Month: May 2010

It's a courageous, smart and open-eyed essay that Peter Beinart, my old friend and fellow former editor of TNR has written. It has, to my mind, two central things to tell us. The first is that the political, moral and cultural shift within Israel is much worse than many seem to acknowledge; and the second is that the American Jewish Establishment, as Peter calls it, is intent on looking away, and on reiterating exhausted motifs and failing smears to keep reality at bay, as their children drift away from what looks increasingly like an apartheid state in a permanently warring Middle East. The Dish has tried to convey part of what has culminated over the last couple of years. But Beinart's picture of reality is as sobering as any I have yet read, and helps one realize just how alarmingly realist John Mearsheimer's bleak view is. The government in Jerusalem is more radical and extreme and illiberal than many want to believe:

Effi Eitam, a charismatic ex–cabinet minister and war hero, has proposed ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank. “We’ll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs from here and remove Israeli Arabs from [the] political system,” he declared in 2006. In 2008, Eitam merged his small Ahi Party into Netanyahu’s Likud. And for the 2009–2010 academic year, he is Netanyahu’s special emissary for overseas “campus engagement.”

A minor figure? Let's go further up:

Foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman’s position might be called “pre-expulsion.” He wants to revoke the citizenship of Israeli Arabs who won’t swear a loyalty oath to the Jewish state. He tried to prevent two Arab parties that opposed Israel’s 2008–2009 Gaza war from running candidates for the Knesset. He said Arab Knesset members who met with representatives of Hamas should be executed. He wants to jail Arabs who publicly mourn on Israeli Independence Day, and he hopes to permanently deny citizenship to Arabs from other countries who marry Arab citizens of Israel.

Then … drum-roll please … Netanyahu himself. This, I'm ashamed to say, I didn't know:

In his 1993 book, A Place among the Nations, Netanyahu not only rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, he denies that there is such a thing as a Palestinian. In fact, he repeatedly equates the Palestinian bid for statehood with Nazism. An Israel that withdraws from the West Bank, he has declared, would be a “ghetto-state” with “Auschwitz borders.” And the effort “to gouge Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] out of Israel” resembles Hitler’s bid to wrench the German-speaking “Sudeten district” from Czechoslovakia in 1938. It is unfair, Netanyahu insists, to ask Israel to concede more territory since it has already made vast, gut-wrenching concessions. What kind of concessions? It has abandoned its claim to Jordan, which by rights should be part of the Jewish state.

So while those of us in what Peter calls the "comfortable Zionism" of the older American generation somehow believe that Netanyahu is sincere in wanting out – one day – of the West Bank, you realize that he already believes that in reality, Israel has a legitimate claim to the East Bank as well, and should be congratulated for not invading and occupying that! How on earth is there ever going to be any kind of settlement on those grounds?

The politics of Netanyahu's coalition also means he could never concede anything on the West Bank. The ultra-orthodox – a very fast-growing group – has shifted to a strong anti-concession position, represented by their party, Shas, which helped humiliate Biden. The fundamentalist virulence of the settler movement has infiltrated the military; and much of the next generation is more extreme than the last:

When Israeli high schools held mock elections last year, Lieberman won. This March, a poll found that 56 percent of Jewish Israeli high school students—and more than 80 percent of religious Jewish high school students—would deny Israeli Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset.

This is the mirror that Obama said he would try to hold up to Israel in order to help it make the right decisions for survival as a Jewish and a Western state. The American Jewish Establishment (AJE, a useful new term) tried to smash that mirror or veil it. This is not an answer. It is an integral part of the problem. On its current trajectory, Israel will become a Jewish authoritarian state, using brute force against a majority of its citizens and inhabitants, because it has no other option. And its actions, by inflaming Jihadism worldwide, could well come back to hurt not just Israel, but us all. I read Ze'ev Sternhell in college, when I studied modern European history. He remains a brilliant scholar of fascism. So this winner of the prestigious Israel Prize deserves a listening:

Commenting on Avigdor Lieberman and the leaders of Shas in a recent Op-Ed in Haaretz, [Sternhell] wrote, “The last time politicians holding views similar to theirs were in power in post–World War II Western Europe was in Franco’s Spain.” With their blessing, “a crude and multifaceted campaign is being waged against the foundations of the democratic and liberal order.” Sternhell should know. In September 2008, he was injured when a settler set off a pipe bomb at his house.

Why is that pipe-bomb any less of a warning than an IED in Iraq? And is it really being a friend of Israel to ignore it?

(Photo: a young religious settler on the West Bank. By Uriel Sinai/Getty.)

An explanation from a conservative for Palin. One small concession: yes, I fear her. I have always feared her. I make no apologies for fearing her and what she represents. I believe that if you are not afraid, you are not watching or listening.

A reader writes:

Pascal notes, then asks:

When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which comes before and after–memoria hospitis unius diei praetereuntis–the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?

The answers that make sense to me now are: no one, and by no command. When I was young, I believed in God and I was terrified of death. When I was in my late teens, I realized: there is no God. It was a hot summer’s night. I was laying in bed. And a deep sense of calm washed over me. There would be no me, and thus I need have no fear for that person who would not be. That freed my life from fear. I stopped asking ‘who’–a human question if there ever was one. Pascal describes a feeling that I still feel. It’s called the sublime. Existence is sublime. I am here in this time and place, and I have no fear.

"I may be wrong, but my guess is that it is about as likely Ms. Kagan is a lesbian as it is that Sarah Palin is the mother of Trig," – Scott Johnson, Powerline.

Shurely shome mishtake? – ed.

Ahmadinejad has made an agreement with the leaders of Brazil and Turkey to swap nuclear fuel, similar to the arrangement that fell apart last fall. Laura Rozen reports:

[O]ne Washington Iran expert, noting that this weekend’s diplomatic meetings involved Iran’s Supreme Leader, said this time may be different. That signals that Khamenei "is endorsing the deal," the National Iranian American Council's Trita Parsi said, adding it may reduce the bouts of Iranian domestic political infighting that have plagued earlier rounds of negotiations that failed to hold up. "That means this is no longer Ahmadinejad's nuclear deal, this is Khamenei's nuclear deal."

Scott Lucas is updating with developments. Gregg Carlstrom contends that the new agreement, which still has to get the approval of the US, Russia, France, and the IAEA, "will almost certainly stall the current U.S.-led push for another round of economic sanctions against Iran."

Donna Brazile defends Elena Kagan.

Steve Coll describes a meeting with William Hague, the new British Foreign Secretary:

On foreign policy, it was fascinating to listen to the Foreign Secretary tic through the usual issue sets—Iran, Afghanistan, Europe, global development, humanitarian intervention, etc.—and to discover that there is hardly any distance between his coalition’s views and that of the Labour government it is succeeding. I’ll save Hague’s comments about Afghan policy until next week, after a reported article I’ve been working on for the magazine, in which British policy figures, has appeared. But on the Afghan war and every other subject discussed, except perhaps for the European economic crisis, where Hague emphasizes Britain’s skepticism about the euro monetary project, it was striking how centrist and even center-left orthodoxy has replaced the radicalism of the Thatcher years and the subsequent “wet-dry” debates among British conservatives. I used to hold in my mind the truism that continental European conservative parties roughly equate to our Democratic Party in their foreign policy views, but that British foreign policy conservatism was an exception; no longer, it seems.

And this position, remember, is coming from William Hague, one of the formerly more staunchly Thatcherite of the Tories, and still a critical outreach for Cameron on the Tory right. There was never anything "wet" about William. But he has adjusted to reality, as so many of us have.

(Photo: British foreign secretary William Hague by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty.)

Well, you really have to wait for it on this local news spot on injecting collagen into a woman's G-spot to improve her chances of orgasm. It's at the 3 minute mark.

Lisa Margonelli heralds the end of "magical oil":

Between 1995 and 2004, deepwater production grew by 535 percent — an unimaginably high, Madoff-like rate in a country with tapped oil reserves and a driving habit that gobbles up a quarter of the world's oil production…Deepwater drilling had an improbable, unbelievable, giddy rise from its birth in 1993. Every well was pushing the envelope, either of depth in the water or the depth of the drillbit beneath the crust. "Every well I did was the deepest ever," an oil industry professional told me, yesterday. "I worked on 20 wells that set records. Every guy that did my job had worked on 20 wells that set records. We were sprinting, breaking records right and left. Everything they did had never been done before." For 17 years the deepwater rigs were jamming on the edge of the envelope…

[W]e are not only faced with an extraordinarily large, frightening, and nearly unthinkable oil spill, we are also facing the end of magical oil. Like the financial crisis, there are physical issues to deal with now, but in the future there will be a crisis of confidence in the oil industry and in government's ability to regulate it. And at the same time, all of that new oil will not flow magically toward our shores, lubricating our lifestyle, allowing us to glide on without an explicit energy policy. We shouldn't kid ourselves that this is merely a large oil spill. It is much more.

Steve Benen piles on Palin and the "Drill Baby Drill" fervor.