May 11, 2008
Noah Pollak has an interesting piece on Barack Obama’s position on the Lebanese crisis. One could hardly imagine a better definition of liberal cognitive egocentrism: define the problem in terms for which we liberals have a solution. (Hat tip: oao)
Obama Stares Down Hezbollah
NOAH POLLAK - 05.11.2008 - 2:19 PM
Yesterday Barack Obama released a statement about the crisis in Lebanon that surely must be cause for celebration in Tehran, Damascus, and Bint Jbeil. First of all, there is the alternate-reality feel to it:
This effort to undermine Lebanon’s elected government needs to stop, and all those who have influence with Hezbollah must press them to stand down immediately.
Does Obama understand that the people who “have influence with Hezbollah” happen to be the same people on whose behalf Hezbollah is rampaging through Lebanon?
Then there is the absurd prescription:
It’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that focuses on electoral reform, an end to the current corrupt patronage system, and the development of the economy that provides for a fair distribution of services, opportunities and employment.
So that’s the problem in Lebanon? Economics and the electoral system? As Lee Smith points out in a scathing post,
Obama’s language is derived from those corners of the left that claim Hezbollah is only interested in winning the Shia a larger share of the political process. Never mind the guns, it’s essentially a social welfare movement, with schools and clinics! — and its own foreign policy, intelligence services and terror apparatus, used at the regional, international and now domestic level. But the solution, says Obama, channeling the man he fired for talking to Hamas, is diplomacy.
In the Lebanon crisis, Obama is rhetorically cornered. Since his only prescription for the Middle East is diplomatic engagement, every disease gets re-diagnosed as something curable through talking.
The full Obama statement is only slightly less absurd than Pollak’s cherry-picked quotes suggest. Actually it seems like he has a kind of PC playbook from which he can select three problems from column A and three moves towards a solution from problem B, and when you’ve reached the end of the laundry lists, he’s covered most everything. Lee Smith quotes another trenchant comment from Abu Kais over at From Beirut to the Beltway:
Oh the time we wasted by fighting Hizbullah all those years with rockets, invasions of their homes and shutting down their media outlets. If only we had engaged them and their masters in diplomacy, instead of just sitting with them around discussion tables, welcoming them into our parliament, and letting them veto cabinet decisions. If only Obama had shared his wisdom with us before, back when he was rallying with some of our former friends at pro-Palestinian rallies in Chicago.
“As Tony Badran wrote me [Lee Smith] this morning: ‘I think Obama’s statement is counterproductive in that it will be read by Syria as confirming their hope that there might be a chance with an Obama presidency to get back Lebanon.’”
No wonder so many fine folk in the Middle East are rooting for Obama. (Apparently the electricity problems have not interfered with the internet campaign for Obama in Gaza.)
Update: More excellent analysis from Barry Rubin on Lebanon and the folly of Obama’s “negotiated” strategy. Rubin argues that Lebanon is the Spain of 1936 (implication, Israel is the Czechoslovakia of 1938):
What Spain was in 1936; Lebanon is today.
Does anyone remember the Spanish Civil War? Briefly, a fascist revolt took place against the democratic government. The rebels were motivated by several factors, including anger that their religion had not been given enough respect and regional grievances, but essentially they sought to put their ideology and themselves into power. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy backed the rebels with money and guns. The Western democracies stood by and did nothing.
Guess who won? And guess whether that outcome led to peace or world war.
(Bold in original.) From there he dissects Obama’s folly and concludes.
Obama is endorsing the Hizballah program. It wants a new Lebanese consensus based on it having, along with its pro-Syrian allies, 51 percent of the power. What’s needed is not consensus (the equivalent being getting Fatah and Hamas to bury their differences, or bringing in Iran and Syria to determine Iraq’s future) but the willingness to fight a battle. In effect, Obama without realizing it, is arguing for a Syrian-, Iranian-, and Hizballah-dominated Lebanon. Such talk makes moderate Arabs despair.
Oh the travails of the Western liberal who wants to believe that “War is not the answer precisely at the moment where it is the answer. People who do believe that war is the answer (despite how badly the odds don’t favor them — e.g., Germany against the world, Islam against the West, Japan against the Pacific world), can “level the odds” by pushing aggressively precisely where and when those who don’t like war will back down.
The point is not to get easily provoked, but to respond decisively when the time comes. Of course, to adopt such a policy would mean keeping one’s eye on the ball. I don’t get the sense that Obama even knows what the game us, much less what kinds of balls are in play. Malley’s facile solutions to the Middle East conflict — get Israel to stop humiliatiing the Palestinians — are recipes for disaster precisely because the encourage the belligerents.
Thus, as Rubin points out, Obama has a specific appeal in the Middle East:
Note that this does not make Obama the candidate favored by Arabs in general but only by the radicals. Egyptians, Jordanians, Gulf Arabs, and the majorities in Lebanon and Iraq are very worried. This is not just an Israel problem; it is one for all non-extremists in the region.
If the dictators and terrorists are smiling, it means everyone else is crying.
These war mongers see a natural ally in Obama’s progressive, kind politics, in his willingness to engage anyone and listen to their grievances. In the Moebius Strip of cognitive egocentrism, they can pursue their plans for world domination while Obama and his advisors insist that no one would be that base and inhuman (except, maybe, the Zionists), and that if these folks are violent, it’s probably because they’re less fortunate than we are, and have legitimate grievances. What more could a demopath ask for as president of the United States?
The Times of London has run a number of articles of reminiscences of 1948. Here, thanks to a British willingness to self-criticize, the Brits are the bad-faith players, and the Israelis and Arabs show maturity. (Hat tip: EG)
From The Times
May 10, 2008
‘The British wanted us to kill each other’
Said Jabr, 74, Arab Israeli
The old British Army base, a small sandstone fort, stands abandoned on a hill in Abu Ghosh, an Arab village just southwest of Jerusalem. Said Jabr was 14 when the British pulled out.
“It was on the 14th or 15th of May. I remember exactly that the British commander came to Ali Saleh, the village mukhtar (elder), and said they were going to leave and warned us to be ready,” he recalled from his family home in Abu Ghosh. “Thirty-five armed villagers walked into the base to take command. But the British commander went at the same time to the kibbutz and told them the same thing.
“The British left one tank in front of the army base. Then a few tanks driven by the Haganah (the fledgling Jewish army) drove up and surrounded the army base. But we had great relations with the local kibbutzim – we believe in friendship and protecting a neighbour’s property, no matter who they are – and the leaders of the kibbutzim. . . came to the village. They met the mukhtar, drank coffee and reached an agreement that the villagers would leave the base and the Haganah would take over. The British commander was waiting in the remaining tank to see what would happen. He saw the Abu Ghosh villagers leaving the base and shaking hands with the Haganah members, and he said, ‘F****** Arabs’. Our impression was that he wanted us to kill each other. Thank God the people from both sides resolved the issue peacefully.”
Mr Jabr proudly displays the Hebrew shield he was awarded by the kibbutz. It shows two hands shaking – a token of thanks and friendship.
Shlomo Avineri has written an interesting meditation on the Palestinian Nakba. He makes his criticism carefully, peppered with constant efforts not hurt anyone’s feelings by suggesting that the Palestinian national movement is not legitimate, strong, etc. But the thrust of his argument suggests just the opposite: the institutional weakness he identifies reflects a much broader weakness in “nationalist” aspirations. In order for the Palestinian Arabs to engage in the kind of self-criticism he calls for, they would have to confront the issue he refuses to raise: i.e., that the only real solidarity that Palestinian Arabs manage to muster among all the mutual rivalries and hatreds they feel among each other, is their hatred of Israel. And that, alas, is not enough to make a civil polity. On the contrary…
The real Nakba
By Shlomo Avineri
Last update - 12:35 09/05/2008
Tags: Palestinians, Israel, Nakba
When the Palestinians mark what they call the “Nakba” (catastrophe) on May 15, they would do well to consider that their real failure did not occur in 1948: It had already happened earlier, and it continues to happen now. The real Nakba occurs before our eyes - and theirs - every day, at every hour, and Hamas’ violent coup in Gaza is only the most recent example of it.
While Palestinians may see themselves, with much justification, as the victims of the Zionist movement’s successful establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, the reasons for their historical failure should be sought elsewhere: in the inability of the Palestinian national movement to create the political and social institutional framework that is the necessary foundation for nation-building. The history of national movements teaches us that national consciousness, strong as it may be, is not enough: Movements that could not create the institutional system vital for their success failed.
I assume this remark about “strong as it may be” represents Avineri’s effort to acknowledge Palestinian “national consciousness.” I actually think that any serious national consciousness is a key ingredient in “creating the institutional system…”, and that the Palestinians’ failures in this area come specifically from a lack of national consciousness except insofar as it articulates a passionate hatred of the Zionists. Beyond this, Palestinian nationalism seriously lacks any sense of “national” solidarity.
It would be a mistake to underestimate the power of the Palestinian national movement, as quite a few members of the Zionist camp did in the past; it is an error that many continue to make today. But it was Haim Arlosoroff - then a young man in his early 20s - who as early as 1921 recognized that what the Zionist movement faced was not a series of violent events, but a national movement.
This warning not to underestimate Palestinian nationalism misses an important point. To the Western (including the Israeli) observer, it’s hard to tell the difference between national resistance to Zionism and the resistance of a religio-cultural tradition that needs to dominate minorities, especially religious ones. Since the Palestinians long ago learned that the West did not like hearing about religious dreams of genocide, they have systematically presented their resistance as national. In fact “national sentiment” may be the least distinctive dimension of the resistance to Israel. What we need not to underestimate is the depth of the resistance; and by emphasizing the role of nationalism, we indulge our cognitive egocentrism and make just that mistake.
Thus Arlosoroff was absolutely right to argue that Zionism did not face a series of (presumably unconnected) violent events, but he was wrong to assume that it was a “national movement.” Indeed, as Steven Plaut just pointed out, for the Arabs living in Palestine in 1920, the “Nakba” that drove them to riots was the creation of a separate politico-administrative unit, Palestine, that separated them from Syria. The resistance Arlosoroff detected was real: it had a consistent and powerful ideology behind it. But it was a mistake then, and continues today, to think of this resistance not in religious and cultural terms. It is not an act of empathy to project Western egocentric notions about nationalism on people who had and continue to have radically different religious and cultural orientations. (Ironically, that projection may be the supreme example of Western cultural imperialism, one which, in the hands of avowed anti-imperialists, may destroy the West.)
The Palestinian national movement, however, has been accompanied by a long string of failures, which have been rooted in its inability to form frameworks of consensus and solidarity; these failures weakened and fragmented it, and it seems that this is a problem the Palestinians have not been able to overcome to this day.
The first and sharpest expression of this failure came in the years 1936-1939, during the Palestinian uprising against British rule. This rebellion failed not only because it was brutally suppressed by the British colonial authorities or because the Haganah (pre-state underground) forces were able to defend the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine). What happened is that the Palestinians were unable to establish institutions that would be acceptable to all parts of Arab society in the country, and when internal disputes arose over the nature of the struggle, the rebellion evolved into an intra-Palestinian civil war. More Palestinians died at the hands of rival armed Palestinian militias than were killed in clashes with the British army or with the Haganah. Within Palestinian society there is tendency to suppress the memory of this violent struggle, which took place between the militias associated with the Husseinis and those tied to the Nashashibis. But this suppression only deepens the failure and makes it more difficult to draw lessons from it.
The price of a lack of self-criticism. Mind you, the means the Arabs living in Palestine used to supress the memory of this internally-generated catastrophe is a narrative about evil Zionists and evil British… in other words, a narrative of grievance and victimization.
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May 9, 2008
I have argued in a previous post that the easy inclusion of Zionism in the broader phenomenon of Western European imperialism and colonialism is not only superficial in its understanding, but actually disguises the most remarkable aspect of the phenomenon — that unlike all other forms of European settlement in the third world, the Zionists proceeded without a prior conquest and therefore did it by making such a positive-sum contribution to the communities among which they settled that even those who were initially hostile were often won over. In an interesting essay on the origins of the term Nakba — a term Arabs living in the newly formed Palestine used in 1920 to refer to their separation from the Syrians — Steven Plaut provides the following quote from several Alawite notables (including Hafez al Assad’s grandfather):
Those good Jews brought civilization and peace to the Arab Muslims, and they dispersed gold and prosperity over Palestine without damage to anyone or taking anything by force. Despite this, the Muslims declared holy war against them and did not hesitate to massacre their children and women…. Thus a black fate awaits the Jews and other minorities in case the Mandates are cancelled and Muslim Syria is united with Muslim Palestine.”
That statement is from a letter sent to the French prime minister in June 1936 by six Syrian Alawi notables (the Alawis are the ruling class in Syria today) in support of Zionism.
The San Diego Union Tribune has an article by Nasser Barghouti, a Palestinian-American and president of the San Diego Chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and Nassemah Darwish, a Kuwaiti-born Palestinian-American who lives in San Diego who has taught at Birzeit University in Ramallah. The piece is characteristic of the Palestinian tendency to rewrite history so that every trace of criticism of their own people’s behavior is replaced with a scape-goating accusation of the “enemy” Israelis. Note that the author uses a classic triumvirate of sources for this appeal to the progressive among us — the hyper-self-critical Israeli (Pappe), the authoritative “progressive” (Carter) and the UN as support for the moral accusations they make.
ISRAEL AT 60
Remembering the Palestinian Nakba
By Nasser Barghouti and Bassemah Darwish
May 7, 2008
Nearly 30 years since she had seen her Northern Galilee home in what she called “48 Palestine,” Rasmiya Barghouti was finally given a permit by the Israeli military authorities to visit. She decided to take two of her daughters and four of her grandchildren with her.
It took less than three hours to reach Safad, renamed Tsvat by Israel after 1948. The van stopped in front of the white stone home that held her childhood memories. She proceeded to the familiar metal door, where she knocked. A large eastern European woman opened the door; the two argued. Rasmiya returned to the van, her hardened face wet with tears. Her only words were: “She wouldn’t let me in! She still has the same curtains I made with my mother.”
They proceeded in silence, as she wept discretely, to lunch at a hotel on Lake Tiberias where her youngest grandchild grew hyper. Instead of imposing her usual military-style discipline on the child, she encouraged him to splatter water and make even “more noise” – a shock to the rest of the family.
The Israeli waiter hurriedly came to the table demanding, in Hebrew, they stop the raucous behavior. It was then that her defiance exploded into cursing the waiter in Arabic. “We can do whatever we please! This is my father’s hotel!” she yelled. Until that moment, her children and grandchildren had been sheltered from knowing anything about her dear loss.
The rage of this Palestinian woman was born out of seeing her childhood home, from which she was forced to leave in 1948, now occupied by a stranger who would not even allow her in. She’d seen her father’s hotel, which he was never allowed to vacate, taken over by strangers. For the first time since her violent dispossession in 1948, she was allowed to visit her homeland, but not to return. Because millions of other Palestinian refugees are denied even such a visit, Rasmiya was considered “lucky.”
Alas for Rasmiya. Would that she knew how many millions of people shared her fate — dispossession and loss — back then, but have moved on to full lives, and now can look back at the long-ago tragedy with regret, but without rage. Would that she knew how cruelly her own people have treated her — how they contributed to her loss and kept her in misery… and all that, so that they could cultivate her rage as long as its target was the Israelis. Alas for the dupes who read this and join her rage against the Israelis. Alas for the Palestinians who have such shallow leaders and spokesmen, who cannot rise above their vicious self-pity and tireless dreams of vengeance, to lead their people to a decent and dignified life!
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May 8, 2008
Efraim Karsh has an excellent article in the latest Commentary on the story of 1948 which, among other things, sheds significant light on the nature of the catastrophe (Nakba) that befell the Palestinian people at that time. I recommend reading the entire piece, but what I have excerpted below (with comments) represents the thread that has to do with the fate of the Arab population of the British Mandate of Palestine. The tale he tells offers an object lesson in how the approach one takes influences the history one writes. Karsh’s approach is founded in the principles of civil society — self-determination, government of, by, and for the people, productive economies, life-enhancing positive-sum choices — and traces the tragic tale of how and why the Palestinian people failed to accomplish any of these progressive goals. (By contrast, note the effects of a different approach and set of values.)
Karsh claims the article is based on new research into the recently declassified archives of “millions of documents from the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) and Israel’s early days” although the piece itself is without any references. The author promises a footnoted version soon.
1948, Israel, and the Palestinians—The True Story
EFRAIM KARSH
May 2008
…Far from being the hapless objects of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who from the early 1920’s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival. This campaign culminated in the violent attempt to abort the UN resolution of November 29, 1947, which called for the establishment of two states in Palestine. Had these leaders, and their counterparts in the neighboring Arab states, accepted the UN resolution, there would have been no war and no dislocation in the first place.
Note that this reflects classic “prime-divider” dynamics — an empowered ruling elite makes decisions that benefit themselves rather than their own people. And the decisions are classic zero-sum: no shared land, no twin-nationalities… the whole loaf or no loaf.
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May 5, 2008
Benny Morris has a new book out on 1948. In the course of researching it he discovered how intense the religious dimension of the conflict that year. Such an observation is on the one hand, quite ordinary and empirical, on the other, a violation of the principles of cognitive egocentrism whereby the Arab objection to Jewish independence must be formulated and presented to the public as a “rational” objection, as a “nationalist” argument. Negotitations according to the PC Paradigm will only work if the dispute is about territories and rational national narratives that can come to a mutual understanding (2-state solution). But if it is profoundly zero-sum and religious in nature, then all the pacific bromides about war not being the answer fall by the wayside.
Here Morris discusses the religious dimension of 1948 and chides the modern historian for not taking it seriously.
Historians Should Take the Jihadi Rhetoric of 1948 Seriously
By Benny Morris
Mr. Morris is a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University and the author of 1948 (Yale University Press), from which this article is excerpted.
Historians have tended to ignore or dismiss, as so much hot air, the jihadi rhetoric and flourishes that accompanied the two-stage assault on the Yishuv [the Jewish residents of Palestine before the founding of Israel] and the constant references in the prevailing Arab discourse to that earlier bout of Islamic battle for the Holy Land, against the Crusaders. This is a mistake. The 1948 War, from the Arabs’ perspective, was a war of religion as much as, if not more than, a nationalist war over territory. Put another way, the territory was sacred: its violation by infidels was sufficient grounds for launching a holy war and its conquest or reconquest, a divinely ordained necessity. In the months before the invasion of 15 May 1948, King Abdullah, the most moderate of the coalition leaders, repeatedly spoke of “saving” the holy places. As the day of invasion approached, his focus on Jerusalem, according to Alec Kirkbride, grew increasingly obsessive. “In our souls,” wrote the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, “Palestine occupies a spiritual holy place which is above abstract feelings. In it we have the blessed breeze of Jerusalem and the blessings of the Prophets and their disciples.”
The evidence is abundant and clear that many, if not most, in the Arab world viewed the war essentially as a holy war. To fight for Palestine was the “inescapable obligation on every Muslim,” declared the Muslim Brotherhood in 1938.
The Muslim Brotherhood gained great strength from their anti-Zionist activities particularly during this period of the “Arab Revolt” of 1936-39, launching, according to Matthias Küntzel, their first “fanatical solidarity campaign in which the idea of Jihad was linked to the policies in Palestine,” and going from 800 to 200,000 years from 1936-38 (p. 21).
Indeed, the battle was of such an order of holiness that in 1948 one Islamic jurist ruled that believers should forego the hajj and spend the money thus saved on the jihad in Palestine. In April 1948, the mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Muhammad Mahawif, issued a fatwa positing jihad in Palestine as the duty of all Muslims. The Jews, he said, intended “to take over … all the lands of Islam.” Martyrdom for Palestine conjured up, for Muslim Brothers, “the memories of the Battle of Badr … as well as the early Islamic jihad for spreading Islam and Salah al-Din’s [Saladin’s] liberation of Palestine” from the Crusaders. Jihad for Palestine was seen in prophetic-apocalyptic terms, as embodied in the following hadith periodically quoted at the time: “The day of resurrection does not come until Muslims fight against Jews, until the Jews hide behind trees and stones and until the trees and stones shout out: ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ “
Of quote not only marks the Jihad as apocalyptic, but also, alas, genocidal.
The jihadi impulse underscored both popular and governmental responses in the Arab world to the UN partition resolution and was central to the mobilization of the “street” and the governments for the successive onslaughts of November-December 1947 and May-June 1948. The mosques, mullahs, and ulema all played a pivotal role in the process. Even Christian Arabs appear to have adopted the jihadi discourse. Matiel Mughannam, the Lebanese-born Christian who headed the AHC-affiliated Arab Women’s Organization in Palestine, told an interviewer early in the civil war: “The UN decision has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders …. [A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the ‘holy war’ has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred.” The Islamic fervor stoked by the hostilities seems to have encompassed all or almost all Arabs: “No Moslem can contemplate the holy places falling into Jewish hands,” reported Kirkbride from Amman. “Even the Prime Minister [Tawfiq Abul Huda] … who is by far the steadiest and most sensible Arab here, gets excited on the subject. “
Note that even the Christian Arab is swept up in the mood of collective empowerment. One cannot understand either the decisions of the Arab leadership in 1947-49, or the catastrophic scale of the defeat, if one does not understand the omnipotent inebriation they felt about their cause.
Nor did this impulse evaporate with the Arab defeat. On the contrary. On 12 December 1948 the ulema of Al-Azhar reissued their call for jihad, specifically addressing “the Arab Kings, Presidents of Arab Republics, . . . and leaders of public opinion.” It was, ruled the council, “necessary to liberate Palestine from the Zionist bands … and to return the inhabitants driven from their homes.” The Arab armies had “fought victoriously” (sic) “in the conviction that they were fulfilling a sacred religious duty.” The ulema condemned King Abdullah for sowing discord in Arab ranks: “Damnation would be the lot of those who, after warning, did not follow the way of the believers,” concluded the ulema.
The Naqba was not the terrible tragedy that befell the Palestinian refugees. They were collateral damage, soon to be turned into sacrificial victims by imprisonment in the camps. The real Naqba was the catastrophe of Jewish sovereignty in Dar al Islam — a humiliation to the Arabs, a blasphemy to Muslims.