The Spine

Lebanon: Take Two

2008-05-13T02:42:00Z

My last posting on Lebanon was half-intuition, half-nightmare. It has already happened. By the time a Reuters dispatch was on the web, 81 people were already dead. How many corpses will there be by the time you read this? One indication that the casualty figures are unexpectedly high is that there are apparently now estimates of the wounded and the maimed.

Ha'aretz just posted an analysis by Zvi Barel, not a projection of the future but of the dying present. He reports the grim observation of a Lebanese commentator: "Those who previously demanded that Hezbolah be disarmed are now being compelled to disarmed themselves."

Lebanon is dead. It was killed by Condi Rice's righteous cease fire.

Travel advisory: Do not visit Beirut.

An alternative perhaps? Certainly not Dubai. It also has no real life, but in another way.

Lebanon is dead.

Trouble in Lebanon

2008-05-13T02:11:00Z

They were obsessed with the war between Israel and Hezbollah. It had to stop: a cease fire at all costs. So Condi Rice stepped into the fray and, as soon as Israel had truly won the upper hand in battle, she produced a cease fire. Its terms were on every essential count altogether vague. The U.N. force that had been a flop for so long in keeping the peace would now be enlarged. But there was no certainty as to its numbers or its composition, its mission in general or its specific relations with Syria and its mercurial pawn, Hezbollah. Hassan Nasrallah taunted everybody that his death machine was stronger than ever. Most governments laughed. The people of Lebanon--at least most of its Christians, the Sunnis and the Druze--now realize that his claims are no joke. The Shi'a grasped that long ago, and most of them have been following his bloody banner ever since.

The only success the cease fire had was in preventing Israel from impeding the Syrian and Iranian rearmament of the fiery militia that has now shown that its power is not limited to southern Lebanon but extends way north to Tripoli and into the Bekaa Valley. A very informative account of the developments in Lebanon--actually a crystal-clear account--in Monday's Financial Times reports that "Saudi and Egyptian officials said they were dismayed by Hizbollah's actions, which they have described as unacceptable." Unacceptable? This is the vernacular of pretentious regimes that can affect nothing.

Ten days ago foolish Israelis took up the chorus of withdrawal from the Golan and peace with Syria. The sage and sober editorialists in the Western press got very excited. But the events in Lebanon are more than a hint that Bashir Assad does not want this celebration.

If you want to read a truly desolating account of how we came to this pass and what it implies for the future of the Middle East read Beni Avni's article in Monday's New York Sun.

Some Common Sense About Peace

2008-05-13T01:26:00Z

Abdurrahman Wahid is the former president of Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world. He has written an article with Abdul A'la, associate dean if graduate studies at Sunan Ampel Islamic State University at Surabaya. I admit it: I saw these two names and the headline, "The Obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian Peace," over their op-ed essay and wondered what it was doing in the staunchly pro-Zionist Wall Street Journal.

Then I realized that I had seen Wahid's name before, and that he was a Muslim heretic about the widely entrenched dogma in the Muslim world around Israel. The piece is clear, strong and complex. He knows that there are forces in the Jewish state that are quite averse to a dignified settlement of the hundred-year conflict, and their position has been reinforced by the hatred they see coming from the Arab world.

But Wahid and A'la are not speaking to the Jewish world. They are speaking as Muslims to the Muslim world. "These prejudices contaminate public discourse throughout the world, and are constantly exploited by Middle Eastern regimes that fuel anti-Israel and anti-Semitic emotions for political purposes, while displaying little or no actual concern for the well-being of the Palestinians themselves."

May their wisdom flourish.

What Else is News?

2008-05-09T18:11:00Z

"After 60 Years, Arabs in Israel Are Outsiders." That's the headline over Ethan Bronner's New York Times piece from several days ago. After Lord knows how many years that the United Kingdom's been around, the Scots and the Welsh and even the Cornish(!) feel as if they're "outsiders." The same goes for Romanians in Hungary, the Quebecois of Canada, and the Swedish-speaking Finns. Minorities in every country across the world -- except, of course, in the United States -- face similar anxieties, anxieties that are incumbent upon non-majorities.

Pity the Clintons' Minions

2008-05-09T17:07:00Z

The humiliating defeat of Hillary Clinton is not only her being vanquished by someone she concedes is an amateur. She has also persuaded herself that this means the decline of American liberalism, as well. This is utter nonsense, of course.

I am pretty sure that the maze of snarling careerists that has assembled around the star couple does not really have these illusions. They were simply convinced, like the old British ruling class, that destiny would bless them with power.

Alas, not. So who will disappear from the scene after up to 20 years of playing court to the Clintons? Here are the people who occur to me: the Cajun bowling ball James Carville, Harold Ickes, Mark Penn, Maggie Williams.

The best of the old bunch, Rahm Emanuel and George Stephanopoulos, long ago deserted the nest, and have gone on to do productive work.

History, Mind and Palestine

2008-05-08T21:01:00Z

When I write of history I do not mean events and happenings of a year ago, although it would be an improvement of public understanding if mainstream media could at least get this time frame right. The distortions, both because of ignorance and malice, of the history of Palestine and of the State of Israel are so grievous that one hardly knows where to begin.

But the most crucial moment is clear...and virtually unknown or deliberately forgotten by press professionals who have the esteem of the public.

First a bit of prelude. The conflict between the Jews and Arabs of Palestine goes back to the late nineteenth century, when pre-Zionists and Zionists began their return to, well, yes, Zion. Of course, there had been Jews in the Holy Land throughout the centuries of the dispersion, although they were not masses of Jews. Neither were there masses of Arabs in Palestine, although there were more than there were Jews. Jerusalem, on the other hand, had a majority of Jews since the first census in 1842. With the Jewish migration (which meant Jewish capital and enterprise) came also an inward Arab migration -- a tremendous inward migration -- from other parts of the Ottoman Middle East. After all, Syria and Lebanon and Jordan and Iraq did not then exist as countries. Moving from one of them to Palestine was like moving from Manhattan to Brooklyn, and nearly as short. No borders, no frontiers, no passports, no visas, no police. And when Zionists said that Palestine was a country "without a people" it meant just that: Palestine was populated by clans and tribes who had virtually no consciousness of nationhood or of peoplehood.

Then came the British who were committed on their own initiative and then by the League of Nations to a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. The Brits were not consistent in meeting their solemn pledges. But such minimal Arab resistance to early mass Jewish arrival and to Jewish work as occurred was, on the one hand, vigilante terror and, on the other, explicit cooperation in the selling-off of land to the arrivals by both the local effendi and the local fellah. And then came mayhem. It was clear from the late twenties and early thirties on that the only resolution to the conflict was a partition of Palestine. On this almost no one would claim that history is other than black and white. The Arab leadership would not countenance territorial arrangements that would allow for a Jewish state. And nothing was done to have Palestine become an Arab state. The destiny of Palestine would be in the hands of Egypt and other entities formed out of the Turkish empire in the aftermath of its defeat in World War I.

Which brings us to the Partition Plan for Palestine approved by the United Nations on November 29, 1947, the crucial moment, the single most crucial moment is the hundred years of tears and blood. The local Arabs had contempt for this plan and the surrounding Arabs made war on this plan. The Jewish Agency for Palestine went ahead and declared the independence of Israel on May 14, 1948. Had the Palestinian Arabs accepted the proposal, they would now be celebrating the sixtieth year of their independence and sovereignty in territory far larger than the land assigned to the Jews. We know what happened then. I believe that the Palestinians -- they did capture the nomenclature if nothing else! -- are as far from independence as ever.

Much is being written these days about Israel's sixtieth birthday. Some potted history, some truly serious. Efraim Karsh, whom TNR subscribers have read often in our pages and on our web site, has done a clarifying, no, truly illuminating historical essay for Commentary on many of the grave matters on which I touched above. Make sure you read the footnotes for sometimes -- and this time certainly -- the footnotes are half of the story. This will be an essay that changes people's minds. Truth will be the beneficiary.

Another piece I recommend is in last month's Commentary. By the gifted young writer David Billet, it is a review of Bernard Avishai's The Hebrew Republic. (Avishai was once before reviewed in TNR, that time by the brilliant literary and political intellectual Marie Syrkin, alas, now dead. But she got his number.) his book, like Avishai's first, is a tale of his disenchantment. Poor preening boy. He needs to have the approval of Tony Judt and the rest who believe that justice is only done when the Jewish state is maximally endangered.

Look on the Bright Side: At Least Bill Clinton's Speaking Fees Will Decrease

2008-05-07T18:27:00Z

So Hillary has lent another $6 million to her campaign. But the campaign will never pay it back, no way. So who will? If she loses the nomination as she now seems utterly bound to do, it will be the Obama campaign or the Democratic National Committee. Which means that Obama partisans and regular party enthusiasts will be doing the funding of her ambition and her vanity.

Of course, Bill will still be able to speak to the Emirates and those silly synagogues in California and New Jersey. But, with her presidential career finished and he having been exposed as more of a lout than I ever thought, his fees will be much lower.

Freud and Israel

2008-05-07T15:08:00Z

Today, May 6, is the 152nd anniversary of the birth of Sigmund Freud, a momentous day in the history of civilization, of mankind's understanding of mankind, of humanity's efforts to tame itself.

This week begins the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the birth of the State of Israel.

On March 13, 1938 at a board meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society it was decided that everyone who could should flee and the seat of the society
should be wherever Freud settled. At the meeting Freud said:

"After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Titus, Rabbi Jochanan ben Sakkai asked for permission to open a school at Javneh for the study of the Torah. We are going to do the same. We are after all used to persecution by our history, tradition and some of us by personal experience..."

Freud made several references to ben Sakkai whose efforts inspired to found his academy. Palestine was one place to which at the moment of the dissolution of the Vienna society, Jewish psychoanalysts might migrate.

Let Them Live in Chappaqua!

2008-05-07T04:31:00Z

It was not only Hillary Clinton who lost big-time in North Carolina. It was also Bill Clinton who spent an uninterrupted week in the state campaigning so that the two might once again inhabit the White House. Don't they understand that the people do not want them. Let them live in Chappaqua or Little Rock or even apart. But not at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Putting Wright in Perspective

2008-05-06T23:27:00Z

Ever since Jeremiah Wright made his debut on the wider American political stage many people -- and especially white liberals -- have been wondering: what do he and his church represent in black religious life in the country? When most white liberals (sometimes, I confess, me included) talk about African-American matters, they speak from a very thin, even wobbly base of knowledge. That's been happening in the last six weeks again. It's my impression, in fact, that the consensus in this camp was that Wright was something of a prototypical figure and his church was very much like hundreds, maybe thousands of others. But this was bad news, and so the like-minded made it into a moral tale: white racism was still so rampant that millions of blacks were compelled to see the country, more or less, through Wright's eyes or through eyes like Wright's.

I've finally read an illuminating piece by two scholars who really know American blacks and black institutions, They are Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, a husband and wife team, he the Winthrop professor of history at Harvard, she a political scientist and the vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who are optimists about the African American future -- optimists, if only policy-makers weren't so attached to a grim view of what African Americans can accomplish.

In any case, they've written this article, "Examining the United Church of Christ," at realclearpolitics.com that puts Trinity into its proper place in relation to other black churches and shows how different it is from them. The U.C.C. is actually a white church with a few black subalterns. This used to be the old, sensible and modest Congregational Church which maybe still feels guilty for those of its seventeenth and eighteenth century communicants who were in the slave trade.

Sotheby's and the Sheikh: Oil and Starving Artists

2008-05-06T23:14:00Z

Rising oil prices in the last few years has meant smoldering resentment among users of ordinary fuel: to keep cars on the road, to heat houses, to power this, that and the other thing. But to the oil barons and to the real oil monarch it has been a tremendous boon. (No, this has not translated into higher living standards of the Arab fellah and certainly not of the fourth generation of Palestinian "refugees.")

Of course, the oil rich do get richer, much richer, and there is a concentric circle of beneficiaries who get paid for their wares in sums they never imagined. Among these are the artists of the latest fashions, their dealers and the auction houses. The Art Newspaper has been keeping track of rising prices in the markets, with a particular focus on Middle Eastern collectors, while not ignoring the new zillionaires of the former Soviet Union and what is still politically very much Communist China.

The May issue of the paper has a front page article on the acquisition at Sotheby's by the Emir of Qatar and his wife, the sheikh and a sheikha each with five names after their titles, acquired what the headline calls "the most expensive (Damien) Hirst" ever for $20 million. That seems to me not to be true. Wasn't there a diamond encrusted skull by Hirst that was sold for $100 million...or maybe it was 100 million pounds? In any case, the sheikh and sheikha laid about twenty million bucks for what the report describes as a sculpture.

The Qatari royals may be socially and politically conservative but they sure spend money on what is "cutting edge" art and what was once -- and not so long ago -- also was thought of as "cutting edge" art. That is, they paid $73 million also at Sotheby's for what is called the "Rockefeller Rothko," "White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose)," consigned by David Rockefeller.

There is in the same issue of The Art Newspaper an article reporting that the Abu Dhabi Guggenheim will have a "potentially unlimited" budget. There the question is: will it have visitors?

And speaking of art prices, there are two articles in this morning's Wall Street Journal that are sociologically fascinating. One is a general story about sky-rocketing values in both modern and contemporary art. The other, rather shocking, is in the upward price climb of Andy Warhol's portraits of Mao. Christie's has a large portrait of the Chairman on private sale in Hong Kong for $120 million. Of course, there are dozens of these around at all levels of price and many different mediums. But why would an extremely wealthy person living under communism want a picture of the tyrant in his house? Or is this something ironic?

There's a Smile Where There Should be Tears

2008-05-06T19:44:00Z

It is nearly three years since Hurricane Katrina desolated and despoiled the north-central Gulf Coast of the United States. But even today there remain many thousands of people who are still homeless and helpless and hopeless, victims of the natural catastrophe which was anticipated but not addressed. Thinking back about watching the desolating TV narrative (especially revealing in the work of Anderson Cooper) of callousness, incompetence, smugness reminds me of the Alfred E. Newman "what me worry?" attitude to disaster that has characterized the Bush administration. Nearly two thousand people perished in the ravaged landscape, many more disabled both mentally and physically. What are ancient communities for a young country like our own stopped functioning. Many refugees are still...well, refugees. How could this government really plan a war in Iraq when it couldn't respond to an ordinary and standing rescue plan for the bayous?

Now Burma has been dealt a cyclone. It is actually not a third, but a fourth world country, utterly without technological resources for immediate response to natural disasters. Yes, its obsessive focus on smashing the pull towards freedom among its people has probably inured the government to Burma's true suffering. When world-wide aid mobilized quickly -- as somehow it is prone to do, despite the usual leadenness of international organizations -- Rangoon stopped it in its tracks.

So here comes Laura Bush with an angry and apt critique of the blocking of the Burma road. Too bad when her own Gulf country-folk were suffering (and many of them still are) she was silent. Indifferent. Like her husband she puts a smile on everything. Even when there should be tears.

"Good Fences Make Good Neighbors"

2008-05-06T05:13:00Z

Once upon a time but not that long ago -- actually in the fall of 2000 -- the
Israeli government led by Ehud Barak was prepared essentially to withdraw
to the cease fire lines of 1949 that had for nearly two decades separated
the Jewish state from the West Bank. Where Israel would retain small bits
of territory that had been under Jordanian occupation since that armistice
(not, you have to understand, any Palestinian government because there has
never, ever been one, no place) it had conceded to Bill Clinton that it
would compensate Yassir Arafat and his deceitful comrades with land
elsewhere. Let me admit that I was nearly apoplectic about many of the
particulars of the offer. And, forgive me, it reminded me of the duress
Great Britain had put upon the Czechs in 1938.

Fortunately, Arafat was a fool. He rejected the best offer Israel would
ever make. Eight years have passed, and we have had the disastrous
withdrawal from Gaza to which Condi Rice had tried to attach provisions for
free passage between the Strip and the West Bank. No government in
Jerusalem would fall for that. She did, however, succeed in coercing
Israel to withdraw from the Philadelphia Corridor, the dividing line
between Gaza and Egypt, and so it is on her that responsibility falls for
the big smuggling trade in ammunition and war materiel with which Hamas has
been waging relentless war on the Negev.

We are once again in the clutch, and this time around it is the clutch of
the Bush administration trying to salvage the simulacrum of at least one
diplomatic achievement in its last year of office. So Ms. Rice is flying
back and forth to Israel to squeeze it yet again for more and
more. (Moreover, it now has JStreet urging the same.) According to the
Jerusalem Post, the Palestinians are once again whining that Israel is
only prepared to leave them with a series of cantons. This is simply not
the case. But, yes, will Israel insist on having military bulwarks or
bastions in the West Bank? You bet your life. Only idiots would not.

A senior Palestinian, once close to Arafat, now close to Mahmoud Abbas,
Abded Rabbo is also quoted in the Post as complaining about Israel
wanting to continue building the "separation wall." Forget the rhetorical
distortion of calling what is actually 90% fence a wall. If this
distortion would be the worst of it...well, you know what I mean.

As it happens, there was a story about the highly touted Belfast peace in
the Sunday Boston Globe. Yes, the one negotiated by former senator George
Mitchell. It turns out that, according to Shawn Pogatchnik, a real
separation wall (not a fence) is the major ingredient of such peace as they
have in Belfast. Read the story. It is chastening. And, while you are at
it, search for "separation wall," "Belfast," and "United Kingdom" on Google. You'll be reminded of the old Robert Frost line, "good fences make
good neighbors."

Hillary's Fake Populism

2008-05-05T21:53:00Z

Everybody knows that Hillary plays rough, and this morning's New York Times tells you now that she is also ruthless. Down in the body of the story there's a little riff from one Max Brantley, "an old friend of the Clintons from Arkansas," in which he contrasts Hill and Bill. "He never stops trying to convert people. She's much more clear-eyed, recognizing the imperfectability of people." So that's her calculation: if you disagree with her you are a sinner.

This ruthlessness is also a promise about how she'd behave in office. She doesn't sign her autograph on red boxing gloves for nothing. It is apparently she, not the vindicative James Carville (he who called Bill Richardson Judas), who coined the phrase "war room" to fit the concept. But, as George Bush has shown, you can perform many deceitful acts and still lose in the body politic.

The leader also inspires followers. How's this for civilized political discourse? "She makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy," said one of her endorsers, Governor Michael F. Easley. I thought we Democrats don't talk like that any more. Or another revealing citation, this one from a labor leader also endorsing Hillary, praising her "testicular fortitude." My God, and I had just about stopped using the word "seminal."

This degradation of discourse and behavior is part and parcel of her attempt at appearing like what she thinks of as common. Is this the learning she envisions in "It Takes a Village"? It certainly isn't what she called eons ago "the politics of meaning."

Of course, the common is for Mrs. Clinton a complete sham. I'd bet the only people she dines with in New York (and she does dine, not munch) are folk who have at least $50 million bucks. And her designer pants suits are not bought at Target or, let alone, Wal-Mart, although she did serve on its board when no one on the payroll had health insurance.

But it's not only that she wants to project humble origins and vulgate speech (had you ever witnessed her do that before?). It's also that she wants the voters of Indiana (and North Carolina) to grasp that she is not impressed by professional economists. No, not she. An article on the front page of Monday's Boston Globe reports that she has now made the summer suspension of the gasoline tax the cornerstone of her campaign. Forget about the fact that the president won't hear from it (so it's a moot question), even though it might help John McCain. The truth is that, as George Stephanopolous pointed out, no credible economist backed her plan to lift the 18.5 cent federal tax on gas. She got huffy: "I'm not going to put my lot with economists, because I know if we did it right...it would be implemented effectively." And then more and more arrogant: "We've got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite (ah, yes, that terrible elite again) opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans." Why doesn't she say outright that she wants to instill paranoia in the American people? Another Rosa Luxemburg, perhaps?

The one strength that Hillary might have carried with her is that her husband's administration had competent, no, brilliant and inventive people in its stewardship of the economy. Larry Summers, for instance, and Robert Rubin. But she is now a populist, a vulgar populist. Maybe we'll be hearing from William Jennings Bryan about the "cross of gold" one century after.

So Mrs. Clinton like panaceas, which are almost always fibs. Obama has been criticized for being a bit vague in he economic program, and perhaps he has been. But he doesn't tell lies.

Condoleezza's Next Disaster

2008-05-04T22:48:00Z

"50 trucks of supplies were forced to turn back as a result of the barrage." These were fifty Israeli trucks attempting to deliver fuel and food supplies through Nahal Oz and Karni on the frontier between Gaza and the Negev. This was not all: As Ethan Bronner reported in the Times, "In addition, a mortar shell hit the Nahal Oz fuel terminal on Israel's border with Gaza as badly needed fuel was being transferred into the Palestinian area to supply the local power station, the military said."

The result, as you read above, was that the deliveries were ended. Stopped. Finis. Kaput.

Hamas will soon find that there is a human catastrophe already happening (the Gaza folks on TV look pretty healthy to me...and pretty pugnacious), plus the E.U. and the U.N. will demand... Well, you know what they'll demand. And Condoleezza Rice will see her doomed peace plan unraveling a bit sooner than she expected. So she will put the arm on Israel etc.

In case you don't know where I stand on this: Jerusalem should not endanger one Israeli life to deliver anything to Gaza. It shouldn't have been making deliveries during the last two years when Hamas and comrades were firing missiles and rockets into the towns and kibbutzim of the Negev and into the ancient port city of Ashkelon. Gaza can get all the fuel and food it needs from Egypt, if the Egyptians want to provide it.

Ms. Rice was a none-too-passive party to the 2005 full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Full, full. You know what that turned into: a disaster.

Now she is working on her next disaster and trying to trim from the borders of Israel some measly bits of territory to grease the wheels. But everybody understood and really understands that Israel would retain a few large settlement blocks and the land between Jerusalem and the 40,000-plus people in Ma'aleh Adumin. A "return to the 1967 borders" is a slogan. It is not a peace map. First of all, those are not borders. They were never recognized as borders by any of the Arabs; they were fragile cease-fire lines. Second of all, history doesn't stop for the convenience of the Palestinians. They have to deal with history as it was made, mostly because these Palestinians hope against all the odds that Israel would disappear by itself.