Month: June 2010

In a word – ugly:

Andrew Exum tacks together a few thoughts on Israel:

I still think the U.S. military has a lot to learn from the IDF in

terms of tactics, techniques and procedures. But since I left the active duty army in 2004, I have interacted quite a bit with Israeli military officers both through formal interviews and informal discussions over beer or coffee. I still learn a lot whenever I talk to them, but I am increasingly struck by the very real differences that have emerged between them and their U.S. military peers who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. One difference concerns the attitude toward the population within which they operate.

Last fall, I was in Israel for a two-week visit and conducted a few formal interviews with various Israeli officers, journalists and scholars. I met for coffee one morning with a retired Israeli general officer to discuss the fighting in southern Lebanon during the 1990s, and before too long, the two of us were engrossed in conversation about guerrilla warfare, Lebanon, the learning process that militaries go through in combat, and a host of related subjects. One hour became two, and two hours became three. The two of us must have downed three cups of coffee apiece, and my hand cramped from all the notes I was taking. At the end of the conversation, though, this retired officer took my hand, squeezed it hard, and said, "Andrew, just remember one thing: the Muslims are like shit. They stink, and there are plenty of them for all of us."

Now in 3+ years of living in the Arabic-speaking world, I have to admit I have heard some pretty horrifically anti-Semitic things said in both polite and not-so-polite conversation. But pardon me if I was a little struck by hearing this language from a retired, educated military officer rather than from, say, a taxi driver in Beirut or some 16-year old Palestinian kid who grew up in Bourj al-Barajneh. Anyway, I shook the man's hand, thanked him for his time, and went on my way shaking my head. Could I imagine a senior U.S. military officer, post-Iraq, saying something like that to a guy with a notebook at the end of a formal interview? I could not.

Ackerman feels that Netanyahu is snubbing most of the American electorate and banking on the support of white evangelical Protestants:

Not even George W Bush was as aggressive a unilateralist as Benjamin Netanyahu, whose foreign policy has shown disinterest in maintaining warm relations with traditional Israeli allies – even including the United States – if it means reducing Israel’s freedom of action against the Palestinians.

For decades, Israel lamented its international isolation and sought to reverse it, even if most Israelis retained a tragic scepticism about whether the world would ever embrace them. But Netanyahu’s government practically wears the world’s contempt as a badge of Israeli virtue.

Spencer is even more blunt over at his blog:

What Netanyahu doesn’t get is that the U.S. is a global hegemon. In a realist sense, we can afford to make the mistakes the Bush Doctrine guaranteed we’d make and still emerge with much of our geopolitical influence and power intact. That doesn’t work for a country that isn’t a superpower. Israel’s military is almost entirely dependent on the United States. Israel might try to diversify its geopolitical sponsorship situation, as Netanyahu appears to be exploring by hugging Medvedev, but Israel simply doesn’t have the ability to influence Russian or Chinese or Whoever’s decisionmaking to the degree that it can influence America’s. And the broader fact is that Israel cannot contemplate a geostrategic situation without a big international benefactor anyway. That makes the impact of the consequences of an adapted Bush Doctrine far more acute.

But the broader point is that the political vectors compelling Israel down a path of inadequate and dangerous national strategy are intensifying. Those are the wages of a democracy, and particularly a democracy with a weird parliamentary system that rewards factionalism. It also means — however banal this may sound — that ultimately a change in strategy must come from a resurgent realist/liberal political coalition within Israel. And that coalition is presently in eclipse.

A reader notes:

Funny how you mentioned the Irish but forgot the most obvious parallel – Cuba. Our policies towards Cuba are completely controlled by the Cuban community who make up about 0.5% of the total U.S. while the Jewish population is about 2.2%. In both cases a passionate minority with understandable reasons for being so are pretty capable of shutting down rational policy discourse in both parties.

Point taken. It's a real problem when foreign policy is not determined by rational judgment of the national interest but by the sub-rational passions of a small group. Another writes:

Very insightful post.  You mentioned that you had the kind of conversation that "you cannot have on US television".  As a 30-something Jewish man, I can tell you you also had the kind of conversation that we cannot have with our parents and grandparents.

Oh and Barney Frank has indeed criticized the recent outrage. So there's one blast of sanity from a Jewish congressman. I'm sorry I missed that.

Beinart presses anti-blockade activists to demand the release of Gilad Shalit, the young Israeli soldier held captive by Hamas since 2006:

Were activists in Ireland and Malaysia and Turkey to take up Shalit’s cause, it would embarrass Hamas to no end. Hamas would likely reply that it cannot release Shalit unless Israel releases the Palestinians prisoners it holds, and perhaps Israel should release some of them. But the activists could answer that there is no justification for deliberately harming the innocent. That, after all, is what they say about Israel’s blockade. If you are for ending the collective punishment of Gaza (which is not the same as trying to prevent Hamas from acquiring weapons) regardless of whether Shalit is released, as I am, you should also be for releasing Shalit, regardless of whether the blockade ends or Palestinian prisoners are freed.

A reader in the country writes:

Today is National Martyr's Day, a national holiday that honors 40+ Ugandan Christians who were brutally murdered by a Ugandan king 100 years ago or so. While in a shop, I heard a news broadcast about a government official's speech (I think it was the president, but I'm not sure) which took an unfortunate interpretation of the holiday, calling on Ugandans to recognize the martyrs and to refrain from sin and homosexuality. He then claimed that there had been homosexuality in the King's court, suggesting that it was the instigating cause.

GayUganda elaborates:

[O]ne of the kings of Buganda was so incensed at some of his pages refusing him sex that he went ahead and killed them. Some former lovers by his own hand. Funny thing is that, that inconvenient fact had been forgotten when history was being dressed up. It would have been too easy to show that homosexuality in Uganda predated the Christian religion….! Thanks to the raging anti-gay fires, this has been forced to the fore.

Meanwhile, the Family Research Council is found to have lobbied members of Congress to vote against a resolution denouncing the "kill the gays" bill. The resolution passed the Senate, but not yet the House.

Akulivik, Quebec, 7 am

Ambers worries:

[It's] quite possible that without all those Census jobs, collectively a mini stimulus program, that the numbers might well go in a different direction once people answer their doors and fill out the damn Census forms.

One would assume that the administration's economic team would get a heads-up from bureaucrats about the "real" number, but, alas, it seems that they do not, which is why there's a gap today between expectations — fed by the administration — and reality, about private sector job growth. To be sure, the administration projected that most of the May job would be Census hires … but just not 95% of them.

A reader writes:

I can't believe I'm going to defend James Cameron, but here goes.

People are having a field day over reports that Cameron wants to "help fix" the oil spill as if he's going to personally devise and implement an engineering solution.  What isn't being widely reported or commented on is what he actually offered: specialized deep-sea equipment and contacts that he has developed over years of conducting deep water filming in serious documentaries about the Titanic and the Bismark.  That equipment could possibly be used to help fix the problem or it could be used simply to monitor it.  Cameron is right when he says "The government really needs to have its own independent ability to go down there and image the site, survey the site and do its own investigation.  Because if you're not monitoring it independently, you're asking the perpetrator to give you the video of the crime scene."  If Cameron has the equipment, the contacts, the time and the inclination to offer whatever services might be of use, why should we ridicule him for that?

Imagine, for a moment, that a US ally that is not Israel – say, Turkey – killed an unarmed American civilian on an unarmed ship in international waters by four bullets to the head at close range. And imagine that president Obama decided that we shouldn't rush to judgment and that Turkey was in an understandable bind, because it was enforcing an embargo on a tiny strip of (say, Kurdish) land it had recently strafed with missiles and bullets, killing over a thousand. The land was home to an elected Kurdish government that was viciously terroristic – even totalitarian in some respects – and wanted to destroy Turkey, even though it had few means to accomplish this. The Kurds, like the Palestinians, had no homeland at all, and were now suffering greatly under the blockade and embargo.

Can you imagine how the Republican right would explode at this example of classic Obama "weakness" and "appeasement"? Can you even conceive that the American right would actually champion and celebrate Turkey's attack – and be far more solicitous of Turkey's actions than any of America's allies? Can you imagine that the conservative British prime minister would be more outraged at this attack on a defenseless ship and the murder of an American citizen than the president of the United States?

This counterfactual really does help reveal that for much of the Republican right, Israel simply isn't a foreign country at all. For many Christianists, it is part of a civilizational war of Judeo-Christianity (an obvious oxymoron) against Islam. Not Islamism, Islam. Ever wonder why Sarah Palin, the next GOP nominee, wore a twinned Israeli-American flag lapel for an address to the Tea Party convention? Ever wonder why every rule we normally apply to foreign countries is automatically suspended when it comes to Israel?

The other dimension is the deep and understandable commitment of many American Jews, particularly of the older generation, to Israel, right or wrong. You listen to Anthony Weiner, for example, a left-liberal Democratic firebrand on almost every issue, suddenly becoming an uber-neoconservative in foreign policy in one area, and one area alone: Israel. The idea of a Jewish congressman actually taking Israel's policies on is close to absurd. Name one. This is not a conspiracy. It is a mindset. 

I grabbed some food the other night with a longtime Jewish friend. We had an honest conversation – the kind you cannot have on US television. He's a big liberal but strongly sided with Israel in this latest incident. Why? "They're my people." But you're an American, I countered, you're not an Israeli, let alone a supporter of Netanyahu. None of that mattered to him. His attachment to Israel was indistinguishable from his attachment to America, and, if push came to shove, Israel came first, right or wrong. This had been dinned into him since childhood. His iPhone was deluged with texts from relatives and friends all appalled by any criticism of the commando attack, and immediately seeing it as anti-Semitic or designed to end the state of Israel for ever.

To charge dual loyalty is described as a blood libel, a vile anti-Semitic charge, and it often is. But my friend was very frank about it and unapologetic. That's just the way it is, he said. It was deeply ingrained. Greenwald wonders why this question is rarely asked:

I had it continuously drummed into my head from the time I was a small child, from every direction, that Israel was special and was to be cherished, that it's fundamentally good but persecuted and victimized by Evil Arab forces surrounding it, that I am a part of that group and should see the world accordingly.  Is this tribal identity which was pummeled into me from childhood — rather than some independent, dispassionate analysis — the reason I find myself perpetually sympathizing with and defending Israel?

But in my experience, this question is asked and answered. In fact, it is fully owned and sustained by memories of the Holocaust, and a narrative of Jewish history in which persecution is the default and permanent position of the Jewish people, even when they exercize overwhelming strength, as they do in Israel.

And there is much to admire and treasure in this. No decent human being who has a grasp of history, let alone the enormity of the Shoah, can fail to have a deep sympathy for the Jewish people, Israel, and respect for its enormous achievements. But the fanaticism and emotionalism that many Jewish Americans have with respect to Israel is so intense that, for some, it overwhelms rationality, and makes a cool strategic analysis of America's national interest close to impossible. Their total identification with Israel is often emotionally as strong, if not stronger, as their identification with America.

And this tragically means that an honest disagreement with Israel's policies is sometimes taken as a breach of friendship, a profound personal betrayal, rather than a moral and political judgment about the actions of a foreign country. It means that the head of the Mossad can be more rational in his assessment of US national interest than Joe Biden. You reach a brick wall in this. And we might as well admit it.

It has pained me enormously to have obviously hurt my countless Jewish friends and colleagues because I cannot support, morally or strategically, the actions of Israel these past two years, and especially its virulent disdain for the new American president who represented, it seems to me, the best chance for Israel in decades. I realize that the difference is that while I admire and support Israel, I do not identify with it. For me, it is a foreign country and an ally. To them it is something far more profound and indelible. So when I attack Israel's policies, it feels as if I am attacking them. I really am not. But I cannot erase how they feel; and I understand why they feel it.

Tribalism, of course, is universal. It is by no means the exclusive property of Jewish Americans. Irish-Americans retain a similar knee-jerk alliance with entities that plenty of people in Ireland find repugnant – just as Israelis are far more candid in their debates than Americans are. Trust me, in my own family, I know the nature of this kind of identification and the righteousness of it in many instances. Many Muslim Americans are as knee-jerk – often more so – about the Middle East as Jewish Americans. But this crisis is, as Peter Beinart has noted, a crisis among American Jews as much as anything, and the inability of some, especially in the older generation, to move even a millimeter away from orthodoxies and rigidities that are becoming almost comically anachronistic, is becoming a form of tragedy.

I think, by the way, that this is the reason some jump so quickly onto the anti-Semitism charge, even when they know that many critics of Israel's policies are not bigots. They simply cannot absorb the idea that people they like and even love believe that Israel is doing wrong, horrible, categorical wrong, and that this is undeniable. And so they cannot explain the criticism, except as a form of self-hatred or animus.

This isn't universal among American Jews, of course, and is mercifully declining in the younger generation. But it is far more common than we might want to admit. It has already deeply hurt American interests and Israeli security. And since it appears it will not really relent for a while yet, who knows what further damage it can do, unless we open up a more honest conversation about it?

(Photo: a pro-Israel demonstration in New York City, by Mario Tama/Getty.)