Category: The Dish

The Shifting Israel Debate

Tensions Remain High At Israeli Gaza Border

It’s hard to recall now but Tony Judt was once ostracized and vilified for writing this (among other things):

We can see, in retrospect, that the victory of Israel in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state’s very own nakba: a moral and political catastrophe. Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified and publicized the country’s shortcomings and displayed them to a watching world. Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, “targeted assassinations,” the separation fence: All of these routines of occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed minority of specialists and activists.

Today they can be watched, in real time, by anyone with a computer or a satellite dish – which means that Israel’s behavior is under daily scrutiny by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The result has been a complete transformation in the international view of Israel. Until very recently the carefully burnished image of an ultra-modern society – built by survivors and pioneers and peopled by peace-loving democrats – still held sway over international opinion. But today? What is the universal shorthand symbol for Israel, reproduced worldwide in thousands of newspaper editorials and political cartoons? The Star of David emblazoned upon a tank.

For these heterodox views, Judt was banished from the New Republic masthead, and targeted by the ADL and American Jewish Committee. He subsequently sighed: “I didn’t think I knew until then just how deep and how uniquely American this obsession with blocking any criticism of Israel is. It is uniquely American. Apparently, the line you take on Israel trumps everything else in life”.

No longer. I doubt Judt would recognize the kind of debate now raging – that so many tried to stop. I offer one example today – Matt Yglesias attributing the lockstep support in Congress for anything Israel does as a function in part of donors whose litmus test is support for Greater Israel. The leaked internal documents of Michelle Nunn’s campaign for the Senate – which show that she has to adopt a maximalist pro-Israel stance if she is to get anywhere with Jewish donors – is the latest proof. Money quote:

Jewish donors are very important to Democratic Party finances, some of these donors have strongly held hawkish views on Israel, and the financial clout of AIPAC is the stuff of legend. At the same time, talk of rich Jews throwing their financial muscle around to influence policy in favor of Israel touches far too many anti-semitic tropes to be regularly mentioned in political discourse. But the concrete world of political fundraising doesn’t leave a ton of time for beating around the bush, so we get a little window here into how it looks to the finance people: if Nunn wants to maximize her donations, she needs to take the right stance.

Note the core point: not so long ago, anyone saying that Jewish donor money made an even-handed approach to Israel-Palestine a pretty dead letter would be deemed ipso facto an anti-Semite.

More to the point, such a view would not be allowed into print in any mainstream outlet. It would be regarded as an anti-Semitic trope – even if it were factually true. It’s as if a libel law did not allow for the truth as a defense! Heads we win; tails your career is over. Now of course these distortions of the fundraising process are not restricted to Israel. Think of the Cuba lobby, for example, another toxic force against a sane foreign policy. But it strikes me as a good thing that the truth can now be told and a more normal set of rules for debating the state of Israel is beginning to take shape. And so the extreme anomaly of the US Congress can come into greater relief:

While much of the rest of the world watches the Gaza war in horror and scrambles for a cease-fire, U.S. lawmakers are pressing the Obama administration to take no action that puts pressure on Israel to halt its military operations.

There aren’t many military actions that kill scores of children that the US Congress is enthusiastic about. But at least the incongruousness of this – and the moral coarsening it reveals – can now be better exposed. And the web surely has something to do with this. At Vox, Yglesias does not have to answer to a bunch of boomer editors still traumatized by the self-censorship of the past, and has grown up as a writer with the kind of freedom of expression that blogging allows for. And reporters from the scene can actually express in real time – outside the usual pro-Israel self-censorship that has existed for years at the NYT and WaPo – what they are actually witnessing. David Carr has a great reflection on all this – and how the sight of such unbelievable carnage and cruelty has altered the global debate, intensifying Greater Israel’s international isolation.

It’s also a matter of record, I think, that there is no way I could have written or published anything along these lines before the blogging era. Having my own space to think out loud, outside the parameters of an existing institution, without all the caution around the subject that was baked deep in Washington journalism, was critical to my changing views in response to changing facts. The intimidation had an effect. It was designed to. And one huge benefit of a site like this – now entirely funded by readers – is that I am only accountable to you, and fear only being wrong.

(Photo: An Israeli soldier seen walking in the dust near the Israeli-Gaza border on July 25, 2014 near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. By Ilia Yefimovich/Getty Images.)

Eating Man’s Best Friend

John D. Sutter doesn’t understand why we don’t eat dogs:

The United States euthanizes 1.2 million dogs per year, according to the ASPCA. Would 6741960599_a1e9c58d64_zeating them be so different? It actually could be seen as helpful.

“[U]nlike all farmed meat, which requires the creation and maintenance of animals, dogs are practically begging to be eaten,” Jonathan Safran Foer, a vegetarian and novelist, writes in the book “Eating Animals.” Euthanizing pets, he says, “amounts to millions of pounds of meat now being thrown away every year. The simple disposal of these euthanized dogs is an enormous ecological and economic problem. It would be demented to yank pets from homes. But eating those strays, those runaways, those not-quite-cute-enough-to-take and not-quite-well-behaved-enough-to-keep dogs would be killing a flock of birds with one stone and eating it, too.”

Michael Brendan Dougherty objects to this line of reasoning:

[T]he reason we shouldn’t eat dogs is related to the same reason it is more heinous and hateful to burn a synagogue than a community center, or that it is more of a violation to burn down a man’s home than the two rental properties he owns of an equivalent dollar value. The spaces, objects, and even animals we sanctify with our respect, friendship, and time really do enter into different moral categories. It is not inherently evil to smash a picture, but it is a gesture of hatred to tear a beloved family photo.

Societies like Korea, where dogs have been eaten and kept as pets, even come up with different categories of dogs to separate the ones that are sanctified by human friendship, and those that are not and therefore can be eaten. As Americans, with our own history and sense of ethics, we would probably never develop this distinction, and that’s okay. We’re fine with diversity when it comes to other cultural manifestations, like manners, another dimension of human behavior with moral implications. It is a human wrong to be inhospitable, but hospitality may have completely different expressions and taboos from one culture to the next. So, too, with our taboos on eating and animals.

The Dish has covered this subject repeatedly over the years. Update from a reader:

Before moving to eating dogs, why can’t we at least start with eating the pigeons? City pigeons are extremely well fed, many are gourmet fed and plump as hell. They should taste great. And it’s gotta taste like chicken, right?

Maybe from a pigeon farm. But you really want to taste a pigeon that feeds on New York Shitty trash?

(Photo by Nina Matthews)

Does The Safety Net Need Fixing?

Jordan Weissmann argues that Paul Ryan’s anti-poverty plan is a solution in search of a problem, and that the safety net as it is has been successful at keeping most Americans out of long-term poverty:

In 2011, according to the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the annual U.S. poverty rate was 14 percent. But only 3.5 percent of Americans were chronically poor, meaning they had been impoverished for three straight years. … One take-away from these numbers is that, yes, chronic poverty is real, and we need to work toward fixing it. But another is that, by and large, most people don’t need a life contract to escape poverty; the existing safety net catches them and helps them back onto their feet.

To his credit, Ryan makes some of these distinctions. The animating idea of his plan is that our approach to poverty should be customized person by person. His plan even distinguishes between the sort of approach the government could take to help a woman facing “situational poverty” versus someone stuck in “generational poverty.” He clearly sees the poor as individuals, which is far better than many politicians. But in order to make custom poverty prevention a reality, he wants to tear down a system that already works fairly well for the majority and has without question diminished material deprivation in this country.

Bouie turns to similar statistics to fire back at Reihan’s defense of the Ryan plan’s inherent paternalism:

At some point in their lives, millions of Americans will experience a short spell of poverty. Not because they don’t have a plan to fix their lives or lack the skills to move forward, but because our economy isn’t run to create demand for labor, isn’t equipped to deliver stable work to everyone who wants it, and wasn’t built to address the distributive needs of everyone who works. The best way to confront this problem for most people is to just address those needs.

Yes, on the margins, there will be Americans who need an intensive approach, and I endorse government support for voluntary life coaching. (For example, look at the Center for Urban Families in Baltimore.) But by and large, the easiest solution is to mail larger checks to more people. In other words, we need more solutions like Ryan’s expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit—the best part of his plan—and fewer life coaches for the poor.

Reihan goes another round, now arguing that caseworkers would make up for the failures of poor communities to provide “mutual self-help” to their members:

Mutual self-help still exists, yet its institutional manifestations seem to have decayed as U.S. culture has grown more individualistic and as the state has grown more inclusive. Civil society cannot, in my view, replace a robust safety net. There are some things, however, that mutual self-help networks can do better than the state, e.g., impart implicit learning or facilitate the transmission of beneficial social practices that must first be validated by in-group members, etc. And so the fact that mutual self-help networks, including invisible mutual self-help networks, are stronger among the nonpoor than the poor is a serious problem, albeit one that is hard to capture through anything other than ethnography.

What does any of this have to do with casework? Essentially, I see casework as a substitute, albeit a decidedly inadequate one, for mutual self-help networks. In an ideal world, casework might even contribute to their revival. For now, at least, casework strikes me as the best tool we have to see to it that the right help goes to the right people at the right time.

Earlier Dish on Ryan’s plan here.

Tunnel Vision

Ben Caspit attributes the Israeli public’s willingness to stomach a ground invasion of Gaza to the discovery of Hamas’ network of tunnels leading into southern Israel:

It should be remembered that had Hamas not rejected the Egyptian cease-fire initiative, Israel would not have discovered the scope of this threat, and Hamas would have continued digging and expanding its tunnel network, right until the moment it was deployed.

One senior Cabinet member I spoke with this week described that possibility to me: “Imagine,” he said, “that we are in the middle of a conflict with Hezbollah up north. Our top-notch infantry brigades are up there, in the north, when suddenly Hamas deploys its network of dozens of tunnels all at once. Some 2,000 Hamas commandos suddenly burst out of them and embark on a killing spree, slaughtering thousands of people in the cities and towns across Israel’s south, from Sderot through Ashkelon, Netivot and Ofakim, maybe even all the way to Beersheba.

Who would stop them? The police? The air force? It would take weeks to clean up the mess, and at the end of the entire process, we would find death and destruction across southern Israel. I know,” the minister continued, “that it sounds like a figment of the imagination, but based on what we are discovering these days, the scenario is far more realistic than it is imaginary. In this region, the reality easily exceeds anything we can imagine.”

But in a translation provided by J.J. Goldberg, Nahum Barnea debunks the Israeli government’s claim that the tunnels came as a surprise to them:

When the Cabinet agreed to the Egyptian cease-fire proposal in the middle of last week, was it aware that Gaza was teeming with tunnels, dozens of which reached into Israeli territory? The answer is, Yes. In an extended effort, over a period of years, Military Intelligence mapped out the underground world of Gaza. Not all the tunnels were identified, not all the openings and routes were located, but the magnitude of the threat was known. It was found not only in the secret material that reaches the prime minister’s desk, but even on YouTube: Military Intelligence chief Aviv Kochavi included the story of the tunnels in a lecture he gave at the Institute for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv. …

Netanyahu was not the first to war against the tunnels. He takes the name of the tunnels in vain. As prime minister he hadn’t seen the tunnels as a threat that justified a military operation — before and during Pillar of Defense in 2012, before and during Protective Edge in 2014. He chose to take a risk. When he said, in reply to a question from Udi Segal of Channel 2, that he hoped the problem of the tunnels would be solved through diplomatic means, he knew the sentence had no grounding in reality.

The Next Phase Of The Ukrainian Conflict

Serhiy Kudelia expects that, if Ukrainian “insurgents are pushed out of big cities, the ongoing asymmetric warfare in Donbas that will be fought largely by conventional means is likely to take the form of an underground guerrilla movement”:

Similar to the PKK in Turkey, ETA in Spain or the IRA in the Northern Ireland, it will rely on sporadic attacks on government and military installations to exhaust the incumbent and damage its governing capacity rather than establish control over a territory. And like Hezbollah in Lebanon or FARC in Colombia, it will rely on outside powers for provision of arms, funds and training. In its new form, guerrilla attacks will likely spill over to other Ukrainian regions, particularly Western Ukraine. According to the latest poll, most Donbas residents (39%) blame radical nationalist organizations for the ongoing conflict, with Western intelligence services being close second (34%).

The path to solving the current conflict in Donbas goes not only through Brussels or Washington, but also through Moscow.

While Russia has become an active participant in the conflict, it is also the only actor with real leverage over the insurgents. By denying them sanctuaries on its territory and ending arms supplies, it will effectively cut their main lifeline. However, the Kremlin will not acquiesce to an outcome that ignores what it views as its legitimate interests in the region with a large ethnic Russian presence. While Russia’s immediate commitment to peace is doubtful, the prospect of a protracted conflict on its border, growing international isolation and risks of regional war is also hardly appealing for Putin. All the sides – Ukraine, Russia and the West – should in principle be interested in finding a sustainable resolution to the conflict. One thing that prevents them from negotiating in earnest now is the belief that their interests will be better served by continued fighting. However, as the recent study of war duration shows, irregular wars last much longer than conventional or symmetric non-conventional wars (113.32 months on average). So if guerrilla war begins there may not be an end to violence in sight.

 

Book Club: To Philosophize Is To Learn How To Die

A reader adds to the other near-death experiences sparked by Sarah Bakewell’s How To Live:

I am 65 years old. In 1958, when I was 9, I suffered a ruptured appendix that was misdiagnosed as flu, so I lay in my bed for a week getting sicker and sicker until I was taken to Lankenau Hospital outside Philadelphia. They treated me with drugs for three days and then operated.
bookclub-beagle-tr

I have a number of memories from the three weeks I spent in the hospital but my near-death experience is still very close to me 55 years later. I, too, have a vivid memory of looking down on myself from up high, the minister at my right hand, and my already grieving parents on my left. I remember seeing a bright light and feeling a great sensation of peace and comfort surrounding me. Then my father kept shaking me. He kept saying “Wake up! Don’t go to sleep!” He pulled me back from that gate or passage I was about to enter.

I also have another vivid memory which I have kept from that time. While I was passing in and out of consciousness I had a dream that has stuck with me.

My heritage is Latvian, and my Latvian forebears are Nordic looking. In my dream I was wrapped in a blanket in the back seat of a big, black limousine like a Packard. I was taken to the ferryboat landing at the foot of Flower St. in Chester PA where we used to cross the Delaware to New Jersey on the way to the shore, before the bridges were built. It was night and cold (I got sick in January.) Very blond men wearing cashmere coats and black Homburg hats took me out of the car and onto the ferryboat. They laid me on one of the wooden benches polished from decades of use. The engines started and the ship began to vibrate. I felt cold and was shivering. Then, one of the men came back for me and picked me up in my blanket. He took me back to the Packard. He said “it’s not time yet. We made a mistake.”

Now I have bladder cancer and have been in the OR 12 times in the past four years. I am able to control my fear and make the most of it now largely on the basis of my early brush with death. To tell you the truth, in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. I don’t want to die just yet but, you know, it really isn’t that big a deal.

Montaigne would be chuffed. Another reader:

One thing I took away from this excellent biography is something you touched on a bit in your very good kickoff to the discussion. Montaigne‘s essays are the antidote to today’s happiness-obsessed culture. Parents raise their children instilling happiness as the most important, above even having good morals. Our social climate today believes that if you’re not happy all the time, there’s something wrong with you.

It hasn’t always been that way. When my father told his father he was divorcing my mother because they were no longer happy, my grandfather, dismayed, replied, “Who told you you were supposed to be happy?” But now, if you live in NYC or Los Angeles, it’s unusual to not have a therapist. Campus counseling services cannot keep up with influx of demand. So the title of this book is sublime irony.

Hope this is valuable. So glad you’ve started these monthly discussions. I have read all three books so far.

Read the whole Book Club conversation here. Send your own thoughts to bookclub@andrewsullivan.com.

Buying Politicians Is A Man’s Game

Rebecca Traister mulls the lack of big political donors among women:

[M]en have known for generations how to use money to exert influence and buy access, shape policy, and make inroads into the world of electoral politics. Women, by contrast, historically saw money not as a means to expand public power, but to ensure personal or familial security, survival, perhaps a slim chance of independence. There are many phrases for the small caches of money that women stash away: pin money, mad money, the Yiddish word knippel, which means a secret sum of money that a wife siphons off in order to protect herself and her family in case she loses the husband on whom she has had to depend. These phrases exist—and almost always refer to money used for the literal safety and protection of women—because money was so scarce for women, and chances to replenish funds lost on a bad bet or ill-timed investment were non-existent.

It’s not crazy that, in a contemporary context, throwing money at politicians and policy-makers would still be an easier, looser, more practiced move for wealthy men than it would be for even wealthy women, who we like to think of as having clambered over all the gendered obstacles of the past, but who—with 95 percent of CEOs still male—remain a very small exception to very long-standing male rule.

The Lady Cops Of The Islamic State

As ISIS commands all women in its domains to veil their faces or face unspecified punishment, Kathy Gilsinan explores the role Iraqi Syrian women themselves are playing in enforcing the group’s fanatical dictates:

The al-Khansaa Brigade is ISIS’s all-female moral police, established in Raqqa soon after ISIS took over the city a few months ago. “We have established the brigade to raise awareness of our religion among women, and to punish women who do not abide by the law,” Abu Ahmad, an ISIS official in Raqqa, told Syria Deeply’s Ahmad al-Bahri. Ahmad emphasized that the brigade has its own facilities to avoid mingling among men and women. “Jihad,” he told al-Bahri, “is not a man-only duty. Women must do their part as well.”

The institution of female enforcers for female morality makes a certain kind of sense if you take the prohibition against sexes mingling to its logical extreme. Still, ISIS in Raqqa may be the only jihadi group employing this kind of logic. In other jihadi groups, “it is men who enforce modesty in public,” explains Thomas Hegghammer, an expert on Islamist militancy affiliated with the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment, via email. Nor has the practice spread elsewhere in the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate. The al-Khansaa Brigade may be what Hegghammer calls a “short-lived stunt in a single city.”

Indeed, regional news sources suggest the brigade was designed to solve a specific problem: male anti-ISIS fighters disguising themselves in all-concealing feminine garb to pass through checkpoints. With male ISIS members reluctant to inspect under garments to verify the womanhood of the wearers, they got some women to do it.

Let The Applicant Work For It

New research suggests that employers should give up trying to woo job interviewees:

[P]articipants asked to entice the applicant were poorer judges of character than those explicitly asked to evaluate them. A follow-up field study found similar effects in genuine interviews within two samples: applicants to an MBA program and teachers applying for school assignments. In both samples, interviewees rated as having high [Core Self Evaluation (CSE)] were more likely to go onto success – job offers for MBAs or “above and beyond” citizenship behaviours by the teachers – but only when the ratings came from interviewers who reported having a strong focus on evaluation. Those who reported giving more attention to selling the role produced CSE estimates that didn’t predict future success.

The authors note in their conclusion that “interviewers who focused only on evaluating applicants actually believed they were less able to select the best applicants than those who adopted a selling focus.” In fact the reverse was true, and the risk goes the other way: when we focus too much on soliciting applicants, we can miss the gorilla in the room: that they simply aren’t up to snuff.