remaining 486 barriers [as of November 2007] are roadblocks, such as dirt mounds, concrete blocks, fences, trenches, and gates.)
At a Van Leer Institute conference on February 13, these experts, informally called the “checkpoint team,” presented a position paper, which they also sent Barak. In it they assert that, while some barriers stop terror, others damage the Palestinian economy, breed resentment, and, in turn, create more terror. According to Shlomo Brom, one of the group’s members and former chief of the army’s planning committee, quoted in Laurie Copans’ February 13th Associated Press article, “The feeling of humiliation and the hate the roadblocks create increase the tendency of Palestinians to join militant groups. . .”
These barriers, furthermore, do not always stop attacks. They did not stop the February 4th suicide bombing in Dimona that killed one and injured eleven, Brom went on to note.
But the major problem that the defense officials cite is not with the few checkpoints on Israel’s borders (to stop attacks like the one in Dimona, they support finishing the fence along Israel’s border). The cause of the most needless hardship, they say, is the hundreds of barriers that form a complicated network of checkpoints and roadblocks, which divide the West Bank into separate, isolated sections.From the outside, the technical terms that are often used interchangeably to explain West Bank barriers seem confusing. According to the group, however, the differences are important and should be demystified.
The West Bank barriers fit into two major categories: checkpoints and roadblocks. Checkpoints can be permanent (toll-both like) structures manned by Israeli soldiers or temporary checkpoints (flying checkpoints) that are placed according to intelligence and are meant to be taken down. The majority of West Bank barriers are roadblocks that come in many forms, such as concrete blocks or earth mounds or trenches that stop cars from using a particular road.
It is this mixed system of barriers that can make a thirty-minute trip from the village of Azun to Nablus take two hours. In a March 6 Washington Post article, Griff Witte described such a trip taken by emergency-room doctor Karim Edwan. To get from his village of Azzun to work in Nablus, Witte writes, “Dr. Edwan must take at least two cabs, skirt a barbed-wire fence, climb a dirt mound, talk his way through multiple Israeli checkpoints and remove his shoes for a full-body security check.”
The checkpoint team calls for a reevaluation of the barriers that cause hardship, like that caused Dr. Edwan, without serving a specific security purpose. One of its members, retired Brigadir-General Ilan Paz, who served in the West Bank during the Intifada, gave the example of a checkpoint that he established that no longer serves its intended purpose. “I founded the Qalandia checkpoint years ago as a flying security checkpoint for a specific reason,” he told IRIN, a U.N. news source, on February 14 “to prevent a specific attack we had intelligence on . . . that checkpoint hasn’t been removed years later.”
According to Paz, the Qalandia checkpoint demonstrates that when there is specific intelligence, checkpoints can be very effective in stopping attacks. However, as things change on the ground, they can become useless and even detrimental. In some instances, the defense experts noted, barriers were put in place, not to stop terror attacks but to separate roads used by Israelis and Palestinians. And, while no longer serving that purpose, they remain in place.
According to Ron Schatzberg, another member of the group, “Near Jenin there is an Israeli settlement called Sheve Shomron. Since the start of the intifada Palestinians have not been allowed to travel on the area’s main road, due to security concerns. A three-meter-high wall has since been erected, a new road has been built for settlers and an army division has based itself there.” “However,” he was cited in IRIN, “Palestinians still can’t use the main roads.”
The team believes that by ending the system of separate roads for Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank not only could earth mounds that stop car traffic be removed, but Israeli security could be enhanced because “militants would find it harder to mount attacks without harming Palestinians,” IRIN reported.
Furthermore, instead of maintaining ineffective checkpoints inside the West Bank, the team proposes finishing constructing the barrier around it, and removing some permanent checkpoints, particularly those that have a major impact on Palestinians without providing Israelis security. These checkpoints could be replaced, as needed, with temporary “flying” checkpoints that rely on intelligence that is gathered and used in cooperation with Palestinian security services, as was done before 2000.
These changes, they propose, would ease Palestinian movement and enhance Israeli security in several ways, not the least of which, through strengthening the economy in the West Bank and aiding in the confidence building demanded by the current U.S. led peace process.
This process, and the U.S. administration officials that are pushing for it, have been frustrated by inaction on checkpoints. In a March 9th David Ignatius op-ed, a U.S. official described this frustration, “What they [the Israeli military] said they would look at hasn’t happened. The IDF has been doing the same stuff the same way [on checkpoints] for seven years, and they haven’t bothered to change.”
The checkpoint team has proposals for change, but without concerted efforts, it could become just another proposal. Making it something more, in clearly difficult times, will take risk, work, and coordination by both Palestinians and Israelis. Or, as Elvis Presley once put it, “a little less conversation, a little more action please.”
Topics: Israel | 44 Comments »
By Dan Fleshler | March 19, 2008
Revisiting a checkpoint, and an unexpected message
The Jerusalem Post notes that Ala Abu Dhaim, the gunman who shot up the Merkaz HaRav yeshiva in Jerusalem:
…did not meet the typical profile of Palestinian attackers, police said. “He is not known to the security forces,” Jerusalem Police Chief Cmdr. Aharon Franco told Channel 2. “He was a normal man … who was going to wed soon.”
Franco added that the gunmen drove students to school for a living, once again denying Abu Dhaim’s family’s claim that he had been working at the Yeshiva. He said that while Abu Dhaim had recently become more religious, he was not devout. Franco said he believed Abu Dhaim had planned the attack some time in advance and that it was not a response to recent violence in the Gaza Strip.
This man was from Jabl Mukaber. in eastern Jerusalem. In a post last July, I wrote about a checkpoint at the edge of one of Jabl Mukaber’s several distinct neighborhoods, a mini-village called Sheikh Sa’ed. I have re-written it a bit and will offer it again. Ala Abu Dhaim must have known all about the suffering of his neighbors in Sheikh Sa’ed, and no doubt the situation there added to his rage.
The first part of this post enraged readers on the pro-Israel right. The second part enraged readers on the anti-Israel left. The rest of us must figure out how to live in the grey area where an understanding of moral ambiguity is a prerequisite to finding the truth.
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Checkpoints, the wall and an unexpected message
I think of Hannah often these days, now that I have begun to wade into the difficult task of conversing with the left on Israel. She is from Australia, in her late 50s, and has lived in Israel since the early ’70s. Hannah (not her real name) is one of the brave, tireless, often rather eccentric Israeli Jews (most of them women) who volunteer for Machsom Watch.
Machsom means “checkpoint.” These woman have taken it upon themselves to monitor the treatment of Palestinians at some of the most controversial checkpoints in the West Bank. Like the wall/barrier/fence (it can be any one of those things, depending on where it’s located), many of the checkpoints that were established in the last few years prevent Palestinians from traveling from one part of the West Bank to another without approval from Israeli Border Police or soldiers.
About a year ago, at the end of June 2006, I accompanied Hannah and her companion, J, to Sheikh Sa’ed. That is–or at least used to be–one of several distinct neighborhoods of Jabl Mukaber, a village on the eastern edge of Jerusalem. Jabl Mukaber was not annexed by Israel, so it is technically part of the West Bank. The residents of Sheikh Sa’ed are closely linked to Jabl Mukaber and the rest of East Jerusalem, where they have many family ties and go for many services.
The Israeli government had planned to extend the wall/barrier/fence so that it divided Sheik Sa’ed from Jabl Mukaber. But in March, 2006, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the planned route of the wall was improper. So the Israelis set up a permanent, staffed checkpoint at the entrance to Sheik Sa’ed. According a report from B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization (which calls Shei Sa’ed a “village”):
“Village residents who do not hold Israeli identity cards are forbidden to exit the village and enter Jerusalem . Even those who have permits to enter Israel are not allowed to cross the checkpoint. Instead they are directed to the Olive Checkpoint. To get to that checkpoint, they have to negotiate a long descent down the cliff on which the village lies. In fact the siege imposed by Israel means that those without Jerusalem identity cards with two ways to leave Sheikh Sa’ed : to go along a difficult and, for some residents, an impossible path down the cliff, or to enter Jerusalem illegally.
The siege affects every aspect of the resident’s lives. One of the most serious consequences is its effect on access to medical treatment: the village has no medical clinic, so the residents have to go to facilities in East Jerusalem, in most cases to Jabel Mukaber, which lies about 100 meters from the entrance to Sheikh Sa’ed. The villagers have difficulty obtaining essential foodstuffs and other consumer needs.
When we arrived there, Hannah, J and I got past the checkpoint and walked into Sheikh Sa’ed, where a cab driver met us and drove us around. The women were there to bear witness, to take notes as they talked to villagers. From the top of the steep, sloping donkey path that is now the only way in and out of the neighborhood for many residents, we watched two teenage boys hauling some wood up the hill. Hannah told me that if people have physical problems, like asthma, and can’t make it up the hill, they are stuck in the village. They can’t get out.
An old man with a cane walked past us and gingerly moved down the donkey path. He appeared to be tip-toeing. The women took notes. The cab driver ticked off a number of indignities, like the tear gas that the Border Police had tossed at some teenagers who had approached the checkpoint, talking loudly and boisterously, but, he claimed, had meant no harm.
In rejecting the state’s plans to build the wall/barrier there, the Israeli court had indicated there was no evidence that these people posed a direct security threat to the State of Israel, Hannah told me. But the Court did urge the Israeli government to build the barrier on another route, further east. As we walked back through the checkpoint to her car, she said, loudly, so a young Border Policeman could hear, “The Germans said they didn’t know. They didn’t know what was happening. I know. I know what is happening.”
She was reluctant to talk politics, to examine the big picture. As we drove away, I kept pressing about her political beliefs, and all she would tell me was that she didn’t vote for Meretz. She was “way left” of Meretz, she said.
But later, as we drove past the wall at Abu Dis, I heard something unexpected from Hannah.
I asked her the inevitable question that must be asked by anyone who insists on seeing both sides’ points of view: “But don’t you think the wall and the checkpoints have stopped terrorists?”
She gave me the standard, post-Zionist answer, something along the lines of “It has nothing to do with security. It’s just there to control people, to humilate them.”
I kept at it. I said that, at one point a few years back, moderates in the Palestinian Authority had accepted the idea of some kind of barrier, as long as it was on the Green Line. The PA had been unable to control Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and they appeared to understand that, for the time being, the State of Israel had to do something to stop suicide bombers. They were not happy about the wall/barrier/fence, but as long as it did not cut a swath through the West Bank, at least some PA officials appeared to be willing to live with it, for the time being. I told Hannah that I knew this to be true because I had heard them voice that sentiment.
Then Hannah said, “It would be ugly. It would be horrible…I could live with it, too.”
I expressed surprise. I had been assuming, without thinking much about it, that she was in the same camp as the international leftists who urge Israel to just tear down the “apartheid wall,” demolish it unilaterally, pretend there is no need for concerted negotiations, pretend there is no problem, pretend there is no blood feud that has been going on for a hundred plus years.
Instead, Hannah said, simply, “There are people who don’t want me here.”
So here she was, the kind of Israeli witness who feeds the fury of anyone with a smidgeon of concern for basic human decency and humanity. But even Hannah, who spent her days exposing the nightmarish conditions of Palestinians under occupation, wanted a wall or a barrier to protect her children, grandchildren, friends and neighbors from getting blown to bits.
I haven’t the faintest idea what Israel should do right now about the wall/fence/barrier, other than ensuring that it doesn’t cut through Palestinian villages and olive groves, and re-routing those parts of it that jut into the West Bank to protect far-flung Israeli settlements, and announcing, loudly and clearly, that it is TEMPORARY, a security measure that can be eliminated if and when there is a political settlement. As for the system of checkpoints and other obstacles to Palestinian movement, Peace Now says the vast majority of them do not protect Israeli security. But it still calls for 35 of them to remain. Sharing the rage of people who don’t want old men to be forced to tip-toe down old donkey paths does not mean that one should ignore the worries and fears of Israeli parents who don’t want their kids to be slaughtered in supermarkets and discos.
To call out, simply and passionately, “Tear down the apartheid wall” at demonstrations, without offering a reasonable, immediate solution to those Israeli parents, is to tell them they should not worry about their kids. One could say, “Hannah should not be there,” Hannah should go back to Australia, the whole experiment should be summarily cancelled. That’s not just offensive; it is unrelated to objective reality, yet I read comments like that all the time on the lefty blogs.
Hannah isn’t leaving, and that is a good thing. She and her comrades rage and rage against the brutality and dehumanization that is an inevitable consequence of the occupation. She refuses to stop holding a mirror up to the Israelis who bear much of the responsibility for this unremitting tragedy. But they do not bear that responsibility alone. While Hannah rages, she also needs to protect herself and the people she loves. She is faced with conflicting moral imperatives that are impossible to reconcile. As some point, I suspect, she stopped trying to reconcile them, like a lot of Israelis who have as much concern for human rights and justice as the sloganeers on the anti-Israel left.
Topics: Palestinians, Israel, Far left, Jerusalem, Israeli occupation | 13 Comments »
By Dan Fleshler | March 17, 2008
Aaron David Miller: The pro-Israel community has won, so stop “geshraying” already
Aaron David Miller has a stirring piece in the LA Times that deserves to be quoted in full.
A note on my headline:”geshray” is Yiddish for “wail.” Other than that, believe it or not (is everyone sitting down? Get ready…), I have nothing to add! Nothing more needs to be said, as far as I’m concerned. Anyone disagree?
The Israel litmus test
Why do so many American Jews demand unwavering commitment to Israel from their politicians?
By Aaron David Miller
March 9, 2008‘You’re nothing but a self-hating Jew, and your boss is an anti-Semite.” It was the spring of 1990. I was an advisor to then-Secretary of State James Baker, and I was briefing a Jewish group from Atlanta — and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Baker was tough on Israel when he needed to be, but he was no anti-Semite. I told Mr. Atlanta that if he wanted to argue about policy, fine; otherwise, we should keep the ad hominem out of it.
Almost 20 years later, here we go again. This time, a Democratic candidate for president, not even the official nominee of his party, is under attack from some deeply confused and ill-informed American Jews. Again, the charges of hostility toward Israel are being irresponsibly bandied about.
Some of this, to be sure, is the seasonal silliness associated with political campaigns. But the persistent attacks on Sen. Barack Obama — and especially on former Clinton administration official Robert Malley, one of his many informal advisors — shouldn’t be casually dismissed as crackpot commentary. They reflect two troubling reactions, or, more precisely, overreactions, within the American Jewish community that undermine its credibility and harm American interests in the process.
First, some full disclosure. I’m not associated with any political campaign and am not running for anything. For nearly 20 years, I worked at the Department of State, under Republican and Democratic secretaries of State, on the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations.
What’s more, I am a close friend of Malley, who served as special assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli affairs between 1998 and 2001. Malley and I continue to collaborate on Op-Ed articles and conferences.
In recent weeks, I’ve been extremely disturbed to see him attacked as an enemy of Israel and as an apologist for the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Perhaps most offensive, several publications have run personal attacks on Malley because his father, in the 1960s, founded and edited a left-wing magazine called Afrique-Asie, which was friendly toward the Palestine Liberation Organization and other Third World movements.
But so what? These charges are ridiculous. There’s no question that Malley has been critical of certain Israeli actions and behavior (as have I). He was criticized, for instance, for an article he wrote in the New York Review of Books that took issue with the notion that Arafat was solely responsible for the failure of the Oslo peace process. But he is not “anti-Israel,” let alone the Israel hater his critics portray him to be. He is well-respected by Arabs and Israelis alike, and he believes deeply in the idea and the reality of Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign and secure Jewish state. He would never do anything to jeopardize that.
In a joint letter last month, five of his longtime colleagues (former Clinton national security advisor Samuel R. Berger; former U.S. ambassadors to Israel Martin Indyk and Daniel Kurtzer; former U.S. peace negotiator Dennis Ross; and myself) made Malley’s commitment to Israel unmistakably clear. As for the mean-spirited guilt-by-association charges having to do with his family, Malley told the Forward, a Jewish newspaper, that while he loved and respected his father — who died in 2006 — he did not agree with him on everything.
The attacks on Malley (which are, of course, really attacks on Obama) don’t merely reflect concerns about the views of a single mid-level advisor; they flow from a deeper dysfunction. The first piece of that dysfunction is what you might call the “cosmic oy vey” — the tendency of many American Jews active in pro-Israeli causes to worry about everything, without a capacity to identify what is important and what isn’t.
Don’t get me wrong. Jews — and yes, I am one of them — worry for a living. Their history compels them to and to be always vigilant. Yet in America, where they have achieved a level of security, acceptance and power unparalleled in their history, their existential worries paradoxically seem to have grown even greater. When Jimmy Carter writes a book — a bad book, incidentally — comparing Zionism to apartheid, many American Jews go crazy. When two university professors, Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, write another bad book — about what they call “the Israel lobby” — many Jews react as if the sky is falling.
The fact is (and many American Jews are reluctant to accept it), the conflict in the United States between Israel’s supporters and its detractors is over. And the pro-Israel community has won. No figure in American mainstream politics can be viable without being firmly supportive of Israel. Americans overwhelmingly back Israel’s right to exist safely and securely as a Jewish state. For reasons of shared values, as well as strong domestic political support, Israel has become an organic part of American culture, religion, politics and foreign policy for Jews and non-Jews alike. Our most recent presidents, Clinton and George W. Bush, have been the most pro-Israel presidents — ever.
For too many American Jews, these successes haven’t created a greater sense of security; they have only persuaded them to keep up the fight to ensure their good fortune continues. Too often this means stigmatizing people who criticize, or even question, particular Israeli policies as detrimental to U.S. interests or to the peace process or to Israel’s security itself. There is a strong tendency even in parts of the mainstream American Jewish community to interpret any such questioning — of the type that occurs every day in Israel itself — as outright hostility.
I’ve lost count of the number of times Jewish activists or friends have said to me that this official or that journalist or this academic must be anti-Semitic. On other occasions, I have been told that I myself should not to be so publicly critical of Israel, lest we give our enemies grist for their propaganda mills.
This “us versus them” mentality still runs deep, and it is particularly harmful when it comes to the Arab-Israeli issue. That conflict is not some kind of morality play in which the forces of evil do battle against the forces of light. It is a conflict in which both sides have legitimate needs and requirements and do both good and bad things in pursuit of them.
To be called an Israel hater for speaking out against Israeli actions when they are wrong and counterproductive — actions such as building settlements and bypass roads or confiscating land — or to be called an anti-Semite for suggesting alternative ways of thinking when the status quo is leading nowhere is not only absurd, it’s dangerous.
In the end, American Jews who impose a litmus test of boundless commitment to every single Israeli action hurt not only their community but the United States as well. Israel is a tiny country living in a dangerous neighborhood. The U.S. and Israel need a special relationship based on confidence and trust to further their mutual interests — but that does not mean we need an exclusive relationship in which America acquiesces to everything that Israel or its supporters in the United States think is wise. This is a critical distinction. One can only hope that, next time around, we are fortunate enough to get a president and Middle East advisors who understand it.
Aaron David Miller, who served at the State Department as an advisor to six secretaries of State, is a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the author of the forthcoming “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab/Israeli Peace.”
Topics: Israel lobby, American foreign policy, Palestinians, Israel, American Jews, Israeli occupation, Mearsheimer and Walt, Rob Malley | 40 Comments »
By Dan Fleshler | March 11, 2008
Announcing the “Fleshies”: awards for the best responses to anti-Semitism on the Web
It is hard to convey the amount of bile and reductionist, blame-the-Jews-for-every-sin rhetoric that has taken over much of the blogosphere. Phil Weiss’s blog generally attracts some of the most articulate Jew-bashers, so I tune into the comments from time to time in order to gauge the level of hatred.
I just noticed some great comments by “Teddy,” one of our most valued contributors whose only fault is that he is smarter and generally more articulate than I am. I hereby award him the first “Fleshie,” which will be bestowed periodically on the best response to anti-Semitism or ignorant anti-Israelism on the Web. He veers farther to the left than I would, but this is the kind of respondent who has a chance to get the attention of the people who are reading these blogs and still trying to make up their minds about whether to hold the Jews responsible for the world’s problems…Stay with this. It is a bit scary in places. And Teddy’s initial response refers to an earlier comment and requires some patience. But, in the end, he richly deserves his Fleshie:
1-{The original provocation by “Cogit 8}”Phil, after observing how ‘your people’ operate for lo a half century, I rather doubt that anything close to a candid discussion about The Jews (or their lobby) will ever occur. The Russerts and Wolf Blitzers are drooling in wait for Obama, who hasn’t inspired much hope to the majority of Americans who want us out of Iraq.
What will happen instead is that Hillary will demagogue the issue into one of “Do you support our little ally Israel, or don’t you? Pulling out of Iraq will leave poor little Israel all alone, etc etc etc.”
If you want a foretaste of the sophistry to come, merely observe how the recent killing of 120 Palestinians by a sophisticated war-machine has not produced even a ripple of empathy in America, whereas the death of one Jew by a crudely made rocket is trumpeted about the mother-land. Proof indeed of The Jewing of America - because most of ‘your people’ really don’t give a rip about other human life.”
2-{Teddy’s response}: “most of ‘your people’ really don’t give a rip about other human life.”
What follows is an excerpt from a comment that closed off a thread a few days ago. I wrote it in response to a predictable claim from MM that Zionism was NOTHING except colonialism and racism, nothing else. I include the first part so you will understand the context of my concluding comment. Some of you are unwittingly doing a wonderful job of promoting Zionism and confirming the suspicions of the most paranoid Jews:
————————
MM,And there was nothing else to Zionism? No other reason for it? Just colonialism and imperialism? No pogroms and raw discrimination that made Eastern and Central European Jew believe assimilation was impossible? No desparation in the 1930s and ’40s because the gates of the world were closed (and don’t give me the infernal, conspiratorial line that somehow the Zionists caused the Holocaust or were glad that it happened, which I used to read all the time on Phil’s blog)?…
That said, many of the Zionist pioneers were racist, and orientalist, and the entire saga does not resemble the golden myths American Jews learned in their childhood about the founding of Israel. But let me tell ya, MM and all your compadres, much of the bile on this blog is reminiscent of the attitudes that convinced Jews in the late 19th century that Zionism was the only solution available to them.
So keep it up, as someone else wrote awhile ago. You’re doing AIPAC’s work for it!
Posted by: Teddy | March 06, 2008 at 12:19 PM
3-{Another county heard from}: Even if one accepts everything Teddy says about the pogroms Jews faced in Europe — what does that have to do with the U.S.?
Like the Palestinians, Americans wonder why we have to pay and pay and pay for sins committed by Europeans decades ago. We even have to pay $35 million a year for the Holocaust Museum, to explain what one group of Europeans did to another group of Europeans. Why?
Now there IS a zionist state, which enjoys a southern European standard of living. So WHY, again, is the U.S. obliged to spend billions a year, and distort its entire foreign policy — in perpetuity — to help this exclusively Jewish project along?
Is this like Catholic indulgences or carbon credits, where paying $5 billion a year will earn us “philosemitic credits” and expiate our eternal liberal guilt? It takes a lot of chutzpah to think that the Shoah can continue to milked for this purpose, in the seventh decade after it happened.
Give it a rest, man! Find a new hustle that actually adds some value to peoples’ lives, rather than just shaking them down and denouncing them as antisemites if they dare to object to having their pockets picked. Some of us are getting rather tired of being abused, after generously contributing all our lives via income tax. Some gratitude, huh!
Posted by: Jim Haygood | March 06, 2008 at 12:46 PM
4- {Teddy’s response}You don’t seem to get it, Jim. I wasn’t defending all that the Zionists did or justifying blind U.S. support for Israel. I was pointing out that the rhetoric on this site, or some of it, blames THE JOOS as a people for all sorts of nefarious crimes, and refuses to make a distinction between right wing Zionists and everyone else who calls himself or herself a Jew. Anti-Zionism and blunt, angry criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitism. “Most of ‘your people’ don’t really give a rip about human life’ is anti-Semitic according to any reasonable definition of the word. If you and yours would denounce grotesque generalizations about the Jewish people and focus on AIPAC, the ZOA and the groups that I, as Jew, also despise, you might attract reasonable people to your arguments
Posted by: Teddy | March 06, 2008 at 01:08 PM
5-{A second provocation by “Cogit8″} Teddy, I regret that you limited your critique to just a few of my words, because I’m talking about a much larger issue (its the same issue that Phil is pondering also, and that is the question of Jewish culpability in the disaster which is Iraq).
If the Dreyfus Affair can be called “one of the greatest iniquities of the last century” and it only concerned one individual, pray tell what will Iraq and Lebanon be called some day? In addition, what will the ethnic cleansing of over 700,000 Palestinians be called?
So yes, “J’Accuse!” is where I’m coming from, and I accuse “most of ‘your people’” of having committed or supported major war-crimes against humanity.
Posted by: cogit8 | March 06, 2008 at 10:43 PM
6 {Teddy’s award- winning response} The Dreyfus Affair was your entry in the compare-whose-pain-is-greater debate, not mine.
You have a Star Wars, black and white vision of the conflict and, apparently, the universe. I learned a long time ago that it is useless to try to explain the complexities and nuances of the ongoing tragedy to people like you. But just a few notes and then I need to return to the world where people understand there are two sides to most stories and neither has a monopoly on truth or goodness.
I don’t believe Israel and its lobbyists were a decisive factor in the Bushies decision to get us into Iraq. But even if they were, what about the high percentage of American Jews who opposed the invasion and the higher percentage that turned agains the war? Are they part of the “people” who should be blamed for Iraq? Weren’t American Jews prominent leaders of the anti-war movement (e.g., Leslie Cagan)?
I don’t believe what happened in 1948 (or the 30s) can be reduced to the single, fashionable phrase of “ethnic cleansing,” unless that phrase is applied to both sides of the conflict. There was a war between two national movements and atrocities were commmited by both sides. What do you think were the intentions of the Arab armies that invaded in ‘48? The entire area would have been Judenrein if they had gotten their way. But even if your Star Wars vision is correct, an entire “people” did not “support” ethnic cleansing. Most Jews who followed the conflict believed in the propaganda they were fed about why the Palestinians left. Only in the last few decades have the revisionist historians showed that there was another side of the story. You can’t blame an entire “people” for supporting ethnic cleansing if they did not believe that is what happened.
For that matter, even if you think the Zionists were the scum of the earth from the very start, realize that they were a minority movement among Jews around the world even in the early 1930s. An entire “people” did not support them. For most Jews. the need for the Jewish homeland only sunk during the Second World and its immediate aftermath.
As for Lebanon and Gaza, I am outraged at the passivity of most American Jewish organizations in the face of Israel’s disproportionate response. But one of the reasons for the passivity among moderate Jews who are horrified by the deaths of Palestinian children is utter despair and hopelessness; they don’t have a practical answer that will help both sides escape from this nightmare. So, as usual, those with the easy, extreme answers –targeted assasinations—win the day. That’s no excuse. I share your anger at what is happening and so do the organizations I support, like Brit Tzedek v’Shalom. So, where does that put me in your cartography of the Jewish people?
Posted by: Teddy | March 07, 2008 at 05:24 AM
Again, Teddy’s answer won’t make the mainstream Jewish establishment happy, because he feels no compulsion to defend what he believes to be indefensible. Some of what he says make me uncomfortable and is too harsh on the Zionists. But standard “hasbara” has no chance to succeed in that digital world. It gets rejected immediately. Teddy and his ilk do have a chance. Please send other nominations to dfleshler@yahoo.com.
Topics: Israel lobby, Palestinians, Israel, Zionism, American Jews, Far left, Anti-Semitism | 43 Comments »
By Dan Fleshler | March 7, 2008
Will Obama, Clinton or McCain make Israel-Palestine a priority on Day 1?
To gauge what the presidential candidates might do about the ongoing Arab-Israeli nightmare, one has to make inferences based on inflections, hints, nuances and tea leaves. What they or their campaign staffers say now is at least as important as the identity of 4 or 5 of the many “foreign policy advisors” who have communicated with them.
One of the measures I am using to judge candidates is not only who is most likely to have a robust, creative and at least occasionally evenhanded Middle East policy, but also who is most likely to treat the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a high priority from their first day in office.
In “Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace –American Leadership in the Middle East” published by the U.S. Institute of Peace, Daniel Kurtzer and Scott Lasensky have offered a host of concrete, practical suggestions to the next administration, based on interviews with dozens of diplomats and others who know what they are talking about. Several of their recommendations require a commitment to putting the issue on the front burner and keeping it there:
1) The president needs to adopt a hands-on policy from the beginning of his/her term. The Arab-Israeli question ought to figure prominently in an early presidential speech, sending a loud and clear signal that the issue is high on the agenda.
2) From the first day in office, the president ought to charge those responsible for Middle East policy with developing…a comprehensive and durable strategy not just to manage the conflict, but to end it. Such a strategy must include concrete proposals for monitoring and judging compliance by all sides.
3) The United States should lock in the gains of earlier negotiations, especially before public support in the region erodes or events on the ground further undermine prospects for a peaceful settlement.
Interestingly, Obama’s campaign manager, David Axelrod, appears to agree with Kurtzer/Lasensky, based on an interview with Roger Cohen in the NY Times last month (”No Manchurian Candidate,” 2/11/2008):
Foreign policy will roar back once this is a straight Republican-Democrat fight. A Democrat who’s going to win has be strong on core American defense principles, which include Israel’s security.
Obama feels Israel in his kishkas, all right. Equally, he feels dialogue, which has been his way of getting things done since he became a Chicago community organizer in the 1980s. There would be no six-year time-outs on Israel-Palestine under an Obama presidency. “He’d be actively involved from day one,” said Axelrod.
That does not mean that Hillary or McCain disagree. We just haven’t heard from their campaigns about the extent to which the conflict will be an early, and high, priority. But we do know that Hillary’s foreign policy advisors who are actively campaigning for her include the estimable Mara Rudman, former NSC Chief of Staff and Deputy National Security Advisor in the Clinton Administration. She is clearly an advocate of vigorous American engagement in the region (and on the board of Americans for Peace Now)…
Anyone else have tea leaf readings, inflections, dreams or visions that are worth sharing?
Topics: American foreign policy, Palestinians, Middle East peace process, Israel, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton | 22 Comments »
By Dan Fleshler | March 5, 2008
Where are all of Clinton’s “dovish” Jewish supporters?
Newsweek now tells us that it is not only right wing, so-called “pro-Israel” agitators and Republicans who are hopping on the “Obama- is-bad-for-the Jews” bandwagon, it is also Swiftboaters in the Clinton campaign:
“Clinton campaign operatives have sent around negative material about Obama’s relations with Israel, according to e-mails obtained by NEWSWEEK. In addition to Brzezinski, the e-mails attack Obama advisers such as Rob Malley, a former Clinton negotiator at the 2000 Camp David talks who has since written articles sympathetic to the Palestinian point of view…
…In one case, Daphna Ziman, a longtime friend of Hillary Clinton’s who has co-chaired several events for her, forwarded an e-mail from the Republican Jewish Coalition, a grass-roots GOP group, criticizing Obama for proposing a Muslim summit. In a Jan. 31 interview with Paris Match, Obama said he wanted “an honest discussion about ways to bridge the gap that grows between Muslims and the West.” Ziman, in her Feb. 2 e-mail, responded, “I am horrified at Mr. Obama’s point of view.” Her e-mail, sent to a group including Mike Medavoy, a Hollywood producer who supports Obama, contained a press release from RJC executive director Matt Brooks. “Nowhere in the Paris Match article does Senator Obama affirm Israel’s right to exist,” Brooks wrote. (Ziman says “the campaign had nothing to do with” her e-mail.)
In an e-mail sent Feb. 4—a day before Super Tuesday—Clinton finance official Annie Totah passed along a critical essay by Ed Lasky, a conservative blogger whose own anti-Obama e-mails have circulated in the U.S. Jewish community. Totah wrote: “Please read the attached important and very disturbing article on Barak Obama. Please vote wisely in the Primaries.” (She didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
Richard Silverstein in Tikun Olam ably expresses the rage I felt upon learning this news. Check out his call for the Clinton campaign “to renounce this ugly feature of their campaign. I note with most severe censure that when the Newsweek journalists gave Howard Wolfson an opportunity to comment for the article he declined.”
But what has gone unnoticed in this fracas is that at least some of Hillary’s Jewish supporters, including reasonably well-connected fundraisers and volunteers, AGREE WITH ROB MALLEY! They share his take on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and don’t want that conflict to be a zero sum game. They want American policy in the Middle East to be evenhanded. They also agree with Obama that the U.S. should not shirk from talking to Syria and Iran. I won’t name names, but trust me on this one. I know a few of them and I am sure there are many more I’ve never met They are supporters of Americans for Peace Now, Israel Policy Forum. They agree with most of the op-eds they read in Haaretz. Some were Friends of Bill and continue to be Friends of Hillary.
It isn’t clear whether they have weighed in and told the people running the campaign that borrowing from the rhetoric of the Republican Jewish Coalition, and using the most dumbed-down, far right definitions of what it means to be “pro-Israel,” are beyond the pale. I confess that I have been afraid to ask the ones I know because I don’t want to put them in the uncomfortable position of saying all is fair in politics, Hillary needs to pull out every conceivable stop to come from behind, and so they have kept quiet, they have let the attack dogs run wild. Perhaps that is not true. Perhaps they have raised objections. Perhaps there has been a furious internal debate in the campaign and these tactics will end. Or perhaps they are not influential enough, when all is said and done, to spark such a debate.
Regardless, the question remains, if Obama wins the nomination, will they come out of the shadows and defend him from the attacks that are sure to come from Republicans? Will they defend Rob Malley and Susan Rice, or at least the positions the two of them espouse? Will they urge Obama to do everything possible to wade into the region and mediate and arbitrate, and, if necessary, employ both sticks and carrots when dealing with Israel as well as its neighbors? Will they defend Rashid Khalidi, the relatively moderate scholar who is the latest object of gibes from Obama bashers because he has dared to be a Palestinian nationalist, as Tikun Olam also reports ? Will they try to wrest control of the rules of the public debate on Middle East policy from the Israel-right-or-wrong crowd?
I am crossing my pro-American, pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian fingers.
Topics: Middle East peace process, Israel, Democratic party, Barack Obama, Rob Malley, Hillary Clinton | 17 Comments »
By Dan Fleshler | February 28, 2008
So just who are Obama’s Middle East advisors? Finally, some clarifications…
Clarifications –i.e., light, as opposed to heat– about Obama’s Middle East advisors are provided by Jack Levin, an Obama friend and campaign insider quoted in Gidon Remba’s Tough Dove Israel. Almost the exact same language can be found on a blog called The Sunny Side, which quotes Eric Lynn, who is on Obama’s staff.
Here is an excerpt from Levin:
(1) The first allegation on almost every list is that Zbigniew Brzezinski is anti-Israel and is Barack’s chief foreign policy advisor.
The fact is that Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to a former president, called Barack and volunteered his endorsement of Barack’s campaign because Brzezinski agrees with Barack’s Iraq policy. While Barack briefly discussed Iraq with Brzezinski, Barack has never discussed, and will not discuss, Israel or Palestinian issues with Brzezinski. Indeed, Barack has no plans to talk further with Brzezinski about anything.
So to call Brzezinski a Barack foreign policy advisor of any kind is incorrect. And to call him Barack’s chief foreign policy advisor is a ludicrous misstatement.
(2) The second allegation on most every list is that Robert Malley is anti-Israel and is a Barack foreign policy advisor.
The fact is that Malley, who served on former President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy staff, emailed some of his writings and views to Barack’s staff as well as (we believe) to all (or most) of the other presidential candidates’ staffs. Barack has had, and plans to have, no conversations with Malley.
So Malley is not an advisor to Barack. Indeed, Martin Peretz (in a Jerusalem Post article entitled “Trust Obama on Israel”) unequivocally stated “Malley is not and has never been Middle East advisor to Barack Obama.”
(3) The third allegation on many lists is that Tony Lake is anti-Israel and is a Barack advisor. At last we have an allegation that is half correct: Tony Lake is a Barack advisor, but Tony Lake is not anti-Israel.
Tony was National Security Advisor to former President Bill Clinton (whose administration is clearly viewed as pro-Israel). Tony’s wife is Jewish and Tony himself converted to Judaism. Tony is pro-Israel and openly so, e.g., he is very well received when he speaks on U.S. foreign policy at synagogues and Jewish gatherings.
(Are you beginning to get the drift that you cannot believe everything you read on the Internet? Read on, please.)
(4) The fourth allegation on many lists is that Susan Rice is anti-Israel and is advising Barack.
Susan was Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under President Bill Clinton and Secretary Madeline Albright (again an administration clearly viewed as pro-Israel). She is not in any way anti-Israel. But in any event, her only involvement with Barack is on African affairs and she is not advising Barack on Israel or the Middle East at all.
(5) Another frequently mentioned character is George Soros. Whatever George’s views, he is merely a contributor (one out of 500,000 contributors so far and growing) to Barack’s excellent campaign. George is not an Obama advisor in any way.
(6) So finally we come to the key question: Who are Barack’s Israel advisors? Here the answers are all true and all good.
Dennis Ross, former President Bill Clinton’s chief Middle East advisor for 8 years, the world’s top recognized expert on the Middle East, a noted author of numerous books and countless articles, all of which are realistic and fair-minded, and himself a Jew.
While Dennis has not endorsed Barack, Dennis frequently confers with Barack and his team, and we all hope that whoever is elected president will call on Dennis to play a lead, crucial and fair-minded role on future Middle East policy.
Former President Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor Tony Lake, discussed in (3) above.
Representative Robert Wexler (D – FL), one of our country’s most outspoken advocates for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship.
Dennis McDonough, foreign policy advisor to former Senator Tom Daschle (D – SD), who consistently advocates a strong U.S.-Israel relationship.
Dan Shapiro, a member of former President Bill Clinton’s National Security Council and a former aide to Senator Bill Nelson (D – FL), another consistent advocate of a strong U.S.-Israel relationship.
Eric Lynn, former foreign policy advisor to Rep. Peter Deutsch (D – FL), one of the House’s strongest supporters of Israel.
(The latter 3 – McDonough, Shapiro, and Lynn – currently serve as full-time Barack staff people.)
I am disturbed that Obama’s people rely entirely on obsolete, narrow definitions of what it means to be pro-Israel and that they don’t defend Malley. Read a little more of Levin’s comments and you will see what I mean. But that’s the game they are forced to play, alas, given the dumbed-down version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that must be presented on the campaign trail, so I don’t blame them.
Topics: American foreign policy, Israel, American Jews, Barack Obama, Rob Malley | 31 Comments »
By Dan Fleshler | February 20, 2008
The smears against Rob Malley continue, but former U.S. officials rise to his defense
James Besser has a balanced and informative piece on the ongoing Rob Malley fracas in New York Jewish Week. Among other things, we learn that the offensive smear campaign against Malley and, by extension, Obama has not abated: “In the days leading up to this week’s Democratic primary in Maryland, Jewish voters in Baltimore and the Maryland suburbs of Washington began getting e-mails warning that Sen. Barack Obama is being influenced by “anti-Israel” advisers, and pointing to one in particular: former Clinton administration official Robert Malley.”
Some of Malley’s former government colleagues have decided they are going to weigh in and defend Malley in the public arena. I’ve been forwarded a copy of a statement they have signed. If there are people you know who might be susceptible to the smear campaign, please let them know what Berger, Indyk, Kurtzer, Miller and Ross have to say:
Over the past several weeks, a series of vicious, personal attacks have been launched against one of our colleagues, Robert Malley, who served as President Clinton’s Special Assistant for Arab-Israeli affairs. They claim that he harbours an anti-Israeli agenda and has sought to undermine Israel’s security. These attacks are unfair, inappropriate and wrong. They are an effort to undermine the credibility of a talented public servant who has worked tirelessly over the years to promote Arab-Israeli peace and US national interests. They must stop.
We have real differences among us about how best to conduct US policy toward the Middle East and what is the right way to build a lasting two-state solution that protects Israel’s security. But whatever differences do exist, there is no disagreement among us on one core issue that transcends partisan or other divides: that the US should not and will not do anything to undermine Israel’s safety or the special relationship between our two nations. We have worked with Rob closely over the years and have no doubt he shares this view and has acted
consistent with it.We face a critical period in the Middle East that demands sustained, determined and far-sighted engagement by the United States. It is not a time for scurrilous attacks against someone who deserves our respect.
Sincerely,
Samuel (Sandy) Berger
Former National Security AdvisorAmb. Martin Indyk
Former Ambassador to IsraelAmb. Daniel C. Kurtzer
Former Ambassador to Israel and Egypt
and Assistant Secretary of
State for Near East AffairsAaron David Miller
Former Senior Adviser for Arab-Israeli Negotiations,
Department of StateAmb. Dennis Ross
Former Special Envoy of the President
to the Middle EastTopics: American foreign policy, Middle East peace process, Israel, Democratic party, American Jewish voters, Rob Malley, Obama | 22 Comments »
By Dan Fleshler | February 14, 2008
One man’s fantasies about “unruly Palestinians”
Epraim Inbar of Bar-Ilan University has published a piece that disproves the notion that everything that can be said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has already said. He harbors the fantasy that somehow the chaos in Gaza and the disarray in the West Bank will turn out well for Israel because….eventually Egypt and Jordan will share the “burden of ruling over the unruly Palestinians.” This notion comes from the same kind of wishful thinking that once prompted Israel to ignore the PLO and negotiate with Arab village leagues in the territories. It is akin to the “Jordan-is-Palestine” concept that still persists among some people on the Israeli right.
We always hear that left-wing Israelis and American Jews are unrealistic, live in a dream world, are unwilling to learn the hard lessons of the past. Compared to this guy, the Women in Black (or the meditators who think that more TM will bring peace and enlightenment to the region) are hard-nosed pragmatists:
…The emergence of Hamastan in Gaza may propel Egypt into a “partner” role, which it played willingly in the 1948-67 period. It is very understandable that Egypt does not want to again rule over Gaza. Nevertheless, Hamas’ success in opening the Egypt-Gaza border places Egypt on the horns of a dilemma.
Thus far, Egypt enjoyed the bleeding of Israel, a regional rival, by Hamas - with little cost to itself. But Hamas has grown more powerful and its free access to Sinai has become dangerous….
…On the one hand, Egypt must show solidarity with the Palestinians and sensitivity to their suffering. Therefore, it allowed Gazans to enter its territory. On the other hand, Egypt is a proud sovereign country that wants full control over its borders. It is particularly fearful of the influence of Hamas at home. The rule of Hamas in Gaza is an encouraging development for all Muslim radicals throughout the world. Egypt, like most established Arab states, does not want Hamas to flourish. Nevertheless, Egypt was already manipulated several weeks ago by Hamas when it allowed Gazans returning from pilgrimage to Mecca to enter the Gaza Strip in violation of an agreement with Israel. Hamas again took advantage of Egyptian sensibilities to blast holes in the Rafah wall.
It is not yet clear how the Egyptian dilemma will play out. One distinct possibility is a greater Egyptian role in Gaza to limit the Islamist influence. This is advantageous for Israel, even if some terror may still originate in Gaza. Actually, such a scenario could evolve only after a large-scale Israeli military operation that would extract a heavy price from Gaza, seriously weakening Hamas, particularly its military wing. Then, Gazans may become more susceptible to an enhanced Egyptian presence (which may or may not be formal).
Informal agreements for Arab influence and unofficial control in the Palestinian areas may prove to be quite conducive to the achievement of basic stability in the region. Eventually, Egyptian informal rule over Gaza might be emulated by Jordan in the West Bank. A large number of Palestinians are fed up with their national movement; it has brought only suffering to the Palestinian people. Thus, the new situation in Gaza could beget an opportunity for the emergence of a new paradigm in which Arab states share the burden of ruling over the unruly Palestinians.
Topics: Palestinians, Israel, Hamas, Israeli occupation, Gaza Strip | 6 Comments »
By Dan Fleshler | February 13, 2008
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