Mondoweiss

Peretz and Goldberg Get Obama to Renew the Balfour Declaration

I'm still mulling Marty Peretz's longish phone conversation with Obama about Israel, also Jeffrey Goldberg's longish interview with the candidate. One of the weird things about both conversations is the sense that Goldberg and Peretz are extracting a promise from Obama to the Jewish community. Indeed, Goldberg establishes himself as a Jew who is a guardian of Jewish "worry". In a sense, neither is that interested in what Obama really thinks--both men behave less like journalists than petitioners, trying to get Obama on the record expressing his support of the Jewish state as an answer to the Jewish problem. "I’m curious to hear you talk about the Zionist idea. Do you believe that it has justice on its side?" Goldberg asks. Then: "Do you think that justice is still on Israel’s side?"

The whole thing feels like a reprisal of the Balfour Declaration, 91 years on, with Peretz and Goldberg reenacting the roles of Chaim Weizmann and Lord Rothschild, and Obama playing the role of the British ruler. Here's why the analogy fits, and why it is actually helpful in understanding Israel/Palestine:

Neocons Don't Have Time for Golf. Or Didn't. Maybe Now They Do?

Scott McConnell comments on Bush's promise of giving-up golf while the war's on:

There’s also a more complicated sociological point to be made here: that the WASP establishment which ran the country’s foreign policy rather decently in the years after World War II has been nudged from the central halls of power, and one is now more likely to find its scions working on their handicaps or plotting elaborate middle age man getaways to this historic courses of Scotland than clawing their way up the ranks of the foreign affairs intelligentsia.

I agree, and wonder why there isn't any journalism on the subject of the new establishment. The answer, my friend, is: the fear of another Holocaust if we talk about Jewish power. So journalists betray their mission of informing the public on the grounds that the public is not to be trusted, and then tell themselves that the public is too stupid to notice this anyway. But people aren't too stupid. They know that significant changes have taken place in the sociocultural makeup of the establishment, especially the foreign-affairs branch; but they get little information about it, and the result is that commenters on my blog can claim that Jews run America, when obviously it's not that simple...

'Commentary' Ignores Palestinians' Eyewitness Testimony in Denying that Zionists Drove Arabs From Jaffa in '48

Last week I blogged about Commentary's piece denying the Nakba, which was underwritten by the chairman of the New-York Historical Society-- a landmark of Nakba denial, published in what was once a glory of Jewish intellectual tradition: Commentary, the magazine I grew up with, stacks of it, my parents didn't throw it away. The article demonstrates how fealty to Israel is eroding Jewish intelligence, as it has forced some of the smartest people on the planet to devote themselves to alchemy, coming up with elaborate proofs that black is white.

One paragraph that particularly disturbed me said that "huge numbers of Palestinian Arabs were being actively driven [Commentary's emphasis] from their homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces.. In Jaffa, Palestine's largest Arab city, the [Arab] municipality organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea..." In making this assertion, author Efraim Karsh denied the New Standard View, that the Zionists forced the Palestinians from Jaffa. He offered no evidence.

Having just attended a speech on the Nakba by Lila Abu-Lughod, an eminent anthropologist at Columbia University, in which she stated that her father had been "driven" out of Jaffa by Zionists, I posted about the Commentary piece, and a couple days later Commentary published an annotated version online, including the following footnote to support Karsh's claim re Jaffa:

One Cheer for Olbermann's Latest Bush/Iraq Tirade

Tonight I watched one of Keith Olbermann's trademark rants against George Bush. It went on for 15 minutes of vituperative outrage, generally surrounding Bush's politico interview, and his decision to give up golf while the Iraq War was going on...

The first thing you have to say is that it's completely impressive that Olbermann gets to hold forth with such fury, it's a proof that we still have a democracy, even on commercial TV. Good for him. He's surely ignored a lot of responsible people telling him to Cool it. The second thing is that Olbermann's analysis is a little cheap. He blames Bush for the Iraq War. Good, so do I. He says that Bush is a nincompoomp. Agreed. There are suggestions that Bush is doing it for business interests. There is anger that Bush overruled the "realists." If you're going to talk about realists, you have to talk about neocons, and you have to talk about ideas. This war was built on bad ideas. Yes George Bush showed the worst judgment in American history, but he is a nincompoop, he doesn't have time to read books. Guys who read books came up with this war and he was swayed by their arguments post-9/11. Of course it's his fault, but it's also the fault of the guys who read and wrote books.  Blame the intellectual agents of this horror, or you are going to have more like it.

Olbermann also gives a pass to the Congress, saying it was misled by mendacious Bush-fed intelligence. But Congress voted for this war; the Congress showed a disastrous lack of judgment when handed obviously-shaky intelligence. Barack Obama was a state senator then, in Chicago, and he knew it was a bad war, Lincoln Chafee knew it when he did the minimum and went to see the CIA guys. The weird thing about Olbermann's rant is that it's so focused on George Bush, and so trembling with operatic outrage, that it creates an odd sympathy for its nincompoop target. I'm glad MSNBC is airing this stuff. I just wish Olbermann was smarter.

Bush's Jewish Guest List to Israel Bash Feels a Little Throw-Backy

Here's Bush's guest list at the 60th birthday party in Israel. I'm still learning my way around the politics of the Israel question, but here are my scores in the free-skating competition:

Sheldon Adelson, the biggest Republican donor, a Netanyahu guy, Iran/Iraq guy, very scary, now quizzed in the Olmert investigation. Kenneth Bialkin--his firm, Skadden, Arps hosted Ambassador Gillerman when the ambassador said Jimmy Carter had blood on his hands, an establishment CFR and ADL guy, I believe, and don't you ever dare impose a solution, while the settlements continue. Matthew Brooks of Freedom's Watch, neocon. Tony Gelbart of Nefesh b'nefesh and Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Jewish nationalist, make sure the kids don't marry non-Jews. Rabbi Marvin Hier. Scary. Believes Jews to be "endangered," as Elie Wiesel does, who's here too. Michael Oren, military intellectual (by which I mean, military justice is to justice as military music is to music). Mort Zuckerman, Conference of Presidents, along with Malcolm Hoenlein. Abe Foxman, say no more. Leslie Wexner of the Limited, giving fellowships to build Israel's leaders and Jewish leaders here, too. Ethnocentric. Dan Senor, a neocon, allied with the Republican Jewish Coalition crowd, but also a little unfriendly to the Iraq bitter-enders. Leonard Sands and Matthew Brooks, more RJC people. Sands has moolah. Bill Safire, former Times columnist.

There are a lot of names, and maybe I'm reading this wrong, tell me who I'm missing, but it seems like the Iraq bitter-ender Zionists aren't here. No Richard Perle or Dore Gold. What we have are mostly donor base and ethnocentric Jews like Gelbart, along with the U.S. and Israel are joined at the hip Jews, the Michael Oren types. Neocons by another name. I wish there'd been a few progressives. Why not a surprise or two, a Dem, an Ambassador Kurtzer. A Nakba Jew, just to shake things up. Guess I gotta wait for President Obama. Have fun, guys.

Obama's Obeisance to the Lobby Concerns Me Not

A friend is disturbed by Marty Peretz's renewed endorsement of Obama--"What Obama Said to Me About Israel", and by Obama's obeisance to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, who my friend points out served in the Israeli army in the 80s at a prison where Palestinians were tortured. How can you have such faith in Obama to change U.S. policy? Well I have faith.

First off, it's interesting that this shidduch, to use the Yiddish phrase for marriage or a deal, is happening right now. Obama has clearly won, and now he is getting a laying on of hands by a prince of the Israel lobby, actually two princes, who pronounce that he's kosher. My crowd has always said that the lobby is important, this just shows it. Expecting Obama to cut the lobby out is naive. It is not for nothing that he sold out Ali Abunimah in Chicago some years back; I wish he didn't but he did, and it was a necessary step to his advancing to the national stage.

I don't mean to suggest that Obama is insincere either. The great demand of Walt and Mearsheimer, and of others who support Palestinian right of self-determination, is that We be included at the table of foreign policy. We're not asking that Marty Peretz be thrown out, or Goldberg, or Dennis Ross even, no; we're saying that other Americans be included, from Ali Abunimah to Zbig Brzezinski to Rob Malley to MJ Rosenberg to Leon Hadar. Of course we seek a great weakening of the Israel lobby, but what I have always said is that a robust debate of what the American interest is visavis Israel is all that we need. When that takes place, Americans will exercise real fairness in our dealings, and the situation will change. And I do think this is happening: that an Obama administration will include Chuck Hagel and many realists who believe that Israel is damaging our position in the world, and that its allies are promoting a dangerous idea about Islamofascism... Obama is a real smart guy. I am sure he has read Walt and Mearsheimer's paper on line.

It doesn't even bother me so much that Peretz is claiming Obama. Peretz is a Washington type, he loves power, he likes to be at the table. He has good political values in some areas, he held Al Gore's hat for him for a long time. The greatness I see in Obama is a cold ability to weigh the arguments of petitioners without being beholden. He doesn't anger, he doesn't fall in love. His language is considered. He has the unique ability to triangulate the Palestinian position and Marty Peretz's and maybe bring about an understanding, the ability not to frighten Holocaust-era Jews. I have that faith.

The most important lesson of Aaron David Miller's book is that the greatest achievement by any president in the Middle East came through the efforts of a guy who really liked Arabs 30 years ago. Jimmy Carter: Camp David. Carter was a rich, rural man who adored Anwar Sadat and even Hafez al-Asad. And he threw himself at the problem, in defiance of the domestic considerations his aides kept warning him about, and was willing to toss his presidency aside to achieve something here. After all, Sadat gave his life for what Carter was merely sacrificing position or reputation to achieve.

The other Democratic paradigm is Bill Clinton, who didn't want to spend any political capital on the problem--no, he'd been impeached and wanted to rise again with his wife's presidency. Clinton's Camp David team was almost all Jewish, its chief negotiator acting as "Israel's lawyer" (per Miller); and it achieved nothing, and the second intifadah began. Ambassador Kurtzer has now written that the next president should have a diverse team, including Arabists.

I recite this history only to say that Obama is more in the Carter camp than the Clinton one. I've read his wife's thesis at Princeton and Obama's first book. These people entered public service because they wanted to change things. No I can't imagine that he will torch prospects of a second term over the issue, but I think he truly understands, as Carter did, that this is the great hidden secret of American politics, and the great challenge to a true statesman is to lead America out of this swamp. Jews are powerful; he needs Jews to get there.

Nakba and Neocons Can Dance

How many years will it be till neoconservative Commentary Magazine apologizes for its Nakba denial? 5, 10, 50? Well, I'm setting the egg-timer. Because the National Post of Canada, a neocon hive--owned by rightwing Jews, long guarantor of a platform to David Frum, who invented two dangerous slogans, "Victory or Holocaust" and "Axis of Evil"--yesterday stated there was "ethnic cleansing" in '47-48 Palestine. First it printed a piece by contributor Jeet Heer on the Nakba that was unapologetic:

Abu Ghraib's a Moral Fig Leaf for the Disastrous Decision to Invade (and Other Wit n Wisdom of Linc Chafee)

I just watched the great Lincoln Chafee, formerly a Rhode Island senator, now the author of Against the Tide, on C-Span talking about the war and politics at the Watson Institute last month. He made a few great points.

The most salient was one I've expressed here: War contains atrocity, and the horror over Abu Ghraib is kind of a rear guard moral action by people who supported the war to somehow justify their disastrous choice by crying out, Look how they screwed it up! As if occupying an Arab society could have been done well, and it was Cheney and a bunch of degraded majors and sergeants and Lyndie England who botched things. Chafee said Look, Vietnam produced My Lai; war is a horrible thing. Charles Lindbergh, as I have pointed out here before, served in WW2, the great war, and in his (fabulous) war journals pointed out the terrible things that the Greatest Generation did to Japanese soldiers in the South Pacific--threw them out of airplanes alive, blocked their egress from caves and poured oil down inside and torched them, etc. I favor none of this stuff. But I've studied war enough to know that it brutalizes people and utterly strips the enemy of humanity and it is much easier to judge this behavior from an armchair having voted for the war than if you spend all day worrying about being maimed by IEDs. Palestinians murder innocent Israelis out of something of the same dehumanization, Israelis commit atrocities likewise; war is a cycle of violence.

Chafee reminded us that the real error was the decision to invade. "This is insanity," Chafee said to his Republican caucus back in 2002 and got blank looks back. He at least had "done the homework," looked at the evidence, had gone to the CIA and spoken to the analysts and seen what the case for war consisted in, understood it to be baseless. "There was no evidence," Chafee said. Saddam threatened the U.S.--nuts! He was coming down Main Street! Insanity, Chafee said again. This is why I and many thousands of others were in the streets protesting the war plans. Then it took us three days to capture Baghdad, Chafee went on; this was some great threat to us? Obama should be making this point: Hillary didn't do the homework.

Chafee also went after the neocons.

Chairman of New-York Historical Society Underwrites Monument of Nakba Denial

Here's an eye-opener. My latest Commentary, for May, has as its top story not a celebration of Israel's birth, but a denial of the Nakba: "1948, Israel, and the Palestinians--The True Story," by Efraim Karsh, who has something of a history in the denial of Palestinian humanity.

The piece is aimed at the Nakba-recognition groundswell that I seek to foster on this site. It begins by saying that Israel is subject "to a constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels," a central plank being the "claim of premeditated dispossession" --ethnic cleansing--perpetrated by the "'new historians.'" Hold on, says Karsh. The "recent" declassification of thousands of documents, "untapped by earlier generations of writers and ignored or distorted by the 'new historians,'" reveals that this claim is "the inverse of the truth."

Then Karsh acknowledges the generosity of "Roger and Susan Hertog" in supporting his research. Hertog is chairman of the New-York Historical Society, a recipient of a Humanities award from President Bush last year, an owner of the New York  Sun, formerly a backer of The New Republic, and former chairman of the Manhattan Institute. Wonder where all those august institutions will come down on this?

Karsh's piece is almost laughable in several respects. First, it is not until the final line of a 6000- or so word article that he refers directly to the target of his attack, the Nakba, when he says that only when Arabs have "fundamentally different" leadership will they put their "self-inflicted 'catastrophe' behind them." Nakba is Arabic for catastrophe; this is the only use of that word in the article. Shouldn't a scholar be straightforward and specific about his target? Also, I have to wonder who those Palestinian leaders are who will put the catastrophe behind them. I've never met a Palestinian who denies the Nakba, or does not think that the right of return is an important issue in the "peace process".

For another thing, Karsh doesn't offer much evidence of recent declassification. Many of the sources seem very familiar indeed. The Peel report, a British factfinding mission in 1949, and so forth. No footnotes.

But let's address the substance: Karsh claims that the Arabs were "driven" out by their own leaders, "out of military considerations or in order to prevent them from becoming citizens of the prospective Jewish state." Thus: "In Jaffa, Palestine's largest Arab city, the [Arab] municipality organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and sea..."

I have not studied the Nakba in any great detail, but I know that with respect to Jaffa, this is grotesque misrepresentation. The other night, the Columbia anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod stated flatly that her father was "driven" from his home in Jaffa by the Yishuv. A second speaker read aloud this letter from Shukri Selameh to the New York Times in 1988:

At 4 A.M. on April 25, 1948, almost three weeks before the termination of the British mandate over Palestine, Jaffa was subjected to an intensifying barrage of concentrated mortar bombing from Tel Aviv, Bat Yam and Agro-Bank. I twice risked my life and that of my family by attempting to escape in my car with my pregnant wife and 2-year-old daughter. Halfway out of the city, I had to turn back and return to the center of town.... [P]anic was so intense and irreversible that almost 90 percent of Jaffa's population of 80,000 escaped in the next 24 hours. 

People scurried for their lives, cramming into cars, pickups, trucks, buses, and a large number fled on foot. Many of them sailed out in small boats, some of which capsized in stormy weather, resulting in substantial loss of life.

It is absolute nonsense to allege that the Palestinians were advised or encouraged to leave their homes. People who plan to do so would take at least their precious belongings with them. The vast majority of the refugees, including us, left with only a few pieces of clothing.

Karsh's refusal even to allude to such accounts is evidence of racism. Equally offensive is his characterization of Deir Yassin, the village outside Jerusalem that famously was attacked by Israeli forces in April 1948, with nearly 100 killed-- including 30 babies--as a place of a "battle." Even Benny Morris, whom Karsh cites approvingly, states that Deir Yassin was the site of "atrocities."  Ilan Pappe writes in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine that Deir Yassin was the "epicenter" of the Yishuv's "Plan D" that spring, in which soldiers were directed to "villages which you will capture, cleanse or destroy" so as to cleanse the land of non-Jews. And duly the Arabs fled when they heard what had happened there. Shlomo Ben-Ami: Deir Yassin was part of a campaign in which "a panic-stricken Arab community was uprooted under the impact of massacres that would be carved into the Arabs' monument of grief and hatred."

(Wikipedia states that Morris has accused Karsh of distorting facts and has written "Karsh's way [is] to belabor minor points while completely ignoring, and hiding from his readers, the main pieces of evidence.")   

Anyway, what does it matter who drove out the Palestinians? As Selameh wrote, "under international law, particularly the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and the Geneva Convention of 1949, it hardly matters why unarmed civilians run away for their lives in areas of hostility. They do not forfeit their right of return." Israel's refusal to let them back to their villages argues that the intention of the original attacks was ethnic cleansing. U.N. Partition had awarded the Jews a state that was narrowly-majority-Jewish. Ben-Gurion wanted a distinctly-Jewish state and exulted to see cities with only Jews walking around.

The Commentary piece is notable because it comes at a time when even The New Yorker is acknowledging the Nakba. Commentary knows this and is pushing back, out of ur-nationalist feeling. The worst thing about this piece is the refusal to dignify Arab testimonies as worthy of mention, let alone credence. Imagine if the head of the New-York Historical Society underwrote a paper that said that my ancestors' claims of being forced out of small towns in Russia during the pogroms were lies. He would pay with his job. Nakba denial is still rewarded.

P.S. Since I posted this entry, Commentary has put up an annotated version of Karsh's piece, complete with footnotes. To their credit! I'm gonna have a look soon...

Nakba Makes 'The New Yorker'

David Remnick has a pretty-damn-good piece in the New Yorker on Benny Morris's new book, concluding, "Next month, the Israelis mark the sixtieth anniversary of their independence, the Palestinians the sixtieth anniversary of al-nakba, the catastrophe."  So Nakba recognition has come to the New Yorker. Last  week the nakba was mentioned in the Times in a piece about Bush's visit to the region.

Remnick's writing has sweep and gravity, and his reasoned point of view shows where "the arrow" is pointing, as they say in college basketball: it's pointing to more and more Nakba recognition, more and more of the Palestinian narrative coming into American life. Apres Obama, le deluge. But Remnick's piece is also way too favorable to Morris. Yes Morris is an important historian, a leader; but it is not the case, as Remnick says, that he flatters no one's prejudices, especially his own. Here I am judging from earlier work by Morris; and I can't imagine his new book is altogether different in tone. In his choleric attack on Walt and Mearsheimer in the New Republic, Morris expressed anger about the delegitimization of the Jewish state in western intellectual circles. That isn't a historical impulse; it's an ideological impulse.

And then there is his analysis, in his classic, Righteous Victims, about "the Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem." Morris stated that the refugee problem was created by factors on both sides: 1, sociological transformation of the Palestinians from a rural population to an urban population, lacking "social or political cohesion" and enraged by Zionist immigration, 2, The active policy of "transfer," endorsed by Ben-Gurion, which the Yishuv then carried out; expulsion. To equate these factors is absurd, it reveals prejudice. It reminds me of the neocon argument that the Arabs attacked us on 9/11 because young men have no political freedom in their societies, thus placing vap0rs (sociological analysis) on the same footing as dynamite (anti-neocolonial resentment). Transfer, the Zionist policy, was clearly the decisive factor. After all, there didn't have to be a refugee problem; a year later the Zionists could have let all the refugees back. They didn't, defying the U.N. They wanted an ethnically-cleansed state.

One of the lessons of the historiography of the Middle East is that we all have prejudices. As Remnick shows, Zionists have created their own narratives since Leon Uris's time and back. And Arabs have shelves of scholarship on Zionism and the Nakba that are all but unknown to the west. What is the American role? That is the question. American Jewish intellectuals are still engaged by the Zionist narratives we grew up with. "I was a Zionist before I was a Democrat," Howard Berman says, and this is true for countless other liberal Jews who lack Berman's transparency. The gift of post-Obama America, the freedom we have as Americans, the responsibility of Americans, is that we must bring our own inspiring narratives, of the civil rights struggle and minority empowerment, to bear on the situation. Already we are doing so, and look at the effect it is having in intellectual circles. The 1967 narrative--the peace process, with all its failures and lies on both sides--is beginning to yield to the 1948 narrative, the original problem. It's a long bumpy road, but as the New Yorker shows, Americans are traveling it...