What supporters of Israel should seek from Biden

Sar Shalom

With the possibility that the Trump Administration might come to an end next January, the question is what should supporters of Israel seek from Biden, or whoever replaces him on the odd possibility that the Democrats are forced to find a substitute. One could argue that we should ask Biden to pledge not to use the Security Council as a tool to bludgeon Israel into compliance with his demands. Another possible request is that Biden refrain from public fights with Israel, that he refrain from harping on about the settlements, or that he talk with mainstream Israelis before formulating his diktats.

I would like to suggest something else that we should seek from Biden. This is because, for one, pledges during the campaign have a way of falling by the wayside once in office, as we saw with Obama and his promises to the pro-Israel community. Furthermore, what I suggest can also deliver benefits for Israel if Biden does it even before the election, let alone getting inaugurated. What I suggest we ask for instead is that Biden declare over and over again that the Palestinian national movement (PNM) has a Trump-like dedication to the truth and that he provide fact after fact to buttress that claim.

There is no shortage of material with which to support that claim. To start, there is the claim that the Jews have no connection to the land of Israel or Jerusalem and thus the Israelis are interlopers who do not belong on the land. A variation is that today's Jews are really Khazars with no connection to any real Jews of the past who did live as a sovereign entity on the land, with the same consequence that Israelis are interlopers. A corollary is that the Palestinians are descended from either Jebusites or Canaanites and thus have roots to the land preceding the Jews. Turning to current events, Palestinian nationalists have a habit of lifting photos of atrocities from all over the world and slapping captions on them stating that Israel had done that to the Palestinians. When actual conflict occurs between Israel and the Palestinians and Israel actually does cause the death of some number of Palestinians, the Palestinians habitually exaggerate the number of casualties and claim that their fallen combatants were actually non-combatants. The list could go on.

If Biden were to force the media to contend with those facts and then state based on that that the PNM is as committed to the truth as is Donald Trump, conditions would be set to erode western sympathy for the PNM. Once it is accepted that the PNM is no more truthful than Donald Trump, we can press the case to those who just want to see an equitable end to the conflict that they should not take the PNM's claims at face value that they only seek the 1967-territories and thus should not assume that prevailing upon Israel to fulfill the PNM's demands would actually end the conflict. Convincing the public that the PNM is no more truthful than Donald Trump would allow us to set a condition for any concession that the mainstream media would support, that the PNM should acknowledge basic truths. None of those benefits require the enactment of any policies.

Promoting an alternative narrative, Part I

Sar Shalom

In a previous post, I wrote how the question of what the conflict is about would tell more about how a politician would relate to Israel than any question about their specific policy leanings. I concluded that post by saying that, under current circumstances, it would actually not succeed in doing so because everyone would answer the question wrongly, that it is about two peoples who need to find a way to share their common homeland. I now start to explore how to promote consideration of the possibility that the conflict is about Arab-Muslim irredentism for the 19th century social order.

The first step in promoting the discussability of the irredentism narrative is to identify the obstacles to that narrative. This must come before any mention of facts that require mental gymnastics to reconcile with the common homeland narrative but are bang-your-head obvious with the irredentism narrative. This is so because as long as those obstacles remain, and as long as the Palestinians' motives are not directly observable, people will perform the necessary mental gymnastics to protect the common homeland narrative and keep the irredentism narrative outside the pale.

I would speculate that one obstacle to the irredentism narrative is the belief that it would be deployed in bad faith in order to insulate Israel from ever having to make any concessions for peace. An attempt to answer that would require on insistence on precise language. The way to describe the barrier that Arab-Muslim irredentism presents to a resolution that would be anything other than strengthening the Palestinians' hands so that they can eliminate Israel without any further western assistance is not that peace is impossible because the Palestinians are irredentent. Rather, the description must be that peace is impossible as long as the Palestinians and that peace will be feasible as soon as the Palestinians ditch their irredentism, but no sooner. That formulation allows for Israeli concessions once the irredentism is abandoned and puts the onus on the peace crowd to push for such abandonment if it wishes to see Israeli concessions.

However, saying that abandonment of irredentism will bring forth Israeli willingness for concessions will be inadequate if Palestinian irredentism is unfalsifiable. In that case, the peace camp will just say that no matter what, we will claim that the Palestinians are irredentent and thus claim a get out of concessions free card. They will say if we claim that the Palestinians' irredentism persists past Arafat's recognition of Israel at Oslo, and Abbas reaffirmation of that recognition, that nothing would qualify to us as renunciation of that irredentism. We need to describe what would do so. I would suggest that a three-fold declaration from the Palestinian leadership would be sufficient to show that they might no longer be irredentent.

1. The Jews are a people.
2. The Jewish people are deeply connected to the Land of Israel in general and Jerusalem in particular.
3. There is no legitimate role for the Pact of Umar in today's world.

This is not to say making the three-fold declaration would be proof-positive that the Palestinians have abandoned their irredentism. However doing so without contradiction, it would show that there is sufficient probability that they have in order to conduct talks. Notably, calling the excavation of the road that led pilgrims to the Temple "fake archaeology" is a contradiction of "the Jewish people are deeply connected to Jerusalem," and thus any statement to that effect would be as if the three-fold declaration was never made.
A further point is that it is necessary to know why failure to make the three-fold declaration, or any subsequent contradiction, is proof-positive that the irredentism remains. For that, it is necessary to explain why the PLO maintains in its charter that "the Jews are citizens of the countries where they live and have no national identity" and why the PA teaches in its curriculum that the Jews are not a people and that the Jewish connection to Jerusalem is a fiction concocted to justify stealing it from the Palestinians. As Einat Wilf has explained, peoples are entitled to the homeland from which they originate and denying that to any people is a grave injustice. However, if the Jews are not people, and if the Jews do not have any actual connection to the Land of Israel, then no people is being denied of its homeland by taking Israel away from the Jews and thus no injustice would be perpetrated. Hence, the refusal to acknowledge those three things is a creation of an alternate reality in which eliminating Israel, thus realizing their irredentism, is a just action.

With a clear condition that is straightforward to meet, we can make it clear that there is a reasonable condition under which concessions would be feasible, thus removing one obstacle to the irredentism narrative. Update: Link was added to the referenced post.

Innoculating our children against the Cult of Occupation

Sar Shalom

With measles being in the news, I'll offer a few words on the disease. In order to avoid measles, the key is not to avoid any form of the pathogen. If the disease abounds, then doing so is fruitless battle. What is needed instead is to be exposed to a version of the pathogen, typically dead though attenuated for other diseases, that is unable to cause the disease. Doing so trains the immune system to recognize the pathogen so that if it does encounter a version capable of causing disease in the future, it would be ready to neutralize before it can do so.

A similar approach can be take to the Cult of Occupation. For the most part, the Israel portion of Jewish education tends to focus on the Jews' travails in Europe in the 19th century and the efforts of the pioneers to build the state from desert and swamps while ignoring the suffering of the Palestinians affected by Israel's presence. Two such Jews raised with such education are New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg and Simone Zimmerman of IfNotNow and now at B'Tselem. According to one of the essays in Anti-Zionism on Campus, Zimmerman became an ardent Palestinianist when she went to college at UC Berkeley and first learned about the plight of the Palestinians. Similarly, Goldberg has written about how she first learned about the Palestinian's suffering after she had finished her Jewish education, leading to her becoming part of the cesspool of describing the Palestinians as innocent, defenseless victims of the so-called regional bully.

As with diseases like measles, preventing exposure to the Palestinians' suffering is a fools errand. However, it is possible to expose those receiving a Jewish education to a version of Palestinian that would not induce them Cultists of Occupation and prepare them with responses for when those who are more interested in waging information war against Israel than in presenting the truth present their version of that suffering. For instance, the Palestinianists are great at presenting sob stories about the indignities of crossing the security barrier, but they never present any information about why the security barrier, and the checkpoint to cross it, is present. We have to present that information as Matti Friedman has done. The Palestinianists will eventually foist on our youth how Israel has destroyed homes and schools in Gaza. We need to beat them in presenting that information to our youth and provide the context of how Hamas launches rockets from schools and crowded urban squares giving Israel a choice between allowing those rockets to be launched at Israel's cities or taking out those rockets and destroying the homes and schools next to them. The Palestinianists will get the message out about all the things the Palestinians lack. We need to beat them at teaching our youth about that situation, and provide the context of what Israel has tried to do to alleviate that situation without cooperation from the PA that is more interested in perpetuating a grievance than addressing any grievance without building capacity to eliminate Israel and how both the PA and Hamas divert the lion's share of any development aid to the effort for eliminating Israel. Including such material in our Jewish education would mean that when our youth hear the sob stories from the Palestinianists, nothing would be new and they will know how to respond.

An open letter to David Friedman

Sar Shalom

Congratulations on being confirmed as president Trump's ambassador to Israel. I have no doubt that you will be a good friend of Israel. There are no limits to the extent of which I believe you will be a good friend of Israel. However, can you be a great friend of Israel. Allow me to explain the difference between a good friend and a great friend. A good friend is someone who adopts policies that help Israel. A great friend is someone who induces others to adopt policies that help Israel. This is particularly important because your time in office will be limited and your long-term impact will be based on the effect you have setting the framework for how your successors view the region.

The narrative. As a new report from the BESA Center demonstrates, western support for the Palestinians is based on false narratives. Convincing someone to support Israel thus requires a narrative in which, under that individual's value system, Israel is the good side. In contrast, the currently prevailing narrative is that the conflict is one of Israeli Goliath against Palestinian David. This narrative would explain Obama's obsession with the settlements, even if it can't be proved that it was the motive.

The David and Goliath narrative has two components. One is the Palestinians as innocent victims. The other is of Israelis as capricious victimisers. Both components will have to be confronted explicitly as just providing the litany of Israel's contributions to society will leave adherents of the narrative saying that it does not excuse Israel's victimization of the "innocent" Palestinians.

Overall theme. The main thrust of the following sections is that the essence of the conflict is, as Einat Wilf describes it, is the inability of the Arabs and Muslims to accept the fact that those whom they have historically treated as inferiors are now claiming equality and exercising power in their midst.

The way forward. Many in the West believe that the way to move forward on peace and to help the Palestinian people is to put pressure on Israel. On the latter issue, even many supporters of Israel concur, with the response being only to limit the help given to the Palestinian people if the cost to Israel is too high. Call attention to facts that complicate this narrative. For instance, visit Israeli Arabs like Ali Salam and Gabriel Nadaf who can show what genuine cooperation with Israel can yield. Visit one of get-togethers of Palestinian leaders like Sheik Jabari with the settlers to show that the settlements are not an unambiguous hindrance to Palestinian aspirations.

Media coverage. Bring in Mattie Friedman and Mark Lavie to identify what issues are systematically buried by the media's code of omertà and devise strategies to create scenes that would force those issues onto the media radar screen.

Finally, avoid simply asserting that their narrative is wrong. Simple assertions that the narrative is wrong will be dismissed. Instead, call attention to uncontrovertable facts that challenge the narrative and force them to bob and weave to reconcile the narrative with those facts.

An undertold story

Sar Shalom

The explanation for the Jewish connection to Eretz Yisrael is typically based on the accounts of the Bible. Often, this line of argument would end with the Bible, or to paraphrase Ruth Calderon, goes from Tnakh to Palmach. Unfortunately, arguing that the Bible and the Bible by itself justifies Israel's existence plays into the hands of those who purvey the narrative that a bunch of Poles opened the Bible sometime during the 19th century and concluded that what they read gave them the right to travel thousands of miles away and dispossess the native peoples of that land. Further, emphasizing legend, as opposed to history, enables Abbas to counter with his own legends, such as Palestinian descent from the Jebusites. After all, his legends can't be readily disproved if one doesn't look at the record in between the time of those legends and today.

It is the historical record in between the legendary accounts of the Bible the advent of modern Zionism, for which there is no parallel Palestinian claim that can be spun, that distinguishes our claim to the land from that of the Palestinians. It is the redaction of the Mishnah in the early 3rd century and the Palestinian Talmud in the early 5th century that demonstrated the continuing connection of the Jews to Eretz Yisrael after the Bar Kochba revolt. It is the generations of Masoretes and paytanim in Tiberias that demonstrates the post-Talmudic connection of the Jews to Eretz Yisrael. It is the settlements established throughout the centuries and supported by Jews in the diaspora that demonstrates the connection of the Jews to Eretz Yisrael after the Crusades.

All of these are mentioned every now and then. However, they are not mentioned nearly often enough. As a start, whenever the Biblical connection to the land is mentioned, mention some components of the post-biblical connection as well. Whenever Abbas mentions his supposed descent from the Jebusites or Canaanites, mention how we maintained our connection to the land between the 3rd and 15th centuries and ask how his people maintained any sort of connection during that time period.

It's the narrative stupid, western version

Sar Shalom

Vic at Abu Yehuda posted this week how the core of the situation with the Palestinians is the narrative. He is right in identifying the Palestinians' narrative driving their national movement's decisions. However, in addition to our narrative and the Palestinians' narrative, we also have to focus on the West's narrative.

Just as the Palestinians' narrative drives them to pursue "revolution until victory," the West's narrative drives its actions on the diplomatic plane. Unfortunately, the West has mostly adopted the Palestinians' narrative. The West might reject Holocaust denial and disregard anything from Muhammad's lifetime, but they swallow the notion of "a proud culture rooted in the land, dispossessed by foreign invaders who have no connection with it" hook, line and sinker, with a possible exception for the part about lacking any connection to the land. As a result, there is no limit to what is seen as normal to demand from Israel in the way of concessions, because after all, Israel is responsible for the mess to begin with. Likewise, the Palestinians' lack of responsibility for creating the conflict absolves them from any responsibility for their current actions, hence nothing they say or do now draws a peep from any of the Western pooh-bahs.

A consequence of this is that the Palestinians can realistically think that they have no chance to militarily destroy Israel, but that they can suborn the West to deliver Israel to them on a silver platter the way Chamberlain did with Czechoslovakia. Therefore, the fight has to be over what will the West believe the conflict is about. If the West were to convey that denying the peoplehood of the Jews or the centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish people is unacceptable, then the Palestinians will learn that they will not get Israel delivered to them on a silver platter and be forced to adapt.

A final note is that declared "support" for Israel by political candidates means nothing. One thing we can count on is that they will make anodyne statements declarations of such support. What is more important is what is their narrative. Do they believe that there is some form of dispossession that must be undone, or do they believe that the conflict is about the Arab/Muslim drive to restore the Pact of Umar? The policies will follow.

Surprise, surprise. JStreet U officer supports Black Lives Matter platform on Israel

Sar Shalom

{Also published at Jews Down Under.}

Tablet Magazine ran a few great takedowns of Black Lives Matter's platform as it concerns Israel. Unfortunately, they were followed by an article by Daniel May, a past Director of JStreet U, essentially saying that Israel's occupation policy is responsible for BLM's platform. While nearly every paragraph of May's deserves criticism, in particular his parroting of Haaretz's lies, I'd like to focus on his original sin. In the final paragraph, May writes:

Palestine will never advance so long as Jews deny the cost of Zionism. The Jewish nation’s independence was won only through the dispossession of another nation.

Everything in the case against "the Occupation" stems from the accusation the Jewish sovereignty was won by dispossessing another nation. From the dispossession narrative comes the "right to resist" which justifies Palestinian terror and, with such actions being justified, delegitimizes Israel's countermeasures. Hence we see the one-sided description from JStreet and their ilk.

To understand dispossession as it pertains to the "Palestinians," consider a counterfactual from American history. Suppose that when the Pilgrims came to Massachusetts (for simplicity, I will be using present-day names for places), the population of Indian tribes native to Massachusetts was small. However, just before then, a handful of tribes from Quebec had started migrating to Massachusetts and accelerated during the Pilgrims' lifetimes. Subsequently, the Pilgrims' descendants stopped the inflow from Quebec and imposed population controls on the Indian population in Massachusetts, affecting the Quebec tribes because they were the larger presence. Would such an action constitute dispossession for the Quebec tribes? Such is the case with the Palestinians.

While it is true that Arabs were the majority of the population of the southwest Levant before the advent of Zionism, it does not follow that all non-Jewish population change was the result of natural growth. In the decades before the first Aliya, the Ottomans started moving population from other parts of its empire to the southwest Levant. A larger impetus for immigration was the economic development created by the Zionists. The result is that as the Jewish population rose due to Zionist immigration, so did the Arab population due to Arab immigration. Neither the Ottomans nor the British attempted to document how many Arabs thus entered Palestine. Thus, we have no reliable numbers for how many entered or what percentage of those claiming to be Palestinian have actual ties to the southwest Levant from before the first Aliya. Thus, the dispossession narrative claims that denying sovereignty to immigrants from Arabia and Egypt is dispossessing those immigrants.

A larger flaw in the dispossession narrative is common accounts miss in how the conflict started, where "how the conflict started" means what changed from when there was relative calm. An example of the politically correct understanding of what changed between then and now comes from Vox's explanation of the conflict from back in January. According to the narrator of that clip, prior to 1870, the population was mostly Muslim and Christian with a small Jewish minority. Feathers were ruffled as Zionism, responding to issues in Europe, sent a large influx of European Jews to Palestine, fundamentally changing the nature of the land to those who had been living there previously.

The facts included in that narrative are accurate, however, it excludes other facts which are critical to understanding what changed. As mentioned above, one of those facts is Arab immigration. However, there is also the matter of relations between Jews and Muslims prior to the advent of Zionism. To understand this, it is necessary to go back to the 1830's when the Ottoman Empire sought European help to reclaim Palestine from Egypt. The condition for that help was an end to enforcing the Pact of Umar. After the Ottoman Empire regained Palestine, the Christians went about their lives ignoring the restrictions of the Pact, confident that Europe had their backs if the Ottomans would seek to impose consequences while the Jews voluntarily submitted because they had no major power backers. The Muslims thus loved the Jews because they gave the deference due to the master faith while hating the Christians for spurning the deference with impunity. A few decades later, Zionism introduced European and other Jews to the southwest Levant. The European Jews brought with them the ideals of the Enlightenment, ideals which they felt Europe failed to uphold towards them, and thus refused to abide by the humiliation engendered by the Pact. With that, any warm feelings the Muslims had for the Jews evaporated. While not all Arabs, or even all Muslim Arabs, in the Levant valued having the Jews display "proper deference" over economic opportunities, that began to change after the British appointed Amin al-Husseini as mufti of Jerusalem. Husseini used that position as a platform from which to promulgate that not doing so was treason to the Muslim umma, which combined with the honor-shame culture of the Arab world led to positions we see today.

The important takeaway is what George Orwell taught decades ago, "He who controls the past controls the future." If we ignore insinuations that Israel was created through the dispossession of the Palestinians, then we are ceding control of the past to the post-Zionists and the Palestinianists, and therefore we cede to them the future, that is the litany of "Occupation" perpetuating the dispossession from a century ago.

Things that we must insert into the narrative

Sar Shalom

Last week, Vic blogged about what we have to do in order to assert our self-respect in public diplomacy. Included in that blogpost were four messages that must be promulgated, according to Vic, no matter what the liberal intelligentsia says. I would like to suggest some different messages that we must promulgate in order to change the terms of the debate.

1. The conflict is about Arab irredentism for the social order that existed in the Levant until the mid-19th century.
2. A sufficient number Palestinian Arabs must be allowed sovereignty over themselves in order to allow Israel to remain a democratic and Jewish state
3. The Palestinian Arabs have no inherent right to any land that is not required for item 2.

The first point is the most critical one. If the public believes that the Palestinians are fighting for self-determination, then we will be behind the 8-ball in any attempt to explain Israel's actions. However, if the public believes that their real motives are restoring the old social order and that claims about denying historical rights are nothing more than a smokescreen to justify doing so in whole or in part, we will have a freer hand to deny their demands. Convincing the public that that is so is no small matter. The point should be that the only solution that would satisfy the Palestinian national movement would be for the Jews be accept their place as good little dhimmis and that anyone who supports that solution is a racist.

The first step would be to repeat the history that relates what that social order was. This must be accompanied by how the mufti Amin al-Husseini labored against the erosion of that social and and promulgated that tolerance of that erosion constitutes treason. The second part is critical because taking the first step without the second would seem like holding a grudge for what the Palestinians' ancestors did, which can never be ameliorated, when the reality is that today's Palestinians seek to do as their ancestors did. This is something which can change and changing it would be a necessary condition to bring peace.

Point 2 answers the critics, who claim to be Israel's friends, yet insist that Israel must capitulate to their demands because they claim there is no other way to preserve Israel as both a Jewish state and a democracy, most recently by Joe Biden and the JStreet gala. Palestinian sovereignty in Areas A and B would provide that, meaning that no amount of Israeli activity in Area C would endanger Israel's status as either Jewish or democratic. Point 3 challenges those demanding that Israel do more than what is required to answer point 2 to say why they do so.

Moving forward to change the narrative about racism

Sar Shalom

As others have noted, the Arabs' strategy to eradicate Israel has evolved first from a conventional military campaign, to a terror campaign, and now into a delegitimization campaign in order to enlist the world to eradicate Israel on their behalf. An essential component of this delegitimization campaign is that Israel is a European colonial creation which has developed into an Apartheid state. Those who have followed my writings would know that I have often argued to counter the Apartheid smear with references to how Zionism does for the Jews what Reconstruction tried to do for the freedmen. One objection to this approach is that historians will hesitate to accept the analogy. As this is a realistic obstacle to advancing a narrative of emancipation of Middle Eastern Jewry, I would like to suggest an alternative tack that could open the door to such acceptance, but would avoid openly challenging the precious narrative of Palestinian pristine victimhood, at least to start, and thereby avoid raising defense mechanisms to counter the effort.

One thing to understand about the Apartheid smear is that it relies on Zionists being portrayed of European colonists. That is what separates the claimed Apartheid in Israel from the genuine Apartheid in much of the rest of the Middle East. That is, while other Middle Eastern countries have separate castes based on religion, gender, or "Palestinian" status all of those are imposed by natives and it is thus tolerated if not supported. However, in Israel the differences are imposed by those whom the West has dubbed "European colonists," and that is what must be opposed. However, in order for the designation of European colonialist, and subsequently that those colonialists are practicing Apartheid, to be accepted, it has to be accepted that the Israeli Jews are, well, European. Fortunately for those continuing the war against Israel by diplomatic means, and unfortunately for the truth, this is an easy sell for much of the West. Most Americans and Europeans do not know any non-European Jews, nearly everything presented about Jewish history and culture is European-Jewish history and culture, and most of the public figures from Israel are White Ashkenazi Sabras with Protexia.

To counter the misperception that Jewry is European-Jewry we need to promote cultural interest stories about Mizrahi Jewry on a regular basis. I have in mind Simon Schama's miniseries from a few years ago The Story of the Jews. Such a production would start by asking what you think of when you think of Jews and show images associated with Ashkenazi Jews. It would then proceed to show another side of Jewry coming from the Middle East. Initial stages should focus on Middle East Jewry on its own terms without calling attention to the abuse perpetrated by surrounding populations on them. Such attention will alert the defense mechanisms of pristine victimhood meme and hinder knowledge from seeping in to the general consciousness that could engender receptiveness to the notion that Middle Eastern Jews deserve protection. The next stage would highlight the connection between European Jewry and the Jews of Palestine, both in terms of movement from Europe to Palestine and of European support for the Jewish community in Palestine. Once it is no longer assumed that the Jews had abandoned and forgotten their homeland, either after the Babylonian exile or after the Bar Kochba revolt, the privations of the Pact of Umar would be introduced. The defense mechanisms for the pristine victimhood meme would go up at that point, but by then common knowledge of Middle Eastern Jewish history could parry those mechanisms much as knowledge of the Holocaust used to parry questions about Israel. Finally, education about Middle Eastern Jewish history would cover the reintegration of European Jewry into the Middle East in the various aliyah waves.

Such an effort may or may not persuade a wider audience about the reality of the Arabs' motives. However, it would not create any reason to support their efforts and thus would have little risk. Further, it would educate us about a much neglected part of our people.

We must change the narrative. What are we going to do in order to do so?

Sar Shalom

This past week, Malanie Phillips wrote an article on the need to change the narrative surrounding the conflict over Israel (h/t Elder). Those who have followed my writings for some time should not be surprised that I find Phillips to be absolutely correct. The issue is, what should be done in order to address the narrative.

The first step in addressing the narrative is to identify it. To paraphrase Phillips, the root of the western narrative

is that the "Palestinian people" are the original inhabitants of the land. Whatever justification Europe's behavior towards its Jews, most notably during the Holocaust, created, the Zionists displaced those original inhabitants in creating their state. As such, their rights are limited to a portion of the land and the "Palestinians" are merely "resisting" to reclaim what the Zionists took beyond their entitlement.

Further statements are derivatives of this root narrative. Examples include John Kerry saying

There’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years. Now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing.

and the equation of the deaths of Palestinian terrorists killed in the act of perpetrating terror with those of their victims.

To analogize, the root narrative is like rotting vegetables, the derivative narratives are like vermin, and activities like BDS are like the diseases that the vermin carry. No matter how often you call the exterminator, if rotting vegetables are strewn about, the vermin will come back and come back and spread whatever diseases they carry. Similarly, if the Jews did steal the land from the native Palestinians, then it is truthy that Israel is gobbling up land for settlements. And if Israel is gobbling up land and no appeals to moral conscience are inducing a change, then BDS may be necessary to push Israel's hand. However much we knock down the BDS efforts, if it is truthy that Israel is gobbling up land, the BDSholes will find fertile ground with the public and as long as the public believes that Jews are not indigenous to the southwest Levant while the Palestinians are, Israel's gobbling up land will be truthy.

One observation about supplanting the current western narrative is that doing so will require repeated airing of a counter-narrative. One means of doing so would be for someone who is sympathetic to Israel and has a position in the major media to write regularly about the history of the Jews of Palestine. An alternative approach would be for a public official to push information that challenges this narrative, which the media would be forced to cover. As of now, this is unlikely because no politician faces any pressure to do so. This is because currently the pro-Israel community's definition of a friend of Israel is one who is at least non-belligerent about the "settlements," a measure by which Obama is notably poor, or who supports providing arms to Israel, by which Obama is imperfect but reasonably good. Those two objectives are altogether appropriate objectives, focusing on them ignores what drives the constant challenges on those fronts. The message we have to tell our lobbyists who press our case to the politicians and decide whom to support is "It's the narrative stupid!"

If we were to evaluate politicians based on their contributions to the narrative, the question becomes what contribution we should demand from those wishing to be viewed as friends of Israel. There are two general categories of what we should wish to see promoted. One is the general history of the Jews of the southwest Levant. Critical topics would be Jewish history of the region in all major time periods and connections maintained between the diaspora and the Land of Israel. A supplement to this would be that the Arabs have no record of any kind showing any sort of connection to the southwest Levant. The second is the social order between Jews and Muslims in 19th century Palestine. These two categories provide a one-two punch against the prevailing western narrative. The former demonstrates that long before anyone migrated from Arabia to the southwest Levant, Jews were building there culture there and that they never fully vacated the region. The latter sets up a counterclaim regarding the reasons for Palestinian "resistance." Our goal should be that instead of seeing such "resistance" being based on "statelessness," that it is based on irredentism for the 19th century social order. In order to make that claim, it is necessary to describe what the Palestinians are irredentist for. The history of the 19th century provides that.

What to look for from the candidates (cont.)

Sar Shalom

In my previous post about the presidential race, I wrote about what messages the presidential candidates should promote irrespective of what policies they would implement if elected. This post will look at what we can expect in the way of policy from whoever get elected. However, looking directly at what any candidate would do if elected is unlikely to be feasible because the candidates are unlikely to say anything more than that they would support Israel and may or may not include work towards a two-state solution. This type of pledge is so banal in checking off key constituencies that it tells us nothing about what any candidate would do if elected.

Yet, even without specifying exact policies or how hard they would push for a peace process, there is something which would provide a clue to the parameters bounding their potential policy: their narrative. For instance, if a candidate's justification for Israel's existence starts at Wannsee and ends at V-E Day, that candidate's sympathy for Jewish connection to any part of Jordan's 1949-conquest would probably be different than if the justification stems from 13 centuries of the Islamic equivalent of Jim Crow. Similarly, if the plight of the Palestinians is compared to that of the Kurds today or of the Jews until 1948, it would create more justification to push for their maximalist aims than if their plight is compared to that of the Hutus in post-genocide Rwanda.

While the candidates are unlikely to address the issue in such terms on their own, they would also have less reason to evade questions about the narrative than they would questions like, "Under what circumstances would you withhold your Security Council veto in protection of Israel?" Any chance of the Jewish media prodding in that direction?

Traditional hierarchies and perceptions of the Middle East

Sar Shalom

In a blog post, Paul Krugman wrote about a unifying theory of what leads to broad spectrum of ideologies on both the right and the left. The theory he adopts is that the position one takes on any issue is generally determined by one's position on relating to traditional social hierarchies. If one believes in challenging traditional social hierarchies, that would lead to one set of policy positions, and a set of opposite positions would result from a belief in supporting traditional social hierarchies.

The examples Krugman offers are social insurance and social policy (gay marriage and the like). However, in principle, this could also apply to the Middle East. However, applying this principle to the Middle East would require first identifying what is meant by "traditional social hierarchy."

For much of the Left, there is only one "traditional social hierarchy" that matters in international relations, and that is of Europe dominating everyone else. Thus, if one views international relations through the lens of whether or not to support European world domination, a supporter would side with Israel while a challenger would side with the Palestinians. Hence, we see that much of the Right, which tends to support traditional hierarchies, sides with Israel while much of the Left, which challenges traditional hierarchies, sides with the Palestinians.

However, there are other traditional social hierarchies in play in international affairs. Within the Middle East, there is the region's internal traditional social hierarchy which placed believers at the top, Jews on the bottom, and Christians occupying a station any place in between. Viewing international relations through this lens, supporters of the Middle East's traditional hierarchy would side with the Palestinians while challengers of that hierarchy would side with Israel. Thus we see that right-wing racists like David Duke support the Palestinians while left-wingers with a perspective on Middle Eastern history like Paul Berman support Israel.

A further observation is that it is very difficult to oppose both traditional social hierarchies. Nearly any action taken to challenge Eurocentric hierarchy would have the effect of buttressing, in actuality if not by intent, the Middle East-centric hierarchy. This provides an explanations for an observation Elder of Ziyon made some time ago that leftist Israel-haters take great pains to emphasize that they have nothing against Jews while rightist Israel-haters are open about their Jew hatred. Support of the Middle East-centric hierarchy is inherently judeophobic. From the Left, hatred of Israel is not motivated supporting that hierarchy, even if their actions inevitably lend it a boost. In fact, anti-racism gets to the heart of their identity. Thus, they circle the wagons to defend their anti-racist self-image by asserting that their motives have nothing to do with the support to the Middle East-centric hierarchy that they invariably provide. In contrast, the right-wing supporters of the Middle East-centric hierarchy have no problem with the judeophobia that that hierarchy entails and thus have no need for the mental gymnastics to deny it.

Another example of which traditional hierarchy to select as one's lens comes from Peter Beinart. When he was promoting Crisis of Zionism, he said at interviews that the Zionist establishment was lecturing the younger generation that they should sacrifice liberalism on the altar of Zionism and discovered that their children had instead sacrificed Zionism on the altar of liberalism. This statement only makes sense through the lens of the Eurocentric hierarchy. The typical response to Beinart has been to emphasize everything that has happened in European Jewish history or the contributions that Israel has made to the world. For the likes of Beinart, this can all be summarized as saying that there should be an exception where the Eurocentric hierarchy should be tolerated.

However, we do not need to imprison ourselves in this lens. Viewed through the lens of the Middle East-centric hierarchy, there is nothing incompatible between Zionism and liberalism. However, view world affairs through this lens requires a greater scope of history than is required for the Eurocentric hierarchy. Thus, we need to teach history sufficiently to identify the pillars of the Middle East-centric hierarchy.

The Middle East is not the only region where the Eurocentric hierarchy is opposite the local-centric hierarchy. Indeed, in any non-western locale with an illiberal social hierarchy, challenging that hierarchy would be imposing Western values and thus establishing the Eurocentric hierarchy. Hence Ayaan Hirsi Ali who was a clear victim of the social hierarchy of her native Somalia is vilified by the Left because her escape from that culture exemplifies the triumph of European values of those of her native Somalia. Similarly, today's young Britons today question the authority of their country to outlaw sati in India on the grounds that they should not impose their values on other cultures.

Reconstruction, cont.

Sar Shalom

In today's "Disunion" blog at the New York Times, there is a post about how the South continued to fight for white hegemony after the surrender Appomattox Courthouse. One topic of the post was the debate over what exactly were the terms of the Appomattox surrender. A further issue was the southern notion that the result of the war was the triumph of “might over right.”

A notable passage in the post is

Trafficking in the toxic myth that congressional Reconstruction was a time of white Southern prostration and vindictive “black rule,” Gordon claimed, “our people feel that the faith which was pledged to them has been violated.” Southerners were “disturbed” by the congressional program, “deprived of rights which we had inherited — which belonged to us as citizens of the country.” If they had known what indignities and disabilities awaited them, Gordon surmised, Confederates would not have surrendered on April 9, 1865.

With changing a few words here and there, this passage would become

Trafficking in the toxic myth that Zionism is a force for Arab prostration and vindictive “Jewish rule.” “Our people feel that the faith which was pledged to them has been violated.” Arabs were “disturbed” by the Zionist program, “deprived of rights which we had inherited — which belonged to us as natives of the land.”

Altogether, that is not too off from the case that is put forward against Israel.

Returning to the point about how the American Civil War represented the triumph of “might over right,” which originates in General Lee's farewell address to his troops, I recall Einat Wilf's reflections on what led to her present views of the conflict. Among Wilf's points was her characterization of her Arab interlocutors at various “peace” gatherings. She described their position as “we get it, you're here, you're powerful,” and then over dinner they would say things like, “the people are not really a people, you're only a religion” and “your whole connection to this land is made up, it's a fabricated story that you created in order to take our land” with the conclusion that they reject any Jewish right to be in the Land of Israel.

Wilf continued on the asymmetry of moderation between the Israeli and the Palestinian side. On the Israeli side, a moderate recognizes the right of the Arab residents between the Mediterranean and the Jordan to have self-determination. However, the Palestinians considered moderates by the West “do not recognize my right. They recognize my might, but what happens the day when I no longer have might?”

When the South surrendered to Northern “might” without recognizing Northern right, the result was that as soon as that might was retracted, the South reimposed social order that had existed previously. Similarly, if the Palestinians recognize only Israeli might without recognizing any Jewish right, then as soon as Jewish might would be retracted, they will seek to overturn everything Israel has built up. This is why there can never be a just and equitable peace as long as the Palestinians reject Jewish rights to live in their ancestral land and that any notion that peace can break out by simply forcing “adequate” concessions from Israel without getting the Palestinians to recognize Jewish rights is simply fantasy.

Mizrahi Reconstruction

Sar Shalom

Back in June, Matti Friedman published an article at Mosaic titled "Mizrahi Nation" contrasting the prevalent Eurocentric narrative of the rise of the State of Israel with a narrative centered on Middle East-Jewry. While I don't have anything to add to his history of Mizrahi Jews, there was one item missing in the parallel between the two narratives. In describing the Eurocentric narrative, Friedman related that many respond to the narrative of oppressed European Jews reestablishing themselves in their ancient homeland by likening European settlement of the Levant to white colonization of Rhodesia. However, there is no external reference for the Mizrahi-centric narrative. I would like to suggest that the appropriate external comparison should be Reconstruction following the American Civil War.

Making such an effort would require two things. One, it would be necessary to have a chance to convince people that the Jewish reclamation of the Land of Israel resembles Reconstruction. Second, convincing people of that notion would have to have an effect on their perceptions of the conflict. The second component is the simpler one. While there is a risk that such an association would alienated some of our right-wing allies who cling to the old Confederacy, the gains among liberals could be substantial. For any liberal who is convinced that supporting the Palestinians against Israel is equivalent to supporting the Klan in its efforts to undermine Reconstruction, it would be game over with us winning that liberal. For the Jew-hatred über alles crowd, there are only two responses to a comparison between Reconstruction: they could assert that while enfranchising the freed Negroes post-Civil War was a positive goal, disenfranchising the whites in service of that goal went too far, or they could circle the wagons to try to prevent the notion that Zionism is like Reconstruction from gaining traction.

This raises the issue of how bring traction to the Reconstruction-Zionism nexus. A start would be to note what is in common between all three of Reconstruction, Apartheid and present-day Israel: they all feature(d) one group that is/was empowered and one that is/was disenfranchised. The task would be to highlight the differences between Reconstruction and Apartheid and pose the question as to whether present-day Israel is more like Reconstruction or like Apartheid. A few examples. Under Reconstruction, the empowered group was previously disenfranchised and the group that became disenfranchised was previously the overlords of those disenfranchised whereas under Apartheid the empowered group only shared the same space with the disenfranchised as the overlords. In Israel, if you take the perspective of the Mizrahi community, the empowered group was previously disenfranchised and the presently disenfranchised were their overlords back then. During Reconstruction, the disenfranchised began a full-press campaign of terror. While the ANC did occasionally commit acts of terror, there was nothing on the scale of the Klan. Needless to say, Israel is faced with a full-press campaign of terror. During Reconstruction, the southern whites never saw anything wrong with any savagery committed in resistance to Reconstruction, only in the North's calling attention to those crimes. In Israel today, the Arabs and their water-carriers never see any crime in any Arab act of savagery against the Jewish population, only in Jews' calling attention to what the Arabs are doing. A further comparison between Reconstruction and Zionism with no analog in Apartheid is the combination of the formerly locally disenfranchised with outsiders. In Reconstruction, this consisted of Northern carpetbaggers helping to enforce the newly established rights for the ex-slaves. In Zionism, this consisted of European Jews, not all of them Ashkenazic, developing a space where Mizrahi had the full rights of free men.

While there are similarities between Zionism and Reconstruction, the lack of any living memory of Reconstruction will make it difficult to make Reconstruction come to people's minds when they think of what is happening in the Levant. Further, it will take more than the sketchy connections I have outlined to withstand the attacks of those who would deny any connection at all cost. A more robust comparison will requiring delving more deeply into the history of Reconstruction. A few examples I could suggest would include The Bloody Shirt: Terror After the Civil War and After Lincoln: How the North Won the Civil War and Lost the Peace.

On Narratives and Tactics

Sar Shalom

A common refrain in the pro-Israel community is that the media are biased against Israel. Coverage of the recent fighting in Gaza has been such that even Gary Rosenblatt of The (NY) Jewish Week, who previously has been a staunch defender of the media against charges of bias, felt forced to admit that there was something untoward in the media's coverage of the conflict. In addressing the media's bias, it would help to look at how the narrative frames developed that lead to today's skewed coverage in order to develop our own strategy to counteract it.

Recently, Columbia Journalism Review recarried an article about The New York Times' coverage of Israel. Early in to that article was a vignette about how narratives at the Times changed from Israel as a scrappy upstart fending off those who would exterminate her to Israel as cruel overlord:

During the winter of 1974, Seymour Topping, the assistant managing editor of The New York Times, and his wife, Audrey, visited Jordan as part of a tour of the Middle East.

On their stops in Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, Topping often had to confront criticism that the Times’ coverage was too favorable to Israel. It was a familiar enough situation for him; to be the editor of the Times in charge of international coverage meant you were a magnet for complaints. They were usually about the paper, but sometimes about US policy, which foreigners often believed was refracted through the Times’ coverage.

In Jordan, King Hussein took a different approach: He arranged for the Toppings to visit a nearby Palestinian refugee camp. The visit affected Topping markedly—he saw both the squalor of the camp and the festering hatred of Israel—and he recounted afterwards that he realized he had not understood the role of the Palestinians in the region’s future until then.

What this episode demonstrates is that King Hussein caught on to a strategy that I have seen mentioned during my days following the DLC: if you want to convince the public to support you against your opponent, tell them something that they don't know about your opponent but would not like if they did. Before the West saw how the Palestinian refugees were living, the narrative was that the victims of the worst genocide from Europe were attempting to restart their lives in the face of nihilist opposition. The new information that Jordan presented to Topping showed that instead of the opposition to Zionism being nihilistic, there was an actual victim of Israel's birth. This led to a new narrative that the victims of Europe's worst genocide sought to rebuild their lives at the expense of innocent, as most westerners came to see them, others. Unfortunately, when this new narrative began to gel, our only response has been to reiterate the facts underlying our old narrative more loudly.

In the absence of facts supporting the Palestinians' claims, the facts underlying our narrative would carry the day. However, if the Very Serious People of the world think that the facts underlying the Palestinian narrative are more significant, no amount of telling our old narrative will change their perception. This applies equally to Holocaust and Hamas' rockets. What we need to do is to tell the Very Serious People something about the Israeli-Palestinian that they don't know, but would make them not like the Palestinian national movement if they did. Since the Very Serious People's love affair with Fatah is based on the belief that Fatah is the last-best hope for peace, the facts we reveal would have to undermine that notion. Further, the Very Serious People are loathe to admit that there is no hope for peace, so undermining the notion that Fatah is the last-best hope for peace will require showing that there is an alternate partner to get to peace.

Accordingly, the next time dignitaries (political candidates, media editors) visit Israel, instead of showing them what Israelis are living through under Hamas terror, show them genuine voices for peace on the Palestinian side. The first example should be a gathering of Sheikh Jabari with what the Very Serious People call "settlers." This information would serve two purposes. It would show that if Fatah is dethroned, that hope is not lost for attaining peace. Further, it would show that the "settlers," are an excuse for Fatah to refrain from making peace rather than a real obstacle, as proved by the willingness of Palestinians like Jabari to meet with them. Preferably, the dignitaries would witness one of these meetings in Jabari's home in Hebron, but if they are unwilling to go where Israel "has no right to be," the meeting should be moved to where the dignitaries would be willing to go to witness it. This could be followed by more similarly minded Palestinians, such as the followers of Mohammed Daoudi Dajani's Wasatia movement. However, more important would be to see how the Palestinian national movement reacts to the Palestinians who genuinely seek peace as is evident in the anti-normalization crusade.

Ultimately, the goal is to supercede the current narrative the way the Arabs got the current narrative to supercede the one that existed until 1967. The new narrative should be one which acknowledges that there is Palestinian suffering, but which attributes that suffering to the national movement using the people as pawns and that the people who actually are trying to help the Palestinian people do not measure their progress by how far they roll back Jewish aspirations.

A partially balanced evaluation of the conflict at Vox, but still 150° wrong (Part 2)

Sar Shalom

In my introductory post on Max Fisher's deconstruction of the "myths" about the Israeli-Arab conflict, I reviewed the one card that I agreed with and started presenting what is wrong in the others. In this post, I shall pick up, in order what is wrong with the remaining cards from Fisher's list of myths.

Card 2, The conflict is about religion

In and of itself, there is nothing wrong in stating that the conflict is something other than religion. Indeed, until the Islamists started turning on the the Christians, the Christians were united with the Moslems in opposing Jewish self-determination. Even today, many Christians-Palestinians are on the side of the Moslems, though there has been an awakening among some Palestinian-Christians, such as Christy Anastas and Gabriel Nadaf, that they are better off under Jewish-Israeli rule than under Moslem-Palestinian rule.

However, Fisher states that the conflict is "over secular issue of land and nationhood." In this statement, Fisher creates the impression that the Palestinians' objective is a positive one, as opposed to the negative goal of eliminating Jewish self-determination, whatever replaces it. For the most part, I discussed that in the last post, but in this card, Fisher added a few words about Jerusalem: "The long-divided city has, in its ancient center, Islam's third holiest site (the al-Aqsa mosque compound) located physically on top of the much older Temple Mount, the Western Wall of which is Judaism's holiest site." Contrary to Fisher's assertions in that paragraph, the Western Wall is not Judaism's holiest site, the Temple Mount is, and within the Temple Mount, the holiest site is the site where the Temple stood, though there is a degree of controversy of its exact location. One common feature at EoZ has been Moslem reactions to Jewish visits to the Temple Mount. What is that animates them so much? The Jews visiting do nothing to interfere with Moslem religious activities there nor do they disrespect it such as by playing soccer. Could it be Jews visiting the Temple Mount undermines their right to lord Islam's supremacy of Judaism just as barring Jews from sitting at the Western Wall did during the British Mandate era?

More egregious is "[t]he European Jews who first encouraged and organized mass Jewish migration to what we now call Israel" which writes out the the Middle Eastern and North African Jews who migrated to the Yishuv. Unlike their European coreligionists, many of these Jews were religious. The role of Jews from the East will be brought up further in Cards 3 and 4.

Card3, They've been fighting for centuries

It is true that there has not been open conflict between the Jews and the Arabs in the Levant for centuries in the same way that there was not open warfare between whites and negroes (the polite word of the era) between the end of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era.

However, Fisher claims that the conflict began in 1948, yielding that it can be as much as 100 years old, ignoring the anti-Jewish hostilities from the Levant that were present in the early 19th century. Fisher characterizes the pre-Zionism relations in the region as " those two religious groups have been coexisting in the region, for the most part peacefully, since Islam was first born in the 7th century." It is a short stretch from that to saying that Zionism destroyed the amicable relations between the Moslem and Jewish faiths that have been created through 12 centuries of patient effort by the good people of both faiths. It has planted hatred and suspicion where there has been heretofore friendship and understanding.

More egregious is Fisher's insinuation that the conflict started after the arrival of European Jews. The reality is that the 19th century was a time that saw numerous blood libels and other massacres across the Levant. The most notable instance was in Damascus in 1840 (which incidentally was the true spark for Zionism, albeit a spark that laid dormant until Herzl discovered it decades later after the Dreyfus affair). However, there were many other locations across the Levant where the blood libel manifested itself, Aleppo (1810, 1850, 1875), Beirut (1862, 1874), Safed (1834), Jerusalem (1847), Alexandria (1870, 1882), and others. The situation of the Jews was such that British diplomats saw that there might be a need to protect the Jews of the Levant. While much of the violence against the Jews was a result of the Ottoman authorites lacking the capacity to prevent, as opposed to with their blessing, and indeed plenty of it was perpetrated by the Christians, it demonstrates that anti-Jewish sentiment was well entrenched in the Levant by the 19th century.

Fisher goes on to characterize the Arab view of the Zionist project as European "colonial theft." A better characterization is that the Arabs were used to Jews in their midst who were willing to accept their inferior place in society. What the European immigrants represented were Jews who insisted on living in Palestine as equals. Early on, many of the fellahin would have been content to let the Jews come in and build the economy. However, many of the effendi were loathe to give up their privilege under the earlier system. One of their members, Amin el Husseini, threatened riots in order to induce the British to appoint him as Mufti in 1921. If there was any event that cast the die for the subsequent conflict, that was it. While most Arabs were unwilling to participate in violence against the Jews when Husseini took office, his promulgating that Arab honor required that Jews learn their proper place induced most of them to participate in the riots of 1929, less than decade after he assumed office, and set the seed for their intransigence which persists to today.

A final misconception of Fisher's is the role of the UN's 1947 partition plan. Following Fisher's reasoning, if the UN had not passed the partition plan, the Jews would have had no right to any of the land and partition only allocated a fraction of the land west of the Jordan for the Jews. The reality is that the League of Nations at the San Remo Conference allocated all of the land west of the Jordan (actually, it allocated more for the Jews, but included a clause that allowed Britain to reduce that amount, which Britain did invoke) and placed it under the British Mandate. What partition did was provide for the winding up of the Mandate and recommended that the Jews should yield a significant portion of the land allocated for them at the San Remo Conference in order to achieve peace with the Arabs. The Jews accepted this recommendation while the Arabs did not and responded by trying to take everything. They succeeded in taking part of what the UN suggested that the Jews should give them, with the Jews holding the rest and forming the State of Israel on it.

There were multiple categories of Arabs who left during the war. One was Arabs who had little connection to the land, such as those who arrived only a few years beforehand looking for work, who thus had no reason to stay in a war zone. Another was those heeded the call of the advancing Arab armies to vacate the area temporarily to facilitate the liquidation of the Jews, after which they could return. This group was augmented by Arabs who were forced by the Arab forces to join this exodus. Finally, there were Arabs who lived in towns and villages that gave sanctuary to the advancing Arab armies. This category was the only one that was forcibly removed by Israel. While the members of the final group were the only ones forcibly removed by Israel, the reality about them cast a cloud over all the others who left either voluntarily or because of Arab coercion, leading Israel to bar their reentry. Unlike all other refugee crises, outsiders saw this one as a bloody shirt to wave about Israel rather than a problem to solve, hence talk about permanent settlement of the Palestinian refugees outside of Israel has been verboten at the UN.

A partially balanced evaluation of the conflict at Vox, but still 150° wrong (Part 1)

Sar Shalom

Recently, Vox, a left-of-center news and analysis site, updated its explanation by Max Fisher of the Israeli-Arab conflict. While the collection of 11 cards correctly identifies several facts that would engender sympathy for Israel, overall, it feeds a narrative that circumscribes Jewish rights and sets Israel as the party to blame for not accepting that circumscription.

{Editor's note - Fisher's reference to "cards" is a pedagogical device he uses to denote each of his points of argument.}

I'll start with Card 7, the one card from the collection that I can endorse. It starts off

There is a common trope, especially on the left, that the Israel-Palestine conflict would end overnight if only the US were not so unflinching in its support of Israel, and instead used its influence to bring the conflict to an end.

The main points of this card are: the premises of that trope are the mistaken (the narrative of the card demonstrates that Fisher considers it mistaken) notion that Israel is fully responsible for the conflict, that American support is not (neither presently nor historically) as absolute as popular imagination would have it, and that pressure on Israel merely creates a sense of isolation which induces Israel to do the opposite. The author cites several facts supporting this position such as the lack of a close relation prior to 1973 and conflicts between Israel and the George H. W. Bush and Obama administrations. This card also did not include any reason to justify those administrations stoking conflict with Israel. Altogether, nothing objectionable.

The remaining cards all have issues in which they highlight issues that misdirect people or ignore others that would create needed context with the overall effect of facilitating unfavorable narratives regarding Israel. Some of the cards are problematic by their very premise, others are neutral or even Israel-supporting by their premise, but turn their premise in a direction that supports an Israel-detracting narrative. I'll address those cards in order over a series of posts.

Card 1 posits that the conflict is not as complex as it is made out to be. This is a premise which is on its surface neutral. Further, the three major supporting points are also neutral. Those points are that any point about the conflict requires knowledge of the relevant history in order to be properly understood, the two sides tend to shout their conflicting narratives, and that the two sides try to present the conflict as complex unless they are saying that their own side is right and the other wrong.

However, Fisher's main point in this card, "[a]t its most basic level, the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is over who gets what land and how that land is controlled," is at the root of why people think that all that's needed to solve the conflict is for Israel to give the Palestinians what is "rightfully" theirs. Proper evaluation of that assertion demonstrates Fisher's first supporting point, but contra Fisher in Card 3, the relevant history did not begin in 1947.

While Fisher might be accurate that Jewish objectives revolve around maximizing the amount of land under Jewish control, the Palestinian national movement is after the nihilistic goal of ending Jewish self-determination in any portion of the Middle East with who winds up in control being besides the point and promulgates that it is treason for any Palestinian to oppose that goal. Saying that one side has only nihilistic goals is anathema to most people who try to evaluate others fairly. However, just because a concept is anathema does not mean that it is false, although it does create reason to require justification before stating it that otherwise might not be required.

Needless to say, the Palestinian national movement would be at considerable advantage if westerners believe their objectives are positive, that is more land for the subjects' benefit, relative to westerners believing their objectives are negative. Thus we can not just go by what they tell western audiences. One alternative way to assess the Palestinian national movement's aims is to look at the history leading to its establishment. In the late Ottoman period, there were three categories of people: believers, equal infidels, and inferior infidels. The believers are those who like the Ottoman rulers accepted the faith of Islam. The equal infidels were those who while not accepting Islam, shared a faith with the rulers of others powers with whom the Ottoman rulers dealt on equal terms, that is to say the Christians. The inferior infidels were everyone else. Naturally, the Christians liked the distinction between equal infidels and inferior infidels because this gave them an opportunity to be accepted as equals. One result of this is that it was a Christian who founded the Baath Party and Christians were as much in the forefront of opposition to the UN Partition plan as were Muslims. As to why there would be such a distinction, this is speculative, but if every power on earth treats a particular group like clay in a potter's hand it is easier to claim that your ability to treat that group like clay in a potter's hand as due to divine will than for a group which is like the potter under other powers.

While such thinking could animate a political party, it would not naturally become a motivating factor for a larger public. However, this way of thinking did not have to take root naturally to become the dominant mode of thought for the masses. In 1921, the British appointed Haj Amin el Husseini as Mufti of Jerusalem and inflated his title to Grand Mufti. Husseini was a believer in the notion that Jews are to be like clay in a potter's hand and used his office of Grand Mufti to promulgate the notion that grant any higher status to Jews constitutes treason. To those of a European guilt-culture background, suggesting that a mode of belief is treason, particularly a mode of belief that liberal multiculturalism holds to be central to maintaining a peaceful world, would be simply meaningless bluster. But, in the honor-shame culture of Islam (analagous to Christendom in this instance, not Christianity), being told that an authority figure considers something treason means that you have to stop doing what the authority figure considers treason. Hence, the Mufti used the Islamic shame-culture to bring the rest of the Arab public to believe as he did that Jew are to be a subjugated people and should not be allowed to bring any relief for themselves from their subjugation.

The Arabs' negative goal would explain why they rejected every partition plan that has been proposed in the past. They did not want Jewish self-determination on less land, they wanted there to be no Jewish self-determination. It also explains their steadfast adherence to the right of return. Simply put, achieving the right of return is enough on its own to achieve an end to Jewish self-determination since the demographic effects of it would result in an Arab government in the next election which would be in position to dismantle Jewish sovereignty from within.

It is one thing to present evidence that the Palestinians' goal is positive rather than negative. The issue with mainstream thought is that it dismisses the possibility that their goal is in fact negative and refuses to entertain any evidence that it is so. If their goal is positive, then the peace process would be a viable way to reach an end of claims agreement. However, if their goal is in actuality negative, then a peaceful settlement leaving both sides standing would require either breaking the Palestinians of their negative goal or imposing a regime on them that does not hold by it since Israel surviving and holding so much as a postage stamp sized piece of land would constitute failure to achieve the negative goal. Wishing that the Palestinians' goal is positive, and thus amenable to some sort of peace process, does not make it so.

Future posts will respond to Cards 2 through 6 and 8 through 11.

Creating a Narrative

Sar Shalom

In a previous post, I asserted that the test of a candidate's pro-Israel bona fides should be judged on what that candidate's narrative surrounding Israel is rather than on how much that candidates avows that he or she will support Israel. I would like to put forward a suggestion for an alternate narrative that would be more robust against delegitimization efforts. As a contrast, it would help to look at the narrative I imputed to Obama:

...the Jews had a connection to the land of Israel long, long ago, but abandoned and forgot it in ancient history, only to remember it in the wake of the horrors of the 20th century in Europe. While the Jews achieved great things when they resettled their home, one cannot ignore that they had to displace a thriving Arab population in order to achieve it.

A few observations from this pernicious narrative: one, we have to deemphasize the eurocentric basis for Jewish self-determination. The eurocentric narrative makes it too easy to claim that "innocent" Palestinians are paying the price for what Europe did during World War II (or even what Europe did during the preceding centuries to those who would admit that). Secondly, we need to do more to establish our indigenousness to the location. References to the Bible in general, and Genesis in particular, may have their place in instilling devotion to the land among the faithful, but to convince others we will need to answer for the time between, in Ruth Calderon's words, Tnach and Palmach.

To counter the delegitimizers' narrative, I propose focusing on the Jews who stayed in the region and only mention Jews from outside insofar as they affect the Jews there. Accordingly, the European Zionists would be noted for augmenting the local Jewish population, rather than creating it from scratch as seems to be the belief among many. An additional objective for a new narrative would be to liken Arab opposition to Zionism to the racism that prevailed in the American South and South Africa.

My narrative would start with the second Judean rebellion during Hadrian's reign. In the wake of that rebellion, Hadrian expelled the Jews from the core of the newly-renamed Palestine, that is from the vicinity of Jerusalem, though the Jews continued to maintain communities in the north and in the south of Palestine, albeit smaller than the community that existed prior to the rebellion. In subsequent centuries, these communities completed the Mishna and the Palestinian Talmud under Roman and then Byzantine rule. Following the Arab-Islamic conquest of the region, the Jews continued on, developing the vocalization system for Hebrew and writing much of the liturgical poetry that we know today.

The Jews suffered under Muslim rule, resulting in many of the local Jews either leaving or becoming Muslim, but this suffering was less than what came as a result of the Crusades. Thus, Jews joined with the Muslim armies in overthrowing the Crusades. At some point, Arab-Muslim rule was transferred to Ottoman-Muslim rule. Under Ottoman rule, there were two types of Muslims to whom the Jews had to accommodate themselves. There were the Ottoman rulers who merely required that the people living in the province accept Ottoman rule. However, there was also the local, largely Arab, Muslim population that expected to maintain the social order from the time of the Arab conquest in which Muslims were on top and Jews below, and would violently enforce that on anyone who did not have protection from the Ottoman authorities. Over time, as the economy in Palestine deteriorated, both Jews and non-Jews left the province, with the Jewish population surviving on alms sent in from Jewish communities from outside.

There were two changes in the 19th century. First, Ottoman authority began to break down, with the result that the local Muslims, as well as the Christian population, had a freer hand to oppress the Jews, which was manifested in the Damascus blood libel of 1840 as well as pogroms across Syria-Palestina in the following decades. Second, the local Jews saw an influx of coreligionists, both from the wider Middle East and from outside the Middle East, who came for their own purposes. These immigrant Jews may have had a paternalistic attitude to the local Jews, but they were more sympathetic to the local Jews than they were to the local non-Jews. Further, they did not come to the region to be subservient the way the effendi saw as their due from any non-Muslim. Much in the way the elite whites of the American South kept the lower-class whites by keeping them focused on any n***s asserting too much dignity, the effendi diverted the fellahin's rage by redirecting it to the erosion of Arab and Muslim privilege.

This will need some work. In particular, I would like to work in how the conflict continues today because the Palestinian national movement (PNM) will accept nothing less than the restoration of Arab/Muslim privilege in the entirety of Dar-al-Islam and possibly Matti Friedman's point about how the PNM finds losing to the Jews to be more humiliating than losing to Christians because there is no history of Jews being equal on the diplomatic stage the way there was with the Christians.

Defining pro-Israel

Sar Shalom

Before long, the primaries will begin for the campaign to succeed Barack Obama. One of the issues in the upcoming campaign will be who is good for Israel. This assessment might seem simple, but that would be deceiving. The reality is that no viable candidate will claim to be anything but pro-Israel. With everyone vying to claim the pro-Israel mantle, how should we determine who would support Israel when it counts and who would bail out?

One part of this assessment would be a review of Obama's record. For all the legitimate gripes we have about Obama's record on Israel, it is important to note that on any matter of providing military equipment or assistance, Obama has never let Israel down acted comparably to prior administrations, including those regarded as friendly to Israel. Is this an attempt to exonerate Obama from the positions he has taken on Israel? No. Rather, this is an effort to bring in all the facts that a view of Obama's record on Israel needs to explain.

What Obama's military assistance to Israel shows is that when the Arabs wage conventional warfare or terror against Israel, Obama has Israel's back. We do not have to ask questions. However, those methods of attempting to destroy Israel are yesterday's war, corresponding to the Arabs' primary modus operandi from 1948-1973 and 1973-roughly 1995. Today's war, which started as far back as the 1960's but became more significant only recently, is the Arab effort to delegitimize Israel and thus gain international support to destroy Israel or at least to change the battlespace enough that they would be able to succeed in destroying Israel on their own through the previous two means. Obama's shortcomings come in his support, or lack thereof, for Israel in today's war.

Obama's response to the notion that he is not supporting Israel in the delegitimization war probably would be along the lines that what he does or says pales in comparison to the facts of what Israel does in terms of Israel's perceived legitimacy around the world. A brief counter response would be that by that reason, no one would ever have reason to hire a lawyer because lawyers only manage the presentation of the facts to the arbitrating body, jury, judge or arbiter, and have no effect on the underlying facts. A more detailed response is that it's the narrative framing the facts that affects whether Israel's enemies can gain traction in their delegitimization campaign through Israel's actions.

The most Israel-hostile narrative I can construct that is consistent with Obama's actions would be that the Jews had a connection to the land of Israel long, long ago, but abandoned and forgot it in ancient history, only to remember it in the wake of the horrors of the 20th century in Europe. While the Jews achieved great things when they resettled their home, one cannot ignore that they had to displace a thriving Arab population in order to achieve it. While such a narrative may or may not be consistent with Obama's thinking, if it is Obama's thinking, it would explain why he would think that there is land that "belongs" to the Palestinians and that it is "illegitimate" for Jews to live there.

Looking back, Obama's 2009 speech at Cairo University provided an indication of such a narrative. It was not anything he said there, whether his mention of the six million who died in the Holocaust, his rebuke of those who deny the magnitude of that event, or even his lament of the Palestinians' circumstances and his call to realize their aspiration for "dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own." Rather, it was what Obama did not say. Obama said nothing about the Jews' origins in the land of Israel. Obama said nothing about the development of Jewish culture in the land of Israel in any era between the compilation of the Mishna and the Enlightenment. Obama said nothing about the Jews sharing with the Muslims in the horrors perpetrated by the Crusaders or the oppression of the Jews by the Muslims. None of this is a reason to ignore the life current life circumstance of the Palestinian Arabs, but it does provide a reason to balance Palestinian dignity and opportunity with Jewish national fulfillment.

More important than what any candidate would permit Israel to do if elected, say in the realm of settling land that the world calls "expansionism," would be the narrative that the candidate offers as a candidate that would effect international perceptions, such as when Israeli construction is called "expansionism." Such a narrative would have to be based on fact rather simply stating an opinion that Israel is receiving a raw deal. This is because an opinion, such as George W. Bush's statement that Ariel Sharon is a man of peace, can be dismissed as indicating someone is out of touch with reality. However, accurate and germane facts cannot be dismissed.

In addition to the Jewish history of the Middle East, such a narrative would need to include a guideline for evaluating the conduct of today's fighting. For instance, we need someone who will say that anyone, whether Muslim, Christian or Jew, who attacks anyone, whether Muslim, Christian or Jew, who is neither a party to the conflict nor in the vicinity of active fighting is a terrorist. By the same token whenever any party party legitimately perceives a grievance and acts to interdict that grievance, the interdiction is not an act of terror, no matter how much collateral damage results. On a cases by case basis it may be possible to say that greater precaution should have been taken to prevent collateral damage, but insufficient precautions do not make the interdiction an act of terror. Likewise, a candidate could point out that we do not consider it to be good sportsmanship for an athlete to fake an injury in order to draw a penalty call from the referee and that it is time that the Palestinians stop receiving a free pass for doing the equivalent. Update: This post has been updated to reflect corrections in the comments.

Being Liberal and Zionist

Sar Shalom

As he began his campaign to reconsider what it means to support Israel, Peter Beinart described the problem facing the Jewish community thusly, in asking the next generation to sacrifice its liberalism on the altar of Zionism, the next generation instead is sacrificing Zionism on the altar of liberalism. This raises the question of what does Beinart mean by liberalism, and does he mean the same thing by liberalism in both parts of the proposition. As an extreme case, substituting these definitions of liberalism would convert Beinart's statement to this, the establishment is asking the next generation to sacrifice its notion that the Palestinians are humans on the altar of Zionism and instead the next generation is instead sacrificing Zionism on the altar of accepting every claim the Palestinians make in the course of their narrative.

Herein lies the crux of the Zionist-liberal, that is of the leftists who don't come out and claim to be anti-Israel, platform, they conflate recognition of the Palestinians as humans with acceptance of their narrative and the facts they cite to support it, using the same term to describe both.

Beinart probably would deny that liberalism requires accepting the Palestinian narrative without question. However, his actions demonstrate something else. Two examples demonstrate this. One is Beinart's citation for praise of the Israelis protesting the eviction of the al-Kurd and other families in Sheikh Jarrah for what Beinart calls making another plot available for Jewish settlers. Here, Beinart is clearly accepting the Palestinian narrative that the disputed properties in Sheikh Jarrah belong to the al-Kurd and other Arab families. However, this claim can be independently checked. According to Wikipedia, the issue is one of whether or not the Jewish deed from the late 19th century is valid. Further inquiry would show that since 1967, the Israeli courts recognized that the disputed properties in Sheikh Jarrah are owned by Jews, but held that the Arab residents there would be able to retain their residence by paying rent to the owner. However, in the 00's the residents received word that the Jewish ownership deeds were invalid and stopped paying rent. That led to the court case and ultimately the Israeli Supreme Court ruling that the deeds were valid. When the Supreme Court ruled on the ownership of the properties and the tenants continued to withhold rent, they were evicted.

If Beinart want to make the case that the Israeli courts erred in ruling that the Jewish deeds are valid, any facts supporting that claim would be welcome. The issue is that Beinart does not see that the Jewish deeds have to be recognized. Instead he latches onto his frame that Jews are gobbling up land and the investigation into any issue touching on the matter ends when it comes across the first fact consistent with that frame. The issue is Beinart's accepting the Palestinian narrative, and their factual claims supporting it, even when externally verifiable information can be compared against it.

A second area where Beinart accepts the Palestinian narrative irregardless of externally verifiable data concerns Susiya. The issue that Beinart raises in Susiya is that Israel refuses to give the Palestinians permits and then when the Palestinians build in Susiya without the permits that Israel withholds, Israel tears down the structures. What Beinart misses is that Susiya is in a part of Area C not far from Area A where Israel exercises no control over the Palestinians' right to build. Further, aerial photos from 15 years ago show that there was no historical community where the Palestinians are trying to build now. Instead of trying to satisfy their need for housing, which can be done within Area A, or reestablishing an historical community, which doesn't exist, the Palestinians are trying to establish facts on the ground in order to force a change in the border between Area C and Areas B/C.

By all means, we should not let our support for Israel to cause us to forget that the Palestinians are humans. This means that when there are genuine outrages committed by our side, such as "price-tag" attacks committed by Jews (that is, not actions done by the Arabs to frame the Jews), we must condemn the actions. However, we must also be vigilant in not allowing recognition of the Palestinians' humanity to be conflated with accepting every claim they make. Given their pattern of disingenuousness, both in terms of presenting details that did not happen and of obscuring details that would change a reasonable person's understanding, we should press that Palestinian allegations not be automatically accepted at face value.