The recent brouhaha over remarks by Helen Thomas regarding Jewish influence in American political life has again raised the hoary old argument that Arabs cannot be anti-Semitic because they are Semites. This unworthy semantic game either deliberately elides the point about anti-Jewish sentiment or stems from a profound ignorance of the history and meaning of the term anti-Semitism. There are many important points that need to be made about this matter. First of all, anti-Semitism is not the optimal term for anti-Jewish sentiment, among other things because there are other Semites than Jews, but it is the one we have, and comes with a long history and a well-established meaning. Rather than critiquing the term or coining a neologism to substitute for it, speakers of English should simply understand the term's history and commonly accepted definition and use it accordingly.

Much the same case can be made about the also highly questionable term Islamophobia, which has a much shorter history but which I argue we are also stuck with and might as well simply define accurately and use properly rather than dismiss or attempt to replace. Salman Rushdie and others I respect, and some who I do not, have suggested that because the term Islamophobia might be, and in some cases clearly is, used by ultra-sensitive religious types to try to inhibit criticism of, challenges to or satire against Islamic religious ideas and practices, the term should be dispensed with altogether. My point for a long time has been that we obviously need a clear term to describe the very specific set of ideas that inform fear and hatred of Muslims and that have little or nothing to do with actual opinions about real Islamic doctrine and practice. We have that term, for better or worse, and it is Islamophobia, and we should define and use it accurately rather than obfuscate, shun or replace it.

The same has to be said about anti-Jewish sentiment. Clearly we need a word to describe this very complex and in many cases very old set of ideas, and in English the term is anti-Semitism. Whatever we think about whether either Islamophobia or anti-Semitism are optimal terms or not, we are stuck with both of them. And after all, language is inherently unstable and there is always a huge gap between the signifier and signified, and between what the author of a set of words intends to communicate and what is understood by its recipients. There is no solution to this conundrum that is inherent in language and we simply have to live with it, so in the long run there is no word that can clearly convey a specific idea in a stable or containable manner and the best we can hope for is to have the widest possible commonly accepted understanding of what these terms mean and use and receive them with as much precision as possible.

Anti-Semitism is not the antonym of Semite or Semitism. It has a very specific history, and everyone who discusses it or is engaged in contemporary debates involving Jews, and those involving Israel and the Middle East, has an obligation to have at least a passing familiarity with it. The term anti-Semitism emerged in the middle of the 19th century, when in fact the only Semites with any kind of strong cultural, economic or political presence in Western society were Jews, and it was therefore universally understood as referring specifically to them. Anti-Semitism is essentially and historically a Western and Christian phenomenon, although it has never been strictly limited to such societies, and in its contemporary usage it refers basically to two distinct but overlapping strands of anti-Jewish Western thought.

The first is essentially religious and folkloric anti-Jewish sentiment in Christian Europe that largely predates the modern era. It's based on accusations of deicide, the rejection of Christ, the supposed connection of Jews with malicious spiritual and demonic forces, myths about Jewish practices such as the blood libel, defamation of Jewish religious texts and so forth. These religious and folklore traditions are essentially rooted in Christian antipathy towards Jews as the only major group of non-Christians in most Western Christian societies after the fall of the Roman Empire. One can think of this strand of anti-Semitism as anti-Semitism with a lowercase a.

The second strand of anti-Semitism, which should probably be referred to as Anti-Semitism with an uppercase A, is a set of social and political ideas that emerged in Europe during the 19th century essentially as a backlash to the emancipation of the Jews of Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries. Prior to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, most Jewish communities in Europe were heavily regulated, marginalized, literally ghettoized, highly restricted in their social and economic activities and very much under the control and influence of frequently obscurantist rabbinical authorities. After the emancipation, Jewish communities in much of Europe quickly flourished in their newfound freedoms and opportunities, greatly expanded their cultural and political engagement with and influence in many societies, enjoyed a surge in the size and geographical diffusion of their population, and in some cases became significant actors on their national scenes. This development was viewed with alarm by conservative, reactionary, nationalistic, ethno-centric and racist elements in many European societies such as France and Germany. The reaction to the expanded Jewish presence and influence in European societies was the emergence of an overtly racist pseudoscientific, social and political orientation that drew on but went far beyond traditional religious and folkloric anti-Jewish attitudes and developed into a political program to contain and reverse these Jewish gains under the rubric of Anti-Semitism. Political Zionism was, in fact, largely a response to political Anti-Semitism.

The racist German journalist and activist Wilhelm Marr did not coin the term, but popularized it and founded the Antisemiten-Liga, or Anti-Semitic League, in 1880 with the specific aim of combating Jewish influence and enfranchisement in Germany and other Western Christian societies. Anti-Semitic conferences and political parties, openly employing the term to denote a specific anti-Jewish political program in Europe during the second half of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries were widespread, and obviously found their ghastly culmination and logical conclusion in Nazism and the attempt to physically exterminate the Jews of Europe, and possibly the world, during the second world war.

The rhetoric of political Anti-Semitism, interestingly enough and as I have pointed out many times in the past, is virtually indistinguishable, except for some of the specific nouns, from the contemporary Islamophobia infecting an increasing amount of Western social and political culture. The idea in both cases is that Jews or Muslims respectively are an alien presence, worship a hostile and dangerous God, are religiously authorized to do terrible things to non-coreligionists, and are engaged in a conspiracy to attack, undermine or take over Western Christian or, as they are now in the Islamophobic era typically referred to, Judeo-Christian societies and culture. The basic message is: these people may look and seem perfectly reasonable and even constructive, admirable members of the community but in fact they are dangerous and are engaged in a war of civilizations against “us.” And the reasons why, and the contexts in which, these discourses resonated at certain historical moments are also highly analogous: the emergence and growing influence and enfranchisement of non-Christian communities in Western societies that for both cynical and genuinely paranoid or chauvinistic reasons some people found a need to demonize and stigmatize in order to inhibit or rollback their ability to thrive. It's pretty much as simple as that, although the motivations are obviously varied and complex.

I'm not going to waste anybody's time in going into the details of either folkloric and religious traditional Western anti-Semitism or political Anti-Semitism as it emerged in the mid-19th century. The scholarship has been done in exhaustive detail and is available to anybody with the least interest in finding out about it. But it is important to note that the history of both anti-Semitism and Anti-Semitism (I'll stick with the lowercase from now on I think, because really I'm going to be referring to both simultaneously even though they have distinct but overlapping characteristics) refers specifically to Jews and a specifically Western and Christian set of ideas based on a very specific history of the relationship between Jews and Western Christian societies over two millennia. For this reason, it is both ignorant and meaningless to suggest that other Semites or speakers of Semitic languages such as Arabs are incapable of being anti-Semitic because they are also Semites. Anyone who makes this argument is only revealing either their own paucity of knowledge or their willingness to dissemble with semantic games. Frankly, I think among Arabs and Arab-Americans the first is much more common, but I've seen what is incontrovertibly the second as well, and it's clearly the worse of the two.

Even if there were no such history, it would still be a very bad argument because obviously it is possible for people of a certain identity grouping to embrace negative stereotypes and bigoted ideas about their own community. There are, after all, some very well known Arab-Americans who express plainly bigoted anti-Arab sentiments from time to time such as Prof. Fouad Ajami, and others who are extreme anti-Arab racists such as the repulsive Brigitte Gabriel (given to sentiments such as “Arabs have no souls” and similar charming remarks). I use these examples only because I am considering here the relationship between Arabs and anti-Semitism, but there are anti-Semitic Jews like the late chess master Bobby Fischer and the jazz musician Gilad Atzmon (and, if we are to believe his dubious personal narrative, another example would be the writer who likes to call himself “Israel Shamir”), African Americans with "Negrophobic" (as far as I can tell we're stuck with that term for now as well, and it seems even more problematic for obvious reasons) opinions, and so forth. So undeniable origins or participation in an identity community is no guarantee of not holding bigoted views or negative stereotypes about that very identity. Obviously even without the very specific history of the term anti-Semitism I briefly outlined above, it would be entirely possible for a Semite to be anti-Semitic anyway.

But, of course, there IS this history and even though anti-Semitism as such is essentially a Western Christian phenomenon, it has spread around the world and has unfortunately gained some particular currency in the past few decades among the Arabs and the Muslims. This is largely, as even Bernard Lewis (and I use that phrase advisedly) agrees, a consequence of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the plight of the Palestinians. There are some strains of anti-Jewish polemic in traditional Muslim theology and culture stemming from the medieval period of strong religious competition and argumentation between the three monotheistic faiths and also from the experience of Muslim rule over non-Muslims, including Jews, which was sometimes oppressive towards religious and other minorities. But there is nothing like Western Christian folkloric and religious anti-Semitism or modern European cultural and political Anti-Semitism in traditional Arab culture or Islamic theology. However, latching on to strains of anti-Jewish sentiment that do exist in parts of Muslim scripture and doctrine, European-style anti-Semitic sentiment has dug distressingly deep roots in contemporary Arab and Muslim discourse, particularly among Islamists.

The importation of European anti-Semitic ideas into the Arab world has a long and complicated history with many sources, but obviously anti-Semitic Christian missionaries and educators were a crucial source, as were various anti-Semitic Western governments and colonial officials. The ideas, not surprisingly, took root first and were propagated most enthusiastically in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Arab world by Arab Christians who could readily understand the doctrinal aspects of Western Christian anti-Semitism (deicide, etc.). In the 1930s and 40s they spread into Islamist and some Arab nationalist circles as well. But until the Arab-Israeli conflict really got going, such ideas were, while no longer unheard of, nonetheless marginal in most of Arab culture.

The wars with Israel opened the floodgates. The Arabs and the Jews demonized each other, and the appetite for actual, Western-style anti-Semitic sentiments among the Arabs began to blossom. This trend was offset for several decades by leftist and internationalist sentiments that frowned on ethnic essentializing, traditional Islamic attitudes that were tolerant of Jews and Judaism, and the narrative that held that Israel was essentially a Western colonial enterprise unconnected to indigenous Jewish cultures and communities in the Arab world (which of course did not prevent anti-Jewish riots and other abuses in several ugly instances). With the growth of Islamist rhetoric, which often embraces Western-style anti-Semitism as axiomatic, particularly since the Iranian revolution of 1979, overtly anti-Semitic sentiment has found a disturbingly large audience in the Arab and some other parts of the Muslim world.

Of course the reverse is equally true. Israeli Jewish and other Jewish communities have concomitantly and simultaneously been developing anti-Arab racist and Islamophobic attitudes and discourses which are often either overlooked or simply tolerated by Western observers. There's no question that in the United States there is a great sensitivity to what is perceived, often rightly but sometimes wrongly, as Arab anti-Semitism, and very little recognition of or interest in Israeli or Jewish anti-Arab and Islamophobic discourse. Indeed, the right wing Jewish pro-Israel contributions to contemporary American Islamophobia could hardly be overestimated, and are at least as important a factor as religious Christian anti-Muslim agitation. So not only is this not a one-way street, it's probably equally grim on both sides.

Which brings us back to Helen Thomas. I really had intended to stay out of this altogether, and I'm not going to ultimately pass any definitive judgment on her recently expressed sentiments, but some observations seem necessary. Her initial comment was very disturbing, but could certainly have been dismissed as an off-the-cuff remark to a hectoring videographer by an exasperated and elderly journalist who was trying to be deliberately obnoxious to someone it seems may have been pestering her. The explanation offered at the time that she was referring to the occupation was never very convincing because she referred to Jews getting out of Palestine and going home to Germany, Poland or the United States, but not to Israel. But had it been isolated and off-the-cuff, as it first appeared, it really shouldn't have been that big a deal, especially since she apologized right away.

Certainly there were some obvious ways for her to fix things. A friend of hers approached me in the immediate aftermath of the first incident and asked what I thought could be done to repair the damage to her reputation. My suggestion was that she could draw on her vast experience of political life and work with some young staffers to put together a book on the apology as a phenomenon in American political life, as she experienced it in her many long years covering the White House and then also as applied in her own case. The United States is a country that believes in redemption and has a long history of accepting apologies and letting bygones be bygones, when things are handled properly. I thought a book linking her own experience with the need to apologize to the many cases she must have witnessed and covered firsthand would have made a very interesting read and also would have situated her conundrum in a positive and constructive context. It was not to be.

Instead, Ms. Thomas decided to make some additional remarks that got her into even deeper trouble. Parsing whether or not any of it descends to the level of anti-Semitism seems utterly beside the point. But to suggest, as she did in her subsequent remarks, that "Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street are owned by Zionists" is just silly, and it's indefensible. Let's take them one by one.

First, the White House is presently headed by an African-American president who is evidently sympathetic to ending the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state, and whose administration is working hard to accomplish that as a core American foreign policy goal. The American presidency, especially this one, is not “owned by Zionists,” and anyone who thinks so is absolutely paranoid. The idea that anyone who accepts the existence of Israel as a member state of the United Nations and proceeds accordingly is therefore a “Zionist” is to strip the term of any meaning whatsoever. By that standard, every American president since at least Herbert Hoover would have been a communist since they accepted the reality of and dealt with the Soviet Union. And, of course, that's exactly what the paranoid John Birch Society used to argue. Richard Nixon must have been an arch-communist since he entered an anti-Soviet entente cordiale with Maoist China, of all countries.

Congress certainly is responsive to pro-Israel organizations and pressures, because those organizations have utilized the levers of American power: money, votes, time and public communications, while there is virtually nothing on the other side of the equation. There is nothing illegitimate about the way pro-Israel organizations influence Congress, a body that was explicitly and deliberately designed to be lobbied. It's just pathetic that Arab-Americans, Muslim Americans and their allies have created nothing that can counter this influence. But that's our own fault. As I've noted many times, there isn't anything except our own apathy, cynicism, paranoia and selfishness holding us back as there are no laws prohibiting our own engagement with the American political system and few if any politicians who would refuse our money or refuse to meet with us respectfully having accepted our money if we ever decided to start giving it to them in any sizable quantities. It is not the fault of the pro-Israel lobby that so many of the Arab-Americans, in a great reversal of the founding ethos of the Republic, demand to be taxed without representation. I suppose it's possible to argue that in any case where there is a powerful lobby on one side and virtually nothing at all on the other side, the powerful lobby “owns” Congress, in a sense. But this implies some sort of permanency or ontology, as if this was a natural state of affairs rather than a consequence of a reversible series of choices on both sides to invest or not invest time, effort and money in causes in which they profess to believe. One group puts its money where its mouth is and the other, generally speaking, seems to be content with sitting at home drinking tea, waving their arms around and impotently shouting at the television. If that's the point Ms. Thomas was trying to make, her choice of words was extremely unfortunate.

The Wall Street example is also silly. There are lots of successful and influential Jews on Wall Street, and lots of them got rich in the process. But anyone who thinks that the banking and financial industries in the United States are “owned” by any ethnic community doesn't understand the diversity in that industry, the extremely heavy presence of white Christian American males in it, and the fact that ethnicity or religion aside, the only thing that matters in that context is the ability to generate revenues. No one is going to make it on Wall Street by virtue of their religion or ethnicity, or be shut out because of it either. Racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination no doubt exist, but in the end the only thing that really counts in that milieu is the ability to make money for oneself and, more importantly, others. And Wall Street's role in Middle East policy seems virtually nonexistent.

Hollywood, as a synecdoche for the entertainment industry in general and the movie industry in particular, is the strongest case here. The film industry in Hollywood is, as a matter of fact, dominated at its senior executive level by Jewish Americans. This truth makes many people uncomfortable, because it raises certain anti-Semitic red flags, but it's simply a fact that is verifiable by going down a list of the CEOs of the major Hollywood film studios and companies in a way that doesn't apply to Wall Street or any other American industry I can think of. It's not total, but there is no other word that will suffice than dominant. And what's wrong with that? Really it's something for Jewish Americans to be proud of, and for others to admire rather than complain about. The history was most forthrightly told in Neil Gabler's "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood" (Anchor Books, 1989). It might have been argued that for several decades during which Hollywood churned out an enormous number of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim horrors perhaps this ethnic factor may have been a contributor. But in the post-9/11 era in which Hollywood specifically, and the entertainment industry in general, has almost entirely cleaned up its act (as I have I think conclusively demonstrated elsewhere) and the center of gravity for Islamophobic sentiment has shifted to the realm of nonfiction and commentary (which is certainly worse), one would have to question whether religion or ethnicity at the executive level, which haven't changed much in the past couple of decades, was ever really a factor in Hollywood's anti-Arab and anti-Muslim attitudes in the last few decades of the 20th century.

Indeed, all of this talk about Jewish power, which is after all what this is albeit translated into concepts such as “owned by Zionists,” even when, as in the case of the entertainment industry and especially Hollywood, there is some basis for it, assumes a couple of things that are evidently not the case. First, there is no longer any consensus on what constitutes proper Zionism or attitudes towards Israel in the Jewish community, although perhaps there once was. The range of approaches has now become truly extraordinary, running from the non-, post-or anti-Zionist Jewish left, to the pro-Israel/pro-peace liberals, to the pro-Israel/but not opposed to a two-state solution political center, to the pro-occupation right and all the way to the chauvinistic, intolerant, extremist and increasingly religious ultra-right. Thomas' riff was no doubt a reference to Jewish power in the United States, but the idea that this power, which is definitely a very real phenomenon, translates into a uniform set of attitudes or policy positions on Israel and especially the occupation is simply wrong. On top of which, most Jewish Americans are strongly Democrats and don't vote on Israel alone, or even Israel mainly. So this kind of reductive talk, whether or not it could be considered in any sense anti-Semitic, is certainly not reflective of the present spectrum of Jewish-American opinion or the way in which it impacts the policy debate in the United States.

I do think it's possible to read Thomas' most recent comments as a rallying cry to Arab-Americans to get more involved, and that's certainly good advice. But the phraseology is extremely unfortunate and, indeed, inaccurate. And certainly she didn't do anything to contradict the impression that was created in many minds by her original off-the-cuff ill-advised remarks, and more than reversed whatever corrective had been accomplished by her well-advised apology. The debate over whether her original or follow-up comments are anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist or simply inaccurate isn't particularly interesting. But it needs to be clearly stated that the idea that because Thomas is of a Semitic Arab heritage she therefore cannot be anti-Semitic herself by definition holds no water at all. Sadly, there is far too much genuine anti-Semitism among Arabs and Arab-Americans, just as there is a disturbing plethora of anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiment among Israelis and Jews around the world, including the United States.

Neither of these reciprocal phenomena of mistrust, fear and even hatred are causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict, they are the consequences, and, sadly, almost inevitable ones, of decades of bitter, existential struggle. In a debate with Alan Dershowitz many years ago at Harvard Business School, in which he tried to argue that Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism was a principle causal factor in originating and perpetuating the Arab-Israeli conflict, I pointed out that what he, and so many others, were engaging in through such rhetoric was a technique of classical sophistry known as a metalepsis, which often manifests as a substitution of an effect for a cause. He replied that in that case he supposed he was being a "Metalepsist," but I told him he was just being a sophist, and not in a good way. What's interesting about the debates I've had with Dershowitz is that while we can't agree at all on history, present realities, who is to blame or anything of the kind, we were able to agree on the only reasonable course for the future: peace based on two states, Israel and Palestine, living side-by-side in peace and security. I think most Arab and Jewish Americans, and most Arabs and Israelis for that matter, can agree on that.

Since that's the case, we don't have to agree on anything else. We can work together towards that cause, without name-calling, without succumbing to bigotry and without justifying or rationalizing intolerance. This begins with not only recognizing that for different reasons we share the same policy goal, but also that Arabs are perfectly capable of being anti-Semites and Jews are perfectly capable of being anti-Arab and/or Islamophobic. All too often they both are, and it's not acceptable. It's up to both communities to police themselves and keep each other honest. We cannot, in the name of a counterproductive and atavistic tribal or ethnic solidarity, turn a blind eye to unacceptable rhetoric by our own ethnic fellows or co-religionists, and we can't hold others to a standard we are not willing to uphold ourselves.

An Ibishblog reader poses a series of questions about my recent articles:

Q: First, do you think that Israel could continue to hold out a decision onwhat to do with the Palestinians? Earlier you noted that stasis is not possible, but isn't that what we have had since the failure of Oslo, a "stasis" that perhaps dates back to 1967?

A: I say stasis is not possible for the state and institution building program. My point in this context is that this project is predicated on continual expansion and will wither and ultimately die if it does not continue to expand. It is this very quality that gives it its greatest strength in terms of challenging the occupation. It actually doesn't allow for what its strongest opponents on the Palestinian side accuse it of: accepting the status quo and making that work. If it doesn't keep expanding, it will start retracting and will not survive. If it isn't the project that lays the groundwork for statehood, it's pretty meaningless. An understanding of that was strongly expressed in Sec. Clinton's address at the Brookings Institution on December 10. I think there are a lot of Israelis who grudgingly understand it as well.

Yes, of course there has been a consistent status quo in the occupied territories since 1967, but only in the broadest possible sense. In June 1967 the occupied territories became occupied by Israel, and they remain occupied. But that's hardly “stasis.” The ebb and flow within the context of that occupation has been fairly dramatic, including the first intifada, the Oslo years, the second intifada and now the circumstances defined by the new Palestinian security forces and the state building program. And that's leaving out everything that's happened in Gaza. And of course the biggest single change has been the gradual introduction of what are now 500,000 Israeli settlers. You don't have stasis in the occupied territories even though you have an ongoing occupation. You have a continually deteriorating situation in terms of entrenching the occupation, anger on both sides and an expansion of the constituencies opposed to a reasonable peace agreement, and conditions that ensure that a failure to achieve a peace agreement will result in another round of bloodshed that is even worse and more religious than the last. Offsetting this are signs of the growing maturation in Palestinian strategy to deal with the occupation, particularly the state building program but also nonviolent protests, settlement boycotts and other such strategies.

The bottom line is the status quo of occupation is neither acceptable nor tenable. If it isn't resolved it will eventually erupt in another wave of terrible violence. The biggest illusion possible is that the situation is stable or manageable. One of the very few virtual certainties I think is worth accepting in this situation is that absent an agreement to end the occupation there will be wave after wave of violent resistance to it in unpredictable spasms. I'm also willing to bet those waves become increasingly violent and increasingly religious, as we can see developed during the first intifada and then throughout the second. I think it's even reasonable to put the Gaza war in exactly that context as a third example, and it only deepens my point. So, no, “stasis” isn't possible in the context of the occupation at all.

Q: Second, if Israel will not allow for the creation of a Palestinian state, what is the alternative that you allude to twice in your essay? How does it fit with the "broader agenda" you spoke of?

A: Of course the only real alternative outcome to an end to the occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state is further conflict. I say Israel, if it will not end the occupation and allow for the creation of a Palestinian state, needs to explain, not least to itself, what its alternative scenario is. By this I mean that it's clear that Israeli society goes to considerable lengths not to face the actual choices confronting it, and that the Israeli political system has absolutely no consensus whatsoever on the fundamental, existential questions facing the country. Look at the current cabinet. One group, led by Defense Minister Barak plainly recognizes the strategic necessity of such an agreement. The second group led by Foreign Minister Lieberman rejects both the possibility and the necessity of such an agreement. The third group led by Prime Minister Netanyahu is as ambiguous as possible about the whole point, and he has made a careful practice of always offsetting his latest move with something else that maintains this ambiguity. If he does or says something that seems to indicate a commitment to peace based on a Palestinian state, he quickly offsets this with something that creates the opposite impression. And, of course, vice versa. In other words, there are three distinct camps inside the present Israeli cabinet alone, not even including the largest single party in the Knesset, Kadima.

Some Israelis might kid themselves that there are ways of making the occupation, or a modified occupation, work as a tenable status quo in the medium term. I think they're plainly wrong, and I was glad to see Sec. Clinton bluntly repudiate any such view in her most recent speech. Looking at the improved security situation in the West Bank, social and economic development in Area A, and the easing of the Gaza blockade (for what it's worth), and thereby concluding that the situation is stabilizing is about as self-deluding as possible. Palestinians plainly don't have any real desire to resume armed struggle or violent resistance, and any such move is clearly a terrible idea. However, over time if the occupation is not ended and the PLO strategy of negotiating with Israel to that end and the PA strategy of building the framework of a Palestinian state both atrophy and die, I don't think there's anything on the horizon at the moment that can stop an explosion of violence and/or the takeover of the Palestinian national movement by Hamas. So the alternatives are very clear: we can have a negotiated two-state peace agreement or we can have more conflict. Those are the only outcomes that existing forces are likely to produce.

Q: Third and this relates to the settlement freeze blog, what do you think of Abbas's threat to disband the PA? I know it's an old threat/tactic dating back to Arafat, but do you think that it will actually happen if Israel refuses to budge on the settlements and Area C?

A: I think it's a pretty empty threat under the present circumstances, because dissolving the PA makes no sense whatsoever. One can understand where it comes from: extreme frustration with lack of progress in ending the occupation and actually the intensification of the occupation, especially through ever expanding settlements. But politically and diplomatically it would be, under the present circumstances, a bizarre gesture indeed, and it won't happen.

However, there is a coherent underlying logic to this rhetoric. I do think it's true that in the long-run Palestinians will not accept partial, limited self-rule in population centers under occupation as an acceptable or tolerable status quo. The PA was supposed to be the vehicle of a transition that began in 1993 and was to have ended in 1998 that was supposed to have left the Palestinians in control of all of the occupied territories except for settlements, military areas and Jerusalem, pending a final status agreement after that. Instead, there was never any progress beyond the creation of Areas A, B and C, and no follow-up to the five-year interim period. Indeed, it was the lack of any such progress that set the stage for the disastrous second intifada. This was followed by the death of Pres. Arafat, the split within the Palestinian movement and the new era of state building. Developments have followed hard upon each other, with continual changes that have created new challenges and opportunities at every stage. So there has never been a serious consideration of dissolving the PA even though its purposes are limited and its time frame expired more than 10 years ago.

However, the PA is not an acceptable long-term solution. I can't think of a single Palestinian or pro-Palestinian perspective that thinks it is. Even if one wanted it to be viable over the long run, it can't be. It doesn't meet the minimum necessary standards for viability or political plausibility. It can't last. The PA is on something of a roll at present, because of the strong performance of the new security forces, the creation of a clean and transparent public finance system for the treasury and the ministries, and the impressive and strategically significant state building program. This definitely isn't your uncle's PA. However, even this more robust and dynamic PA is ultimately of limited purposes, and has defined its role even more clearly and specifically than ever as the body to manage the transition towards independence. Nobody is more forthright about this than Pres. Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad. So it's not as if anyone imagines decade after decade of stable PA control limited to Area A as the occupation and colonization march on unimpeded. That's just not going to happen. Either the PLO and PA strategies will succeed or they will fail to secure independence, and the future of both entities will be decided entirely by that outcome.

I doubt there will ever be a formal dissolving of the PA outside the context of an agreement with Israel, but it's always possible in some future scenario. What's more likely, if there is no agreement to end the occupation, is the collapse of the PA and/or the PLO and their marginalized nation or capture by Hamas and other Islamists whose preferred aim would be to take over both of those entities entirely. So I read Abbas' comments as being a warning that is very strongly rooted in ineluctable political realities: if the occupation is to continue indefinitely, there is no future for the PA and Palestinians don't and won't accept the present arrangement as a semi-permanent one that can continue in calm and stability. Just like Sec. Clinton, he's trying to tell the Israelis that if they imagine that because the situation in the West Bank seems under control and largely positive compared to previous years therefore the medium and long-term circumstances will allow for the perpetuation of a modified occupation, they are dead wrong. This is a message that needs to be sent as strongly as possible by everyone and received by any Israelis who are making this disastrous miscalculation.

For many months now I have been predicting that the US would probably be able to secure a three or four-month settlement freeze extension, allowing for the resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. And, indeed, the Obama administration moved heaven and earth to do so, but now it would appear they have accepted that the present Israeli cabinet simply will not agree to any such thing. Even in the face of inducements rightly called “overly generous” by the New York Times, and I would say almost absurdly generous, the present collection of politicians leading Israel found themselves unable to agree to the most practically minimal, if politically controversial, gesture in exchange for massive benefits including the transfer of a large number of the most advanced fighter jets in the world. I'm amazed, and I'm sure the Obama administration is as well. And it can't be the case that Netanyahu and his colleagues have won any new friends in Washington as a consequence.

While I thought it would happen because I did not think the Israelis would be so addicted to the settlement project that they wouldn't accept such an offer, I never understood the underlying logic of the 90-day extension drive. It always needed to be asked what the United States expected to be different three months after the extension was secured. The realistic prospect of securing a deal outlining the borders of a future Palestinian state, excluding Jerusalem, in such a time frame and under the existing circumstances was always quite remote. Perhaps the administration included some kind of unstated caveat to the inducement package that it would expect changes in the Israeli cabinet if a deal on borders could not be secured, but that's pure speculation. Suffice it to say the administration never put their proposal in writing, and the Israeli cabinet never came close to accepting it.

This is not the end of the world, or the end of the peace process. The United States has numerous options for how to proceed, although what the administration's next step will be is quite unclear. No matter what course the administration takes, it and the rest of the international community have to redouble all forms of support for the Palestinian state building project. With diplomacy in disarray, the importance and indispensability of state building, as the only real source of practical momentum at the moment, is increasingly obvious. On the diplomatic front, Palestinians were blocked from entrenching their position in the UN by the United States, but have succeeded in securing recognition from Brazil and Argentina, with Uruguay and several other states expected to follow. State building is practical and strategic, but increased international recognition for Palestine is important as well. Unilateralism is probably a dead end, but multilateralism isn't necessarily anything of the kind. Palestinians would be foolish not to understand that in the end Israeli opposition will make it practically impossible to establish and maintain a viable, sovereign and independent state of Palestine. But Israel would be foolish not to understand widespread international recognition of Palestine's legitimacy and existence has very significant consequences as well.

At this stage everyone needs to take a deep breath and assess what has and has not happened and ignore the Chicken Little voices that have yet another opportunity to tell us all about how the sky is falling. The settlement freeze was always a gimmick: temporary, partial, and with enough loopholes to ensure robust and continued colonization for the full 10 months right up to and including Sept 26. The three-month extension proposal that has just been abandoned was an even bigger gimmick, since it was after all a gimmick of a gimmick. We have lost almost nothing practical as a result of its failure. If Israel will keep building now, the reality is that it has always kept on building. And, given that Jerusalem would not have been included in any 90-day extension, it would have keep on building there the whole time, if it really wanted to. There also have always been, and this no doubt would have continued if not intensified, unauthorized settlements that the Israeli government does nothing to prevent or dismantle, with rare exceptions. And then, three months later, Israel would have openly resumed all settlement activities everywhere it wishes, and Pres. Obama would have not only provided disproportionate inducements but also committed to never asking for another settlement moratorium extension, possibly with nothing at all politically or diplomatically to show for it a few weeks later.

So the idea that, as a practical or strategic matter, we have just lost a great opportunity to achieve a breakthrough or a major diplomatic accomplishment is completely wrong. The settlement freeze issue has been, and still is, a huge political problem for all sides, in spite of the extent to which it is largely a chimera. The Obama administration clearly miscalculated on several occasions, first by making a total freeze a condition for direct negotiations but not applying sufficient pressure to secure it, and then by accepting the Israeli partial, temporary moratorium without providing the Palestinians sufficient cover to let it pass.

For their part the Palestinians allowed themselves to be sucked into the impasse without creating a political way out for themselves when it was entirely predictable that one would eventually have been needed. Worse, after direct negotiations began, they got hung up on the settlement freeze gimmick when what would have made sense was to let that issue go and take a firm stance on the substance behind the freeze issue – the borders between a future Palestinian state and Israel. The worst thing they could do at this stage is to continue to stick to their guns on this dead-end issue. It would make more sense for Palestinians to take firm and clear positions on final status issues, especially the borders of a future Palestinian state and the status of Jerusalem. The settlement freeze question is a subset of the question of settlements generally, including both existing structures and expansion, which is itself a subset of two real permanent status issues. For Palestinians, the settlement question is essentially a subset of the borders issue: how much of the occupied territories will have to be exchanged in a land swap with Israel and what areas will become the Palestinian state. For Israelis, the settlement question is essentially a subset of the security issue, or as some Israeli officials like to say, the border issue is a subset of the security issue, which would make settlements a subset of a subset. No matter how you slice it, the settlement issue itself is not a permanent status issue as such but reflects other more fundamental questions.

Israel might feel triumphant at present, that it has faced down its super-power patron, which has backed off and accepted its refusal to accede to its demands, but faces a potentially very difficult set of short term challenges and a certain set of existentially threatening long terms challenges, largely of its own making. Israel, after all, has "won" the freedom to dig itself into a bigger hole, and deepen its presence in the occupied territories which, in the long run not only threatens its self-definition as a Jewish and democratic state, but also opens the prospect of ongoing and intensifying conflict that will become less and not more manageable, containable and resolvable. And so now Israel can defiantly continue to trap itself in an impossible situation. But the fundamental strategic problem remains the same: what is the future of the occupied territories going to be? How can Israel deal with an internationally illegitimate occupation that requires the forceful subjugation of millions of disenfranchised noncitizens? How long can such a situation remain nonviolent?

Of course there is only one way out for Israel and all the parties: a negotiated agreement allowing for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. Israel's future as a Jewish, democratic, viable and sustainable state depends on this. The Palestinians depend on it as well, of course. Israel has already built numerous settlements that will not remain part of Israel in the event of the creation of a Palestinian state. If it wants to build more structures that it will eventually have to give up, that really isn't the burning issue. There is a minimum of territorial size (22% of mandatory Palestine, in fact), contiguity and geographical coherence required for Palestinian statehood that would be accepted by the Palestinian people and would be successful. Those of us who haven't given up on the idea of a two state solution (which of course is the only plausible solution), and that includes most Israelis and Palestinians and the international community, already base our vision of the future on the understanding that a considerable amount of Israeli settlement will end up under Palestinian sovereignty. If the Israelis add a bit more to that mix it doesn't fundamentally alter the strategic realities. Of course, gigantic settlement activity would do that, but it's clear given American frustration over this issue that the price of such activity for Israel has become more significant than ever and that US scrutiny and criticism can be expected with every major move.

In other words, we are back to square one again and, having dropped this tempest in a teacup about a gimmicky and not strategically serious partial, temporary settlement freeze moratorium extension for 90 days, are facing the same fundamental reality: we can have a two state solution which involves a land swap in which Israel keeps some settlements in about 3-4% or so of the occupied territories and gives up the rest, or we can have an ever deteriorating conflict that becomes increasingly violent, religious, fanatical and out of everyone's ability to control. Whatever the administration decides to do to try to fix this prodigious diplomatic mess, financial, technical and political support for Palestinian state building is absolutely indispensable. One can make strong arguments for quiet diplomacy with both parties, which would at this stage almost certainly have the best chances of success, or interesting arguments for the US to lay out a series of its own positions on what the end of conflict would look like, which would be a high risk but also potentially high benefit move. I doubt the administration is ready for anything too dramatic, which is probably a good thing at this stage. So while they busy themselves with careful cleanup and quietly exploring where opportunities may lie with the parties beyond the settlement freeze dead-end, the immediate focus should be on as much support for Palestinian state and institution building as possible. It was always conceptualized by the Palestinians as a parallel track that could provide momentum when diplomacy faltered or even collapsed. Could there possibly be a better circumstance for it to play this indispensable role than now?

Having jumped in the deepest of deep ends in terms of guilty pleasures with my recent essay on my uncomfortable response to some of the James Bond films and novels, let's swim a little closer to the shore and artistic terra firma. I want to turn at this point to guilty pleasures that are not necessarily toxic, but which are of dubious merit, or those that combine abundant measures of both the meritorious and the miserable, and the essential quality of which is therefore confusing and ambiguous. The genesis, so to speak, of this whole series on guilty pleasures was an idea I had a little more than a year ago for an essay on how to think about art or cultural artifacts which we cannot decide whether or not we think are good, which we find both attractive and repulsive, and which alternately and even simultaneously are in some ways unmistakably impressive and plainly mediocre in others.

At the time I specifically had in mind the 1974 Genesis double album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and its various other incarnations. Since the late 70s, when I first heard it, I've had a very ambivalent relationship with this piece, or rather set of pieces, of music. I think high on everyone's list of guilty pleasures, or things they enjoy without respecting much or even at all, would be certain kinds of pop music. Almost everyone enjoys, at some level, some version of catchy, appealing musical drivel, for various reasons. But the question becomes a lot more complicated when for many years one cannot decide whether a certain piece or set of music is actually good or bad, whether we are responding enthusiastically to something that is a totally guilty pleasure or is something we can really defend wholeheartedly or at least in part.

Because I hadn't thought about it systematically, but the question would crop up in my mind regularly from time to time, I had the idea of doing a little essay on whether or not The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is actually any good. I had self-consciously been hoping that writing such an essay would “resolve” the question in my mind once and for all, after an incredible amount of back and forth over many years. But something interesting happened in the process of preparing to write that (this?) essay: I decided that the question wasn't as difficult as it seems and that, on balance, The Lamb simply had to be consigned pretty firmly to the “not good” category once and for all. For a while that seemed satisfactory. But over time, it hasn't.

So I return to the original problem, once again with a degree of ambivalence about the object in question, and it raises a set of extremely difficult questions. How do we respond and relate to works of art we both respect and dismiss simultaneously at different levels? How do we deal with those occasional objects that seem both not only worthy but impressive in some ways and incompetent or even pathetic in others? Is it possible for something to be both really very good and undoubtedly pretty bad at the same time? Is it possible to tease apart that which is recuperable from that which, honestly, must be permanently dismissed? What kind of guilty pleasure is involved in appreciating that which we find “good" about such an object while frankly admitting that a great deal about it is “bad?” Is this the aesthetic and intellectual equivalent of a bad or even abusive relationship or friendship? Shouldn't we maintain high enough aesthetic standards that objects that are woefully and probably fatally flawed are dispatched without too much sentimentality? But then, should we really privilege the head over the gut in such a manner when it comes to something as instinctive and emotionally direct as music? These are just a few of the questions this problem opens up and there's no hope at all of answering them here. Yet even teasing out the difficulties of addressing them ought to provide some serious food for thought and at least clarify some of the questions and problems if not provide any answers.

Before we go any further, obviously I have to spare some attention to what I mean by “good” and “bad” in artistic terms. Historically there was some resistance to the introduction of literary studies as an academic discipline at all on the grounds that “gentlemen cannot be examined on matters of taste” and so forth, as distinguished from scholarship in the classics and languages, for example, that were traditionally seen as sufficiently rigorous. But the very premise of literary studies, among other well-established and obviously legitimate disciplines, is precisely that there are systematic methodologies for reading and more broadly aesthetic interpretation, and that there is something vitally important to be gained by the application of such techniques to literary and other artistic texts. This is, of course, another way of saying that literary studies and critical theory assert their own relevance, if not primacy. But this relevance is almost universally accepted, and has been for many decades (imagine if a university decided to try to completely abolish its English and Comparative Literature departments, for example), and at its heart lies the idea that artistic and aesthetic judgments about literature and other arts are not only legitimate but can and should be systematic and rigorous. Of course the question of how to read and evaluate artistic artifacts and judge relative merit (the last is not necessary, although it's extremely difficult to pursue these studies without at least implicit value judgments at some level) is ancient, vexed and, ultimately, irresolvable. But I can't go forward with the question of ambivalence of judgment of artistic merit without providing some sense of what I'm talking about beyond arbitrary expressions of “taste.”

By “good” generally speaking I mean that which succeeds on its own terms, which achieves the implicit goals set down in its own structures and produces the effects it appears to be striving for. Simply put, does it create the response in the audience that is built into its project, especially when that audience is well informed and critical? That strikes me as a minimal requirement of artistic merit. Another obvious characteristic is a dynamic relationship, which can be complementary, contradictory or even calculatedly and suggestively arbitrary, between manifest and latent content on the one hand and formal attributes on the other hand. In other words, does the artifact communicate its messages formally as well as in terms of more overt content? Third, does the expression reflect a certain mastery of formal technique, which of course can also be expressed through a calculated and deliberate rejection of or opposition to those formal techniques, and/or real insight into the manifest and latent subject matter being addressed by the content of the message? Really great art is only achievable, it seems to me, when both formal mastery and suggestive insight are combined in a given work. A successful work minimally has to contain a little bit of one or the other at the very least. Without either formal mastery, which could include radically original and even intuitive techniques, or reflective insight, which again can be either carefully thought through or possibly also intuitive – in other words, without disciplined talent and/or significant intelligence at work – I'd argue it's going to be very difficult to find an artistic product significantly meritorious. There are important additional questions, of course, such as: Does it open rather than close down space in which ideas can operate, proliferate, and evolve? To what extent is it relevant to material that came before and after it, and what role does it play in cultural change and development? Does it seem to have continued or heightened relevance over time, and so forth?  Obviously such judgments depend on the criteria and methodologies employed for interpretation and analysis and are also culturally dependent, so a large degree of subjectivity is perforce involved. But this hardly constitutes a resort to arbitrary "tastes" or prevents the development of rigor and serious, systematic thinking about the question.

This, more or less, is what I mean by “good,” at least in this context. By “bad” I therefore mean a marked absence of such qualities. In particular the failure of a work to produce its apparently intended effects or to marshal structures and forms that are consistent with its attempted messaging are rather obvious failures. It almost goes without saying that I can identify maddeningly large quantities of both what seemed to be “good” and are obviously “bad” aspects to The Lamb, which gives it its ambiguous status in my own experience. I'm really not trying to write only about this one, by now somewhat obscure, double album from the 1970s, but rather to use it to discuss more broadly the problem posed when one can identify much of both the good and the bad in a single object and is therefore confronted with this conundrum of judgment, especially over a long period of time. If one were able to simply dismiss an object like this or forget about it, it wouldn't be that much of a problem. The deep ambivalence comes when moving on is difficult and when the ambivalence neither resolves itself nor fades into the distance but instead persists as a nagging question that demands a resolution (which is probably not fully achievable).
 
The Lamb, it should be acknowledged from the outset, can be seen in a way as a synecdoche for the usually dreadful genre of progressive or “prog" rock that emerged in the late 60s, specifically following the release of King Crimson's extraordinary 1969 debut LP, In the Court of the Crimson King. That record, which is pretty brilliant in a lot of ways and was certainly groundbreaking, had an enormous influence in very wide circles especially in Britain, and can't be held responsible for the grotesque excesses to which it helped to give rise. Prog rock, especially of the Crimson-influenced variety, rested on two interesting and theoretically worthy ideas: first, that European rock musicians could and should move away from the blues/R&B roots of American rock music and start to explore European classical and folk traditions which might have (and actually sometimes did) produced a really interesting variation on a limited field; and second, that a more elevated level of instrumental precision and compositional complexity, often rooted in formal classical or jazz training, would make rock music more exciting and interesting to listen to. Sounds good. Unfortunately, in practice for the most part the genre lurched from one level of self-indulgent excess and absurdity to another and was rapidly characterized by ludicrous displays of pomposity and self-grandiosity.

The introduction of classical influences that began rather promisingly with early King Crimson quickly went off the rails in a very ugly way. Crimson had included in their first tour playlist in 1969 a rather stunning version of Mars from Gustav Holtz's The Plants, which had obviously influenced both their overall style and several of their specific songs (in subsequent years Crimson produced a number of variations on Mars under different names in a repeated nod to this aspect of their roots). They never bothered to put their straight 1969 version of Mars on any of their formal releases at the time, but it can be heard in some of the frequently breathtaking live recordings of that tour released many decades later. From this interesting side-experiment, the band that epitomized most of the worst excesses of prog rock, Emerson, Lake and Palmer (including the original Crimson bassist/vocalist and in-house lightweight Greg Lake), extrapolated an abominable album-length demolition of Modest Mussorgsky's 1874 piano suite, “Pictures at an Exhibition.” It was dreadful for Mussorgsky's original composition, for rock music, and, above all, for its audiences (who might better be described as victims). The pomposity of prog rock in general and its biggest villains, ELP, in particular, probably reached its nadir in the god-awful 1977 Works, Volume I double LP, especially the first side of the first disc which was defaced by Keith Emerson's "Piano Concerto No. 1," no less. And, yes, it's as contemptible as you no doubt fear.

As for the heightened levels of instrumental competence and formal training that tended to accompany prog rock, these were undoubtedly real but generally never made it beyond, or at least quickly degenerated into, empty pyrotechnics without any artistic merit whatsoever. Without adult supervision, self-restraint or real writing ability, prog rock types typically deluded themselves that pomposity, grandiosity and empty instrumental pyrotechnics were a substitute for well-written, enjoyable or interesting music. Worse still, they forgot or denied they were still operating in the field of pop, in which the ultimate goal has been and remains a perfectly honed, catchy and diamond-like three-four-minute love song or something equally perfectly formed but simple. The very notion of a catchy tune, which is the sine qua non of pop music, became anathema to this genre of it. A particularly egregious example of this was another leading UK prog rock band, Yes, which managed to assemble some extremely talented instrumentalists indeed but which, in several decades of dedicated and earnest labor, never managed to compose a single remotely interesting or decently composed song. Their music, usually difficult and demanding to perform, was nonetheless almost always a prodigious mess full of sound and fury and signifying nothing whatsoever. Almost all of it is downright unlistenable.

The only one of the prog rock bands whose instrumental brilliance was sometimes able to overcome a complete absence of songwriting talent or, worse, a militant disinterest in the craft of songwriting, was the aforementioned King Crimson. The band, which continuously changed members except guitar ace Robert Fripp, produced very few well-written songs, but quite a lot of very interesting and sometimes exciting music, and especially inventive and dynamic live improvisations (along with the Grateful Dead they are probably the only well-known rock band to really risk that on such a scale for so much of their history, although that's surely the only thing those two bands have in common). Because of these qualities, Crimson had interestingly delayed levels of influence on the music scene, with their work from the early 70s, for example, having a profound impact on early 90s grunge bands like Nirvana and many others (Kurt Cobain apparently considered Crimson's Red the best LP he had ever heard, and I can understand the sentiment). Even so, much of Crimson's output is so badly written that, like almost all of the rest of 70s prog rock, it can't escape being cringe-inducing.

The punk revolution of the mid-70s was aimed straight at the heart of this rot, and I'm not sure there's been a more salutary self-correction in any aspect of popular culture in recent decades. John Lydon (soon to be renamed Johnny Rotten) reportedly first came to the attention of the Sex Pistols' future manager and mastermind Malcolm McLaren because, among other things, he was wearing a T-shirt with "I hate" penned in above its prefabricated Pink Floyd logo. Quite right! And, of course, with its psychedelic-inflected aesthetic and Roger Waters' unusual (for prog rock) ability to sometimes write a decent song, Pink Floyd was hardly the worst of the bunch. It's crucial to understand that The Lamb was released on the brink of the punk counteroffensive and during the very depths of the prog rock fiasco, and that this is reflected in its contents in a really fascinating and complex way, for both good and ill. Prog rock, for the most part, was unable to avoid self-important grandiosities like the concept album, especially the concept double album. In many ways, The Lamb is the last of these, although Pink Floyd's Animals and The Wall might be seen as final holdouts. But while it participated in so much of prog rock's excesses and errors, The Lamb strikes me as one of the very few products of that genre still worth listening to, at least in part. It's errors and failings are generally typical, but its genuinely interesting features were quite unusual and noteworthy at the time, and remain intriguing and engaging.

Genesis were always something of a lesser light in the prog rock world of the early 70s. They were fairly late to gain any real attention, and while they sometimes tried to copy aspects of Yes' pseudo-classical style, they weren't nearly as good at actually playing their instruments. A more significant difference was the fact that they began as a songwriting collective and always took the idea of songwriting much more seriously than most their prog colleagues. They came across as what they were: not exactly a group of upper class twits, but certainly a group of upper middle-class public (i.e. private) school boys. The band was founded in the late 60s at the Charterhouse school, and the class exception, working-class drummer Phil Collins, was a subsequent hire. This was a key origin of some of Genesis' distinctive quirkiness: their early songs were infused with a strange pseudo-Edwardian sensibility, nursery rhymes and riddles, an absurdist sense of humor particular to the English middle and upper classes, a kind of soft liberal politics that tends come with a certain amount of privilege, and a familiarity with classical and English literature and traditions that was otherwise (probably mercifully) rare if not entirely absent from the subject matter of other rock songs.

Using, as he has throughout his career, a combination of weird and occasionally good ideas and genuine audacity to make up for a marked lack of real singing ability and any other obvious innate talent, their singer Peter Gabriel gained attention for the group through his outlandish costumes and makeup, striking even by the prevailing glam rock standards of Marc Bolan and David Bowie. Some, like the notorious “old man” mask used in live performances of The Musical Box, were extremely effective, while others were ridiculous or simply unconvincing. But it had to be said that Genesis were at least toying with a level of theatricality that was largely if not entirely unprecedented. As with their subject matter, their live performance staging was unexpected and quirky enough to distinguish them from the rest of the prog rock pack.

And then there was the sound. Partly by accident and partly by design, Genesis had early on discovered how to create a unique and very atmospheric musical quality that fit a lot of their subject matter perfectly. Frequently based on multiple 12 string guitars, flute, unusually delicate keyboard touches by Tony Banks and light, haunting, almost ghostly, electric guitar flourishes by Steve Hackett, the sound had a lilting, faded, autumnal and almost musty quality. It sounded as antique and fragile as the nursery and schoolroom subject matter they frequently wrote about or invoked. It seemed, and still seems, an anachronistic and inappropriate set of musical qualities and subject matter for any version of rock and remains quite unique, especially since all efforts to copy it have failed completely. It either works for you or it doesn't. Most listeners are left extremely cold and unmoved by the effect, but for some of us the sound itself seems to possess “magical” or at least deeply evocative qualities that are undeniably affecting. The opening passages of Cinema Show, for example, with its extremely delicate interplay of 12 strings and flute, has an evocative quality that's almost ineffable, but if it works for you, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If one of the unarticulated and even unconscious aims of prog rock was to create a genre that was more European and less American, in this sense early Genesis probably succeeded more than any other effort to find an overall musical quality, a “sound,” that was not just clearly European but unmistakably, almost militantly, English, complete with faux-old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy and calculatedly "quaint" qualities, and that uniquely absurdist English sense of humor.

I noted above that they started out as a songwriting collective rather than a band as such and that unlike most of their prog rock colleagues they took the notion of songwriting seriously and worked hard at it. At some point that kind of single-minded effort is likely to begin to pay off, but quite a lot of their early work suggested trying too hard by half, and it has to be admitted that they produced some of the worst songs, in terms of the interplay of music and lyrics, but I can think of. Two of them were featured on Selling England by the Pound, the 1973 LP that immediately preceded The Lamb. It was certainly their most polished performance up till then, but also brought out the worst of their excesses, and reflected those typical of prog rock generally. Firth of Fifth, for instance, is a bombastic but certainly not terrible, and in some ways very interesting, instrumental track, but the words, whoever was responsible for them, are definitely my candidate for worst written lyric of all time, at least when combined with a plausibly defensible if grandiose instrumental. Insofar as it does make any sense it is inane and insulting, but mostly it just makes no sense, and in a bad way.

Another particularly cringe-inducing song on Selling England is the endless The Battle of Epping Forest, which I suppose was intended to be a satire of some kind of contemporary British culture. Epic fail. It's musically unlistenable, and the lyrics, which are almost certainly the handiwork of Peter Gabriel in his very worst, are an object lesson in how not to write words for a song. Everything is a belabored pun, play on words, unfunny joke, lame cultural reference and so forth. No doubt its a distant descendent of Bob Dylan's masterful satire Desolation Row, with its grotesque parade of clichés and cultural icons bitterly anatomizing a brutal heartbreak. As Stephen Sondheim once observed about Ira Gershwin, you know something has gone badly wrong when while listening to a song one can't help imagining the writer sweating over a thesaurus and rhyming dictionary, trying to pack as much wordplay as possible into the text, when a lyricists' actual role is to be, insofar as possible, invisible. This disastrous and elementary failing was repeated in parts of The Lamb, to devastating effect.

An excess typical of both early Genesis at its worst and prog rock's undisciplined grandiosity in general, also found on Selling England, is the abuse of the third section of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, The Fire Sermon, in the god-awful lyrics for the aforementioned Cinema Show. Needless to say Genesis missed Eliot's point entirely and only succeeded in demonstrating the immaturity of their songwriting craftsmanship, rather than their erudition or upper-middle-class education. Yet for all of that, the sound was unique and compelling to some and it was clear that these people, Gabriel in particular, were at least really trying to write effective, emotionally powerful songs in the context of a genre that generally speaking did not recognize, and even dismissed, the need for any such thing. That something good was eventually going to emerge from so much effort, in spite of so many blunders and false starts, was probably inevitable.

The Lamb both is and isn't it, which is what makes it such a difficult text. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway actually has at least five distinct incarnations that overlap with each other but can be viewed as at least somewhat discrete entities. First, it's a largely and deservedly forgotten short story by Peter Gabriel that was included in the interior gatefold of the original double LP. It can be dispensed without any second thought, being poorly written and completely inane. Gabriel had developed a storytelling technique during early gigs to entertain the audience during the frequent band re-tunings in live performance, and some people found it charming and engaging. It certainly helped to give Genesis another element of uniqueness and deepened its quirky style. But in truth Gabriel never displayed much talent as a prose storyteller, and this short story suggests that his choice of profession as a musician and performer rather than as a writer was a wise one. Second, The Lamb is a studio double album released in 1974 combining lyrics and music in a set of songs that purport to tell a similar if not the same story. Of course this is what most people think of when we refer to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Third, it also refers to the rather extraordinary 102 performance world tour, which on a good night was probably one of the most remarkable concerts one might have hoped to see but which was never filmed or even properly recorded. Fourth, there are the recordings of live performances: numerous bootlegs (and, yes, I admit to possessing modest collection of these) of varying qualities of performance and recording, and the nearly complete version from The Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles recorded on January 24, 1975 and released, with considerable tweaking, in the Genesis Archive 1967-75 box set issued in 1998. Even more than the original studio recording, I'd consider this last version close to definitive, although some of the other raw live recordings such as the one from the Wembley Empire Pool in 1974 and several others are also indispensable. Finally, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is also the name of the first and crucially important song of the whole set, and can therefore can refer to that as a stand-alone in any or all of the numerous versions performed by Genesis or Gabriel over the years.

As I already noted, the “story” behind The Lamb, both written in prose by Gabriel and as reflected in the lyrics is, on its face, utterly inane and garbled. Its efforts at surrealism are largely, although not entirely, a failure and it simply doesn't hold together in a meaningful sense, at least in terms of its manifest content. There have been numerous efforts to “interpret” or otherwise provide meaning and structure to what Gabriel himself called “a big lump of story and music,” almost all without significant success. This is almost certainly because to a very large extent there is no there there, so to speak. To return to my proposition that the first quality of “good” art succeed on its own terms, The Lamb as a story, a concept and a unified whole fails utterly. You'd think that would be the end of things, but interestingly it's not. Among other things, there is a subtext in which a great deal of what is written, particularly in some of the song lyrics, has a latent meaning its author may not even have been fully aware of that regularly asserts itself in a very compelling manner.

During the period in which The Lamb was written, Gabriel was becoming increasingly unhappy with his relationship with the other members of Genesis, his role as a rock star and, I think, the way in which prog rock in general was proceeding. Sometime during the composition he decided to quit the band, and in the run-up to the tour he decided to take a hiatus from music altogether and apparently considered a change of careers. At the end of the tour in 1975, he actually did disappear for a couple of years only to reemerge in 1977 as a very compelling solo act. Roger Waters of Pink Floyd did a great deal of complaining in his songs about the hazards of rock stardom and the abuses of the industry, but, for a short time at least, Gabriel went beyond complaining to actually walking away. It didn't last, but it probably salvaged his ability to subsequently emerge as a major songwriter, performer and, at times, visionary, in the pop music field. At any rate his songs in The Lamb and on his first solo album strongly reflect this discontent and even anger. A year earlier in 1974, King Crimson honcho Robert Fripp dissolved his band indefinitely (it unexpectedly, even to him, reemerged in a barely recognizable form in 1981) and went underground to practice the New Age teachings of Bennett and Gurdjieff. It's less demonstrable, but it seems likely that Fripp too could see the writing on the wall for prog rock and decided to get out while the getting was good. And perhaps it's no coincidence that Fripp and Gabriel, the best of the bunch in most ways anyway, reemerged in new, stripped-down, post-prog forms in the late 70s with Fripp joining Gabriel's first tour (playing while concealed behind a stack of amplifiers) and producing (badly) his second LP.

It's been suggested before, but I do think The Lamb, in so far as it is amenable to and worth reading as a whole text, has interesting things to say about this set of issues that just so happened to be consuming its author at the time. It's probably best read as a kind of refracted diary of a frustrated and fledgling artist who feels entirely smothered by the very structures he created and is looking for creative and personal independence, that is to say for a way out. This certainly seems to be the only way to make sense of it all. Predictably, it is the refracted and displaced exploration of such sentiments that gives rise to the best and the worst of what The Lamb has to offer.

So what works on the album, and what doesn't, apart from an incoherent narrative that makes little diegetic sense and is essentially a string of non sequiturs both in a linear and even in a more attenuated, non-linear or surrealist framework? Well, to begin at the beginning, it has to be said that the opening of The Lamb and its title track, especially on the Archives and bootlegged live versions, creates a pretty spectacular musical effect. Rapid keyboard arpeggios are themselves circled with odd buzzing, fluttering sounds, gaining density and intensity until the first theme comes crashing through and the opening lyrics, "And the lamb… lies down… on Broadway," initiate the narrative in earnest. The effect is that of something being conjured out of nothing, of a strange, unearthly, and incorporeal presence suddenly and inexorably swirling into a shape and bursting into life with an abrupt and surprising muscularity. This opening track is strikingly effective at almost every level and was the only song on the album to be routinely performed by both Genesis and Gabriel in subsequent years. In other words, what is overall frequently a disappointing and even “bad” LP gets off to a remarkably “good” start.

Musically the opening sets the tone for the rest of the album, combining both powerful and delicate elements and emphasizing more simple and traditional rock song structures than Genesis had typically aimed for in earlier records. It also has some of the most effective lyrics on the entire record, first carefully creating its urban surrealist atmosphere, then introducing the angry, alienated outsider, Rael, “the imperial aerosol kid,” who is also implicitly violent and a sexual predator, and finally beginning a series carefully calculated pop cultural references and, more importantly, musical quotations. Unlike many of their prog rock colleagues, Genesis had tried to avoid musical quotations, including from classical sources for most of their early period. For The Lamb, however, they suddenly decided to literally litter its music and text with quotations and allusions. This process may start as early in the opening track as the third verse reference to Suzanne, possibly citing Leonard Cohen's 1966 classic that Gabriel would later rather brilliantly cover. It is unmistakably underway as the opening song ends with “they say the lights are always bright on Broadway, they say there's always magic in the air,” from The Drifters' classic. The musical and lyrical quotations in The Lamb are, importantly, mostly to either American classic pop and rock songs, or to distinctly American-inflected British rock such as the Rolling Stones (who are parodied at the very end of the album), and not to any classical or folk sources typically favored by other prog rock bands.

The choice of these quotations is very calculated. Gabriel and Genesis were deliberately trying to move away from the Edwardian, classical, mythic, swords and sorcery, fantasy, quaintly English and “airy-fairy” as they put it, subject matter and tone they were most closely associated with. The effort was only partly successful, but indicates an understanding of where unmistakably diminishing returns were becoming clearly evident. The attempt to create a “gritty” urban setting in a version of New York City, to center on an unpleasant and possibly dangerous main character who is a violent gang member, and to toughen some of the music while retaining a signature delicacy at times, all reflected this impulse. And in quoting American and American-inflected classic pop and rock songs, Genesis was obviously trying to say, you've misunderstood us: we aren't Yes, ELP and company, we're more interested in and responsive to the great songs we all know and love and were trying to write new ones rather than compete with or mimic Gustaf Holst, Wagner or Chopin. Gabriel's idol, after all, was Otis Redding.

At times, The Lamb either succeeds in this ambitious transformation, or at least comes very close. Probably the most striking and, for those who respond to and like it, emotionally affecting track on the album is Back in NYC, which is a huge deviation from anything Genesis ever did before or after. Some people have identified it, and its narrator Rael, as proto-punk, and whether one agrees with that extremely debatable interpretation or not, we're certainly dealing with an angry, violent and vicious character giving full vent to his rage. The live version on the Archive and many other bootlegged live performances find Gabriel at close to his finest, and for whatever reason (quite possibly linked to his frustration with the band and the whole direction Genesis was taking) he almost too convincingly comes across as an angry, unstable and at least slightly dangerous persona in some of these performances. Throughout the 80s and into the 90s he displayed similar flashes of anger on album and stage in a weird love/hate relationship with his audience that was only resolved, perhaps, with the LP So, best known for its love song to the audience In Your Eyes, and probably not fully until even later with the conciliatory album appropriately entitled Us. Musically, Back in NYC is also quite unique for Genesis and seems to set the stage much more for Gabriel's solo work such as San Jacinto, his unreleased cover version of I Heard It Through the Grapevine, and his collaboration with Afro-Celt Sound System, When You're Falling, which seems to be more or less of a reworking of NYC.

But however effective it clearly is in the opening track and in Back in NYC, the character of Rael is often extremely problematic and at times constitutes one of the greatest failings of The Lamb. To effect the shift Genesis were looking for, he had to be as "othered" as possible: American, not English; Puerto Rican, not white; half, not fully, Puerto Rican (no indication of "the other half"), have a name that kind of sounds right but really does not exist, and so forth. Worse, Gabriel was simply unable to get his voice right in the lyrics. Gabriel's own deeply English vocabulary, phraseology, references and sensibility come through time and again, and there's no way any listener can credit Rael the narrator as a successfully constructed a half-Puerto Rican New York street kid gang member. It is possible, of course, to hear Rael as GabRael rather than "Real," and therefore as yet another mask the Genesis singer was using to thinly disguise aspects of his own persona. Gabriel's subsequent development of a powerful confessional style of songwriting suggests that consciously or unconsciously this is what he was trying to do. But given my criterion that an artistic effort ought to minimally succeed at least on the terms it lays down for itself, I don't think it's possible to see Rael ultimately as anything other than a grand miscalculation and an effort to pull off a kind of ambitious cross-cultural ventriloquism for which Genesis and Gabriel did not possess the requisite capital or knowledge-base.

Listing the vast number of phrases, sentiments and formulations that are easily identifiable with what must have been Charterhouse culture but completely inappropriate for anyone of Rael's purported description would be far too tedious. The worst examples are concentrated in the weakest song on the album, in my view, The Chamber of 32 Doors, especially its celebration of the “country man” versus the “town man.” The distinction of town versus country is quite deep in the English culture and psyche, but has no rhetorical equivalent in the United States, especially in New York City (it matters little whether the voice speaking in that part of the song is assumed to be that of Rael himself or some advice-giving relative as some have suggested). Beyond that, the song is just awful. It anticipates Gabriel's future confessional style, but it fails both formally and in terms of satisfying its own clear-cut agenda, and its emotions are bathetic at best, a kind of melodrama we will come to in a future Ibishblog guilty pleasures essay.

Another of the low points comes soon after the excellent opening track and the stunning short follow-through, Fly on the Windshield (a metaphor much later appropriated by Depeche Mode), which quickly gives way to Broadway Melody of 1974, which is similar to and almost as bad as The Battle of Epping Forest, though mercifully much shorter. It's basically a series of bad puns and lame cultural allusions that are supposed to be clever, evocative and, I suppose, surrealistic, but are merely tiresome and annoying. Again, a sub-Desolation Row fiasco. Obviously there is a point being made here about nostalgia, which was running deep in Anglo-American culture in 1974, but the song feels like a checklist and produces Sondheim's "Gershwin effect" of primarily evoking the image of the songwriter sweating over his wordplay to the exclusion of lyrical effectiveness or, for that matter meaning.

A number of the other tracks fail along similar lines. Anyway and The Colony of Slippermen fall back into the public school cleverness trap in an extremely ineffective manner and the whole trope of Rael and his brother facing the twin specters of castration and suburban domestication seems crude and juvenile. The Lamia is in some ways a well-written song, but again resorting to classical mythology and Romantic poetry (in this case John Keats, in Slippermen, William Wordsworth) not only doesn't work and sounds silly, but worse it seems to contradict a lot of the other imperatives Genesis seemed to be setting themselves and the album in earlier parts of The Lamb. It comes across as a retreat, a surrender to a familiar and played-out style and, in a sense, an admission that the new path either wasn't working or couldn't be sustained. It is as if, as the double album progresses, the creative energies deployed on both sides of the first disc simply burned themselves out and Genesis increasingly allowed themselves to slip back into very familiar and therefore completely ineffective territory that it was the whole point of The Lamb to move beyond if not repudiate. Under such circumstances it's hard to avoid self-parody, but if that danger was not entirely avoided in be only partly successful effort to create a new, gritty, urban and slightly menacing atmosphere on disc one, by Slippermen Genesis begin to sound like a parody of their old selves. Of course it's an inglorious spectacle.

To oscillate rapidly back towards the album's charms, largely located on the first disc, the songs that work best are, not surprisingly, those most directly reflecting Gabriel's claustrophobia, fear and despair at the time. Cuckoo Cocoon has as much of the trapped and sedated but anxious as one might wish: "this feels so secure, that I know it can't be real, but I feel good," etc. In the Cage seems to work extremely well on almost every level. Genesis continued to perform the song for many years after, and because it's so well-crafted it stands alone perfectly. It slowly gain steam and increasingly and then frantically builds to a moving and effective crescendo that condenses and releases a great deal of tension. That its author felt trapped by something serious is evident on first listening. And while there isn't any direct quotation, there certainly is the (entirely positive and, insofar as possible, unpretentious) influence of Bach in Tony Banks' keyboard solo (for a prog rock band, Genesis was remarkably unconcerned with the pyrotechnical solo, no doubt because they aspired to write effective songs).

I am unusual, I think, among admirers of The Lamb in appreciating the track that follows In the Cage, the unheralded and much-maligned The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging, which musically is probably the simplest song on the entire album, but which I think contains genuinely clever and effective lyrics. Those interested primarily in complicated or interesting musical structures will no doubt find little of interest in it, but I would argue that it demonstrates Gabriel's slow maturation as a wordsmith, and at an earlier point in his career it might have fallen victim to the “Gershwin effect,” but doesn't. Again, the song goes directly to Gabriel's growing anxiety about becoming a commodity. In his brilliant song Solsbury Hill, the highlight of his first solo effort after leaving Genesis, he insists that "I walked right out of the machinery," a boast rendered increasingly hollow as it is being used in more and more TV commercials. Nonetheless, if Solsbury Hill is to be seen, as it should be, as Gabriel's declaration of independence from Genesis ("today I don't need a replacement, I showed them what the smile on my face meant"), then songs like Grand Parade and the others served as fair warning, due notice and further evidence of a decent respect to the opinions of mankind as they say.

No such unorthodoxy attaches to my very high regard for "The Carpet Crawlers," which is undoubtedly the highlight of The Lamb, and therefore certainly the best song Genesis ever produced with or without Gabriel. There is some dispute about whether Gabriel was responsible for both the lyrics and most of the music or only the lyrics and the essential melody, but it hardly matters. Here, at last, by those criteria I laid out the beginning of this essay is a product that can unequivocally be identified as “good” in every possible sense. There have been many efforts to decipher who and what these carpet crawlers might be and why their refrain is “we got to get into get out.” I don't think there's any great mystery about it, however. The song describes, in figurative but unmistakable language, the perils of ambition and working within a system of ambitions, of the trap that they set for the individuals “who are pulled up by the magnet, believing they're free.” It seems to me almost impossible that song could have been written by anyone who wasn't giving voice to a degree of outrage at their own captivity in such systems and the distortions of personality and behavior they inevitably produce.

In particular I find the often ignored introductory section to be exceptionally evocative and effective, and the clearest sign that Gabriel's ambition to become a serious songwriter, after so many fiascoes and false starts, was finally beginning to be realized: “A salamander scurries into flames to be destroyed. Imaginary creatures are trapped at birth on celluloid. The fleas cling to the golden fleece, hoping they'll find peace. Each thought and gesture are caught on celluloid. There's no hiding in my memory. There's no room to avoid.” Self-destruction, self-creation and re-creation, self-delusion, self-defeat, illusory ambition, the pointless yearning for and relentless punishment by entertainment industry success, the passionate desire for and intense fear of creating a permanent artistic record, and the self-recrimination and self-loathing these produce are all powerfully invoked here. The fact that it leads directly into an exceptionally beautiful song that continues to press the case with powerful and evocative imagery and a haunting chorus and refrain, and which builds to an extraordinary intensity, only reinforces the sense that we are dealing, from the outset, with an entirely successful and indeed remarkable work of art, a truly great song by any standards. Whether he wrote only most or basically all of it, bootlegs of the tour suggest that Gabriel consistently produced powerful vocal performances of the song, even on the (frequent) evenings in which his voice and/or singing abilities were less than impressive. And no matter how many times Phil Collins has tried to sing it, the song was and remains entirely owned by Gabriel.

As for The Lamb on stage, it remains one of the more tantalizing mysteries for prog rock, and indeed rock in general. Gabriel-era Genesis was probably the most interestingly "theatrical" band ever, in the most positive and negative senses of the term, even though others perhaps before, and certainly since, have had more elaborate staging. This pattern clearly reached its peak with The Lamb tour, which bizarrely and inexplicably was never properly documented, let alone filmed. The staging included a studied and carefully constructed pitch blackness; three large screens showing more than 1,400 slides throughout the performance; a giant swirling cone that descended on Gabriel at the end of The Lamia; the most bizarre and elaborate costume, the Slipperman, that he or probably any other major rock figure has ever worn; and a life-sized and apparently convincing dummy second Gabriel that emerged with an explosion on the other side of the stage at the moment Rael realizes that his brother John, who he has been chasing through most of the narrative, is actually himself. An enormous amount of effort to reconstruct the spectacle, which was evidently quite remarkable, has been expended by numerous people, and one can get a generalized sense of it, but there is a palpable feeling in many quarters that it probably packed much more of a wallop than we can glean from the fragments. Or not. Very few of us will ever be sure. The tiny scraps of 8mm video that have survived, almost all of wretchedly poor quality, are extremely suggestive and enticing. So is the text of the tour program that describes the show as "multi-media," a concept that was fledgling at best in 1974.

One of my closest friends, who is a noted rock critic, a serious and canny cultural observer and a brilliant journalist, once told me that the one show he most regrets never having seen was Genesis in 1974. Even though I long had a soft spot for The Lamb, and had a sense of what an intriguing spectacle it must've been from photographs by Armando Gallo and others, at that time I told him I wasn't sure what he meant. But upon reflection, and especially after the release of the Shrine Auditorium performance in the Archive box set I was convinced and I told him so. One thing is for sure: the lack of a serious documentary visual record of the performance only adds to its mystique, which for those of us who like, or are even deeply ambivalent about, it is considerable. It is, for some of us, the mother of all the ones that got away without more than a few traces.

I've gone into all this background and textual detail in order, I hope, to make a broader point about how ambivalence in judgment of artistic merit works in practice and how difficult the questions it raises are. As promised, I haven't answered any of them. What I was trying to illuminate is why The Lamb is compelling both on its own merits and in terms of its relationship to a cultural moment, the immanent and probably overdue death of prog rock, but at the same time to be very frank about all the serious flaws and failings that hold me fast to a position of apparently irresolvable ambivalence. But if The Lamb marks in some senses one of the highest achievements and in other senses a crucial herald of the death of prog rock, it also anticipates several other new forms: the stripped-down post-prog music pursued by Gabriel, Fripp and other refugees of that ilk; Genesis' own post-Gabriel slow drift into garbage-pop artistic oblivion and concomitant commercial success; and possibly in some senses the imminent punk counterattack. Certainly for those who have significant regard for Gabriel's later achievements, especially beginning with Gabriel III (also known as “Melt”) in 1980, The Lamb is most clearly the end of one era and the glimmerings of the beginning of another.

I hope that by looking at the ways in which I am simultaneously attracted to and repelled by The Lamb, I have been able to begin to tease out a little bit of how ambivalence functions as a variety of the guilty pleasure. For me, in this case the effect is slightly vertiginous since the repulsion is at least as strong as the attraction, and such a strong case can be made for either embracing or dismissing the object overall. That parts of it can be unequivocally embraced and others unhesitatingly dismissed doesn't help much in resolving the question of the status of the whole, which ultimately must be subjected to some kind of judgment. In this case, and in all such ambivalent guilty pleasures, the guilt comes from tolerating what's embarrassingly bad in order to celebrate what certainly seems to be praiseworthy, and of course what we respond to emotionally. I'd be lying if I didn't admit that The Lamb is something I tend to listen to on a regular basis, especially in weakened, tired, emotional or euphoric states of mind. I couldn't live without this LP, but I wouldn't want to defend its overall merits in any kind of extended public debate.

Unlike the toxic guilty pleasures, such as the Bond films, in which I propose that the frisson of various forms of guilt is an intrinsic part of the pleasure, in this case the guilt attached to tolerating the indefensible is experienced more as a kind of shame, an embarrassment that must be tolerated because of an attachment to more positive qualities. It's a little bit like being with an incorrigible spouse or romantic partner who insists on behaving badly from time to time. Whether or not it's worth the effort, the guilt and the shame is a judgment call everybody has to make in each individual case. In this case, I bit the bullet and wrote and made public this long-delayed essay in partial and carefully attenuated praise of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway… at last. So be it. Let the shame of such a guilty pleasure be upon my head, and the heads of my children for that matter. In this case, the pleasures it provides are certainly worth it, and they have consistently proven that over several decades.

Some months ago my dear friend the great critical theorist R. Radhakrishnan suggested I pay some attention in writing to the phenomenon I discussed with him on several occasions whereby we respond emotionally, aesthetically or intellectually to cultural artifacts that we nonetheless do not, at a certain level, respect. In fact, we may know very well that a cultural product is inferior if not fundamentally absurd, and yet it may have a profound impact and even an irresistible draw to us. How and why does that operate? What's going on when we respond so powerfully at all kinds of levels to something we feel, whether on reflection or viscerally, is either completely or in some senses beneath contempt? How do we account for such "guilty pleasures?" Of course, this version of guilty pleasure is a subset of the deeper existential problem of why we want things that we know very well are bad for us: why we cling to, or mourn the loss of, dysfunctional relationships with toxic people; persist with, or pine for, self-destructive behavior of one kind or another; or find ourselves in the grip of a political or religious ideology we know very well, at a certain level at any rate, is indefensible and possibly loathsome. But for the meanwhile, let's stick to the subject of bad art.

I'm going to begin looking at this problem by taking on one of what has been, in my life at any rate, one of its more gruesome manifestations: films featuring the character James Bond and the Ian Fleming novels on which they are based. Let's be clear at the outset: on the whole and in most senses they are without question garbage, and toxic garbage at that. The films are militantly stupid and implausible, often insultingly so, distinctly racist and irredeemably sexist, and the novels even more racist and sexist (more about the dismal ideology at work in them a little later). And yet some of us are drawn to some of them in spite of having no respect for them whatsoever, and even finding them offensive. In particular the early Bond movies starring Sean Connery have a real pull on my imagination and I'd like to begin my exploration of the morphology of guilty pleasures by considering how on earth that could possibly be the case.

The Bond films are useful as a starting point because, for me at any rate, they point directly to one of the most important and powerful forces behind guilty pleasures of this kind: nostalgia. I find a great deal of my fascination with “bad art,” if it even rises to that level in this case, is rooted in a kind of nostalgia for what gripped my attention when I was young, what evokes a bygone era, what reminds me of my childhood or youth, and what seems originary and culturally fundamental. For those of us who were children in the late 60s and early 70s, the early Bond movies were, like Beatles' songs and certain TV shows, supporting pillars of the popular culture with which we were surrounded, including in the Middle East. We grew up with them, so they are in that sense a kind of cultural comfort food, something we wouldn't find particularly appealing on its own merits if it didn't inspire memories of distant and supposedly happier times, the innocence and happy days of childhood and other dubious fantasies.

For instance, one of the toys I remember most clearly really enjoying as a young boy was a Corgi matchbox car version of the legendary gray Aston Martin driven by Bond in Goldfinger (1964), complete with what at the time appeared miraculous, but now seem both clunky and ridiculous, gadgets. The model toy car seemed to capture both the cool elegance and the exciting power of Q's armored and souped-up Aston Martin and with it, in a sense, the very essence of the Bond films themselves. So for me, these memories are deep and powerful, and the imagery and ideology of these films hits at a fairly visceral level.

The early Bond films, particularly From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger and Thunderball (1965) really were enormously influential in not only Western but global culture in establishing and popularizing a pop art aesthetic particular to the 1960s. Particularly the set and costume designs, as well as the frequently psychedelic credits, and to some extent the scores as well, may have appeared staid and conservative but in fact fully embraced and propagated to a very wide audience this aesthetic at an early period in its popularization. So in reconnecting with them, one instantly access one of the more powerful vehicles for popularizing an aesthetic style that literally did define an era. When that process is in operation, it doesn't matter how silly the content of any given message might be. The aesthetic sensibilities being seductively passed around like free samples from a local coke or heroin dealer were always the most important thing being communicated, and if one is nostalgic for an era defined by that style, the vehicle itself by definition and perforce must possess a certain charm, however unearned.

But of course that's not the only thing that drew people and continues to draw people, especially young men, to the Bond films, particularly the early ones. Both the films and the Fleming novels are chockablock with Freudian sexual imagery that is either barely or not at all veiled, and the essential subtext of most of the early Bond films is blatantly Oedipal. In particular Goldfinger, which was and remains probably the most iconic, although hardly the best, of the early Bond films is an entirely Oedipal drama in which a younger, more sexually dynamic man confronts and tries to usurp and overwhelm a richer, more powerful and in most ways more formidable older rival. (Ever since Umberto Eco's early and influential essay about narrative structures in Fleming's novels it's been intellectually defensible to discuss Bond in serious company, but it still feels silly to look at the subtext of such frivolous material.) Nonetheless, what Goldfinger and many of the others suggest is that the fundamental Bond Fantasy, so to speak, is essentially an Oedipal one. Contrast Bond's snazzy, hip and youthful Aston Martin with Goldfinger's opulent but staid and indeed antique Rolls-Royce (complete with homicidal Korean manservant), recall the legendary and very blatant aborted castration scene with the laser cutter (“no, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die,” etc.), and consider their constant struggle over sports contests (golf), control of gold and money, and even more crucially control of women (most notably the unsubtly named “Pussy Galore”). The case makes itself. Part of the film's power comes from its blatant crudeness, its encoding so liminal, so close to the surface, so very un-hidden that it requires almost no interpretation and can be lost on virtually no one who pays the least attention, even at the time.

There are several consequences to this crucial aspect of the Bond films and their appeal. First, they only really “work” the first few times, because the message is so simple and can only be repeated in so many ways before it becomes a self-parody, which it quickly did (if it wasn't always already one from the outset). Second, it requires a youthful Bond, which quickly became a problem for Sean Connery who was already wearing a toupee in Dr. No (1962). By the time of Connery's return to the part in Diamonds are Forever in 1972, he was clearly too old to be an Oedipal hero of any kind whatsoever and this aspect of the films was lost more or less permanently. It is no coincidence that Diamonds are Forever introduces the Bond film as primarily a comedy rather than primarily a thriller or action film for the first time, a pattern to be consistently maintained throughout Roger Moore's tenure during the rest of the 70s.

Moore and the producers rightly understood that when he assumed the character in Live and Let Die (1973) he was already inheriting a self-parody, and both he and the writers made every effort to ensure that Bond became essentially a (rather poor) comedian involved in adventures rather than an action hero with occasional (also very poor) "witticisms" as in the early Connery films. I think it's impossible not to see this transformation as fundamentally rooted in a combination of Connery's past-the-sell-by-date age in Diamonds are Forever and the fact that after Thunderball the Oedipal drama was too well-established to be successfully repeated with any emotional impact and that the formula had been repeated so many times that the only thing left to do was for the Bond movies to embrace their status as a self-parody in a very overt manner. From then on, if not before, Bond movies also became fairly passive recipients of the latest fads, rather than trendsetters themselves: blaxsploitation in Live and Let Die, the kung fu craze in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), videogames in Moonraker (1979) and Never Say Never Again (1983), etc. ad infinitum.

That said, when an Oedipal fantasy is effectively constructed, and several of the early Bond movies do achieve that effect, it's difficult to overstate the potential to appeal to both a wide audience and, especially, a dedicated following of young men and, above all, boys. So for those of us who were, in fact, boys at the time, part of the source of our guilty pleasure in the Bond films is not really very mysterious at all, especially when combined with the power of nostalgia. This is not to say, of course, that absolutely everything about all the Bond films is bad. Dr. No is in many ways a terrible film, but it did have a number of original features and actually defined a major genre, for good or ill, and therefore can't be dismissed lightly. From Russia with Love is often cited as the best of the Bond films, and I think overall that's true. It is well-paced, entertaining, engaging, suitably ridiculous and for the first time assembled all the essential features of the Bond movie as a genre, giving it as much of the charm of the originary as Dr. No possesses (which is a considerable degree). It's not exactly a good movie, but it's certainly not terrible.

It's harder to praise Goldfinger, Thunderball or You Only Live Twice (1967) in general with a straight face, but On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) is another matter altogether. Many Bond aficionados consider it easily the best of the films, and one can certainly see why. It's well paced and scripted, and some of the Alpine action sequences are genuinely well-done. Scenes involving the cable car are genuinely tense, and the chase on skis is, if not a classic, certainly an expertly constructed chase scene, the only good one in any Bond film, which, of course, contain mediocre chase after mediocre chase. More importantly, On Her Majesty's Secret Service marks the only real, albeit decidedly halfhearted, effort to give Bond an actual personality, and the fact that it was in almost every sense a miserable failure is extremely revealing. George Lazenby, who gives a perfectly creditable performance, was widely reviled largely for not being Connery, but also no doubt took the brunt of the producers' ill-considered decision to follow the lead of the novels in attempting, also without success, to flesh out a little more of a character for Bond in the film. From the outset he seems vulnerable and tenuous rather than icy and coldly effective, and his virtual nervous breakdown at the end when his newlywed wife is murdered is interesting but didn't sit well at all with most audiences, either at the time or now for that matter. Diamonds are Forever, with the return of Connery to the role and radical shift in tone and attitude towards the comic, glib and jocular, its obsession with fakes and doubles, and absolute evasion of any mention of the murder of Bond's wife at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, serves as a thoroughgoing repudiation of the mistake. One reason for this is, of course, that the effort to "humanize" Bond simply didn't work. But there's more to it than that. It was fundamentally inappropriate to the character and the genre built around him.

The Bond character has been described as an “automaton” and Fleming himself saw him as “a blunt instrument” in the service of a government. I'd phrase it differently. Bond is more of a cipher than an automaton, an empty vessel rather than one on autopilot. This surely is part of his wide-ranging appeal: he DOES things, and in a sense he IS things, but he isn't exactly someone since he has no identifiable personality as such (which has helped so many actors to play him more or less interchangeably). If the point is to allow young men to project themselves onto a character and young women to project onto him a sexual or romantic fantasy, the blanker the screen, the better. Bond leaves that space open perfectly, and On Her Majesty's Secret Service threatened to clutter it up with disruptive and intrusive detail, such as actual elements of a character. In the novels he has virtually no personality, and in the films, none whatsoever. And here's where it gets really insidious: Bond is, more than anything else, the archetype of the ideal modern, and even postmodern, capitalist subject: perfectly the company man and commodity fetishizing consumer.

As a company man, Bond is, to all appearances, faithful and loyal to his employers not only to a fault but in an ultimately inexplicable manner. He seems patriotic, but his patriotism is absolutely devoid of any ideas, or even conscious affiliations, whatsoever. He a ruthless agent of the government, particularly of his handler, the noxious M, but, in the films at least, why is entirely unclear. Yet his loyalty to what he frequently calls “the company” is ostentatiously demonstrated on numerous occasions, and not only in terms of the personal risks he is taking for missions he is often not fully briefed about and in pursuit of policies in which he takes no interest whatsoever. When M asks him, in their first ever film conversation in Dr. No, when he ever sleeps, Bond assures him, “never on the firm's time.” Similarly, he is scrupulous about money and other assets belonging to what he describes as “the company” or other elements of “government property” that have to be “fully accounted for.” In other words, however mischievous and defiant he sometimes pretends to be, at heart he's an exemplary employee and, above all else, a fully interpolated company man, and proud of it.

Bond is also among the most passionate commodity fetishizing consumers in all of film and literature. Fleming was an early practitioner of the brand-name dropping genre of faux-elegance, and Bond is very particular about what he deigns to consume. Perhaps above all else, Bond is depicted as a walking set of appetites: for fetishized fine food; fetishized beverages, especially alcohol (though some of his tastes in that regard are decidedly odd); fetishized consumer objects, brand names (especially the ultra-exclusive Q brand) and bling; and, of course, fetishized women, for whom he has a particularly voracious and objectifying appetite. As a vehicle of ideological instruction, Bond is an ideal capitalist subject who exemplifies how to work selflessly for the bosses on the job, and consume everything in sight off the job, with a special enthusiasm for commodity and other forms of highly questionable fetishism. We don't know who he really is in any meaningful sense, but we know who he works for, what he does (mainly kill, for which he is “licensed”), and, most importantly, what he consumes. The lessons being taught here are about the worst you could fear. Fleming's early novels are also anti-Soviet cold war propaganda documents of a quite strident variety, although none of the films fell directly into that trap. If he intended Bond to serve as an instrument of indoctrination in the socio-economic mores of late capitalism, not bogged down by any element of political theory or content whatsoever, his construct was as crude but effective a vehicle of ideology as the character is a crude but effective “blunt instrument” in vapid, empty and unthinking obedience to his government superiors.

The films never get into it, but Fleming did open his series of novels with an effort to explicate the origins of Bond's conduct. Casino Royale (1952) is a genuinely interesting and mercifully short read, and is the only one really worth picking up for a couple of hours. It's certainly Bond at his most ruthless and brutal, and is probably worth the two hours or so it will take to make one's way through it on that basis alone. But Fleming unusually spares a little bit of time in the novel on what passes for Bond's psychology, or at least the architecture of his motivations. At the book's outset, he already possesses most of the qualities described above. He's a company man, a fetishizing consumer, and an unquestioning, ruthless “blunt instrument” of his employers' instructions. After some pretty dreadful spy thriller drivel, a genuinely interesting and skillful explication of the mechanics of baccarat and a reasonably suspenseful gambling scene, Bond is subjected to a brutal and clinically described torture session in which his testicles are beaten to a pulp by his first nemesis, the Soviet agent Le Chiffre, with a carpet beater (the first of the virtually endless castration-oriented primal scenes that litter both the novels and the films). He barely survives the abuse, and during his extended hospital recovery enters into an uncharacteristic bout of self-reflection and self-doubt.

This is where things really get interesting. Bond seriously questions his role as a government agent and gets sucked into some equally emasculating moral and perspectival relativism (shock, horror). He muses, “the hero [referring to himself] kills two villains, but when the hero Le Chiffre starts to kill the villain Bond and the villain Bond knows he isn't a villain at all, you see the other side of the medal. The villains and heroes get all mixed up.” He continues, “patriotism comes along and makes it seem fairly all right, but this country-right-or-wrong business is getting a little out-of-date. Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive 50 years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep changing parts.” This crippling flash of insight, we are meant to understand as the nadir of his career and almost the permanent and irrevocable downfall of Bond the character, a mental emasculation that mimics his (also temporary) physical one. But it's actually a set up for his rededication to his role at the novel's conclusion. His French colleague Mathis tells Bond it's not about principles, it's about defending against people who, for whatever reason, want to kill you and your loved ones: “Surround yourself with human beings, my dear James. They are easier to fight for than principles.”

Bond actually tries to follow this advice, and allows himself to fall in love with the ridiculous and ridiculously named Vesper Lynd, his putative assistant. He determines to resign from the service and marry her. During a romantic trip after his recovery from the nearly fatal testicle torture, in which all of Bond implausibly returns to perfect working order, her behavior becomes increasingly erratic and her stories increasingly contradictory. It becomes clear all is not what it seems. She commits suicide, leaving behind a note in which she confesses to have been a double agent working for the other side (the testicle torturers, among other things), claiming to have been blackmailed because a man she loves is being held hostage in Poland. All thoughts of moral and political relativism in Bond die with Vesper and her betrayal – upon learning of her perfidy he swears reflexively, weeps briefly and immediately seeks refuge in his “professionalism”: “He saw her now only as a spy. Their love and his grief were relegated to the boxroom of his mind… Now he could only think of her treachery to the Service and her country and of the damage it had done. His professional mind was completely absorbed with the consequences…” Bond becomes Bond as we "know" him, or at least recommits to being Bond, because of this betrayal and an animating thirst for vengeance. He concludes: “Be faithful, spy well, or you die… Advance against the enemy and the bullet might miss you. Retreat, evade, betray, and the bullet would never miss.” He calls to report her death to his organization with the famous and chilling final lines: “The bitch is dead now.”

Almost all of this relative complexity is lost in the appalling 2006 film remake of Casino Royale. Bond's flirtation with moral relativism is excised. The shallowness and dubious nature of Vesper's confession/excuse is papered over by an assurance that IM6 knows it's all true about the boyfriend being held hostage (in the book we have only her flimsy, unreliable word for it). And Bond, rather than being almost killed and deeply traumatized by the testicle torture, literally laughs it off, telling the 2006 version of Le Chiffre at the height of the torment, “the world is going to know that you died scratching my balls.” Whatever tidbits of interest can be gleaned from the novel are scrubbed clean in this absolutely terrible film. In fact Casino Royale has been filmed three times: first for American television in 1954 with Barry Nelson as an American version of “card sense” Jimmy Bond, a gambling American agent. It bears little resemblance to either the book or any of the subsequent Bond films and is probably most notable for a surprisingly weak performance by Peter Lorre as Le Chiffre. Second was an early and unamusing Bond film parody in 1967 starring David Niven and Woody Allen. And third, the 2006 fiasco that was widely touted as “gritty” and some kind of return to a tougher, cruder Bond when it's nothing of the kind. It's hard to know which of the three is the worst.

At any rate, in Fleming's first novel it's pretty clear by the end that Bond is going to be motivated primarily not by patriotism, which he has largely seen through, or by affiliation and love for family because he doesn't have any and has been betrayed by Vesper who he was intending to marry, or by political ideas because he doesn't understand or care about them at all. Instead, he's largely going to be motivated, at least from then on if not before, by psychosexual rage prompted by the betrayal of a woman and the machinations of the organization that was ultimately responsible. In other words, Fleming makes it clear that Bond is fundamentally driven by some pretty base motivations, to say the least. At least his misogyny in all subsequent novels is well sourced here, although he already has a solid dose before discovering Vesper's betrayal. Before her suicide he decides to marry her when he concludes that, “she was profoundly, excitingly sensual, but that the conquest of her body, because of the central privacy in her, would each time have this sweet tang of rape.” These attitudes are intensified after his discovery of her betrayal and projected not only onto the entire female gender but internalized as a primary motivation in resuming his career as a “licensed killer” and projected onto the Soviet enemy as a whole.

It is no doubt this combination of Bond as an arch-consumer driven by un-, or at least barely-, controlled appetites and as an ostensible company man actually driven by psychosexual demons of a particularly grim variety that led John le Carré to dismiss Bond as a potential traitor. He noted that Bond had no political or ideological affiliation to the system for which he was fighting and that his appetites made him potentially very easy to “turn.” I'd add that his profoundly neurotic sexual attitudes only add to the conclusion that, as an operative, from the little that we know about this character, he seems particularly unsound. Although le Carré is almost certainly right in this assessment, the irony is that in literary terms Fleming served as an essential bridge between the earlier “British hero” genre of spy fiction, of the John Buchan variety for example, and le Carré's own antihero genre. In Bond, Fleming created an outsized heroic veneer with no interior, or at least no interior that isn't deeply tainted, and without most of the chivalrous, mannered and principled “heroic” qualities of the earlier spy thriller heroes, setting the stage for le Carré's bureaucratic antiheroes. So even if one were to champion le Carré, as most serious readers would, against Fleming, one would have to acknowledge the role the latter played in preparing the genre and the public for the former to emerge.

Which brings us back to the fundamental question: why do some of us enjoy or emotionally respond to these perfectly dreadful films and novels? Obviously it's not enough to say, I like action films or I like spy novels. There are plenty of both that are good if not excellent, but these are not. The perfect example of how something reasonably close in genre, style and time to the earliest Bond movies can be not only excellent, but a transcendent work of art is the Hitchcock masterpiece North by Northwest (1959), which clearly was a major influence on the Bond genre and on several of the earlier Bond films individually. In truth, for the most part even the best of Bond are really shoddy action films and spy novels, and citing a taste for the genre is completely insufficient as an explanation. I suggested that nostalgia, aesthetic sensibility and style, and the crude, raw Oedipal sexual fantasy at work in the early Bond films at least partly account for their enduring ability to command some of our attention. But I'm going to end by suggesting there may be something deeper and more insidious at work as well.

When my nephew was a small child he used to demand of my sister, “give me something bad for me that I yike.” Most of my relatives were taken with the baby talk mispronunciation of like as "yike," but my father and I appreciated the sentiment in and of itself. Sometimes, for reasons we shall investigate further in future guilty pleasures Ibishblog postings, we turn to the cultural landscape, throw open our arms and demand that it gives us something bad for us that we yike.

The question is, especially in the case of something as toxic as Bond, do we like it, or at least respond to it, in spite, or at some level because, of the ways in which they clearly are bad for us? Its probably a little of both. As a fully interpolated and perfectly functioning company man, a perfected fetishizing consumer, and a finely honed machine that serves his socioeconomic, political and biological functions in an exemplary manner, Bond really is an idealized late capitalist fantasy. He doesn't ask too many questions, he just does what's expected of him to perfection. No wonder we respond. If only it were so easy.

When such a fantasy sugarcoats not only its own ideological contents but gratuitous racism and sexism as well, perhaps its very toxicity is part of its appeal. All guilty pleasures involve the sense that one is indulging in something unworthy in one way or another, but Bond films and novels are a guilty pleasure that we can, and should, really feel guilty about. It feels transgressive, if not downright naughty, to enjoy or in any way pay close attention to such moronic, toxic rubbish, complete with foul ideology, racism, sexism and continuous insults to the intelligence. So maybe, in such a case at any rate, the frisson of guilt is an inextricable part of the pleasure.

I don’t usually respond to other bloggers commenting on my work, but in this case the question was put to me directly by someone called Yaacov Lozowick, who wrote a response to my recent blog posting about PM Netanyahu’s ridiculous demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as a “Jewish state,” whatever that means, in return for an eight week extension of the temporary, partial settlement moratorium. I guess it’s worth responding to somebody once in a while just to clear things up, so here goes.

The first point of contention is his claim that there is no one even muting (I’m sure that’s what Mr. Lozowick means, even though he wrote “mooting”) Palestinian incitement against Israel. This is completely wrong. There has been a great deal of effort on the part of the PA to clean up the education and clerical systems under their control and to promote a discourse that celebrates diplomacy, state and institution building, boycotts of settlements and settlement goods but not Israel, nonviolent resistance against abusive occupation practices such as the wall, and security cooperation where reasonable and appropriate. There is no doubt there is a long way to go on containing incitement, but similarly there is an intense amount of Israeli incitement against Palestinians. Perhaps the most shocking recent version was the call by Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Youssef for God to wipe out Pres. Abbas, and all the rest of the Palestinians for that matter. Some Israelis speak as if incitement were a cause rather than effect of the conflict (in classical rhetoric this is known as a metalepsis, which typically functions as the substitution of an effect for a cause), and as if it were a Palestinian problem exclusively and not a major problem among Israelis.

Mr. Lozowick mistakenly identifies me as a Palestinian (I am, in fact, a Lebanese-American, but I work for a Palestinian-American organization and largely on the Palestinian-Israel conflict). I do not argue that the right of return or anything else connected to the refugees is an issue to be discussed at the end of any negotiating process. On the contrary, I think all four of the major permanent status issues identified by Pres. Obama at the UN in 2009 should be on the table right away. On this score, it would appear that I take a very different view than that of PM Netanyahu, who seems to only want to discuss security at present. Mr. Lozowick falls into a rather typical trap of suggesting that because Palestinians haven’t accepted some Israeli proposals in the past, they never will in the future or that they somehow turned their back on peace or negotiations. There have been many proposals from both sides, and none of them with regard to permanent status issues have been accepted by the other side in toto. That’s why we don’t have a peace agreement yet. This ruse relies on people not being aware of the numerous Palestinian proposals that Israel has rejected out of hand over many decades. At the moment, the PLO through Yasser Abed Rabbo has proposed recognizing Israel as a “Jewish state” in return for a commitment to return to the 1967 borders. Israel, naturally, rejected this counter offer just as swiftly and categorically as the Palestinians rejected Netanyahu’s latest cynical maneuver.

For the record, I do not think the Jerusalem either must or should be divided again. I think the city should be shared, open and freely accessed by both parties and by adherents of all three major monotheistic faiths. I’ve got no interest, and I don’t think the Palestinian or Israeli peoples do either, in the city being re-divided with barbed wire fencing, checkpoints and so forth. What we are talking about is the city serving as a capital for both Israel and a new Palestinian state, with divided sovereignty in different areas. How that sovereignty is administered is another matter, and obviously a complex formula is going to be required to solve this conundrum. There has been a great deal of very significant research done on how to manage this problem by many different institutions and think tanks. It’s a complex problem that requires a very creative solution. Most crucially, I think it’s obvious that a special regime for the holy basin and/or the old city would be required. It would be a sui genris arrangement for a sui genris place, and I think that’s what’s going to be required.

One final point for Mr. Lozowick: he’s quite wrong that Palestinians have never discussed the question of return, or other refugee issues. On the contrary, they were heavily discussed at Camp David in 2000 and agreement was apparently quite close some months later at Taba. I think Palestinian negotiators and all serious observers have understood for a long time that there simply will not be a mass return of Palestinian refugees to Israel because for Israel this is a bottom-line and a dealbreaker. I think, similarly, all serious Israelis and other observers have understood that there cannot be a peace agreement that does not provide for East Jerusalem to serve as the Palestinian capital, because for Palestinians this is a bottom line and a dealbreaker. These are, reciprocally, the most difficult political issues facing both societies, and leadership from both sides can be fairly accused of feeding their people large doses of political narcotics about the “sacred, inviolable right of return” which encourages Palestinians to imagine will actually be exercised sometime in the foreseeable future by large numbers of people, and “Jerusalem, the eternal undivided capital of the Jewish people,” thereby encouraging Israelis to imagine that a peace agreement can be achieved without a compromise on Jerusalem. One of the most important building blocks for a successful peace agreement would be much more honesty in the public discourse, and especially from political leaders, on both sides regarding these two very difficult issues.

It’s because of their reciprocal character that Palestinians, or anyone else, shouldn’t have seriously considered Netanyahu’s proposal for exchanging recognition of Israel’s “Jewish character” for an eight week extension of the temporary, partial moratorium. It’s widely reported that Patrick Crowley, the State Department spokesman, backed Israel’s demand at a recent press conference. I think that’s completely false. If you read what he said, it most importantly begins with, "It's not for us to endorse this idea or this idea.” So much for an endorsement. Just like President Bush he referred to Israel as “the homeland of the Jewish people,” language, as I have noted in the past, that is pulled directly from the Balfour Declaration and lacking any great political or legal significance. He said Israel was “a state for the Jewish people,” but also “for other citizens of other faiths as well,” an important addendum that has been downplayed if not ignored by the media, especially the Israeli press. Crowley urged the Palestinians to make a counteroffer, and now they have. Israel, naturally, isn’t interested.

There’s a great deal of shameless spinning going on in the media these days, for example the idea that one of the inducements being offered by the Obama administration for a temporary extension of the temporary, partial moratorium is American support for long-term Israeli security presence in the Jordan Valley following Palestinian independence. No one outside of official circles really knows for certain the substance of the proposed inducements, but even what has been leaked, assuming it’s at all accurate, strikes me as quite vague in this regard and requires a good deal of creative interpretation to come to that conclusion. Obviously some people have an interest in spinning it that way, but it doesn’t make it true.

UPDATE: Mr. Lozowick has responded on his own blog and clarified that he did mean mean “mooted” and not muted. Fair enough. (Obviously I do know the difference between the two terms, in spite of an obviously racist comment on his posting by somebody else, but frankly muted makes much more sense in his sentence than mooted, so I was being charitable.)

On closer inspection, I find that the Jerusalem Post has excised at least the final paragraph of my op-ed in their newspaper today. They may have taken out more, but I don't have time to doublecheck that just at present. I'm sure they feel entitled to do that. It's their newspaper after all. But it's my article. I'll post the full version shortly, but the missing final paragraph reads:

In the meanwhile, Palestinians should redouble their state and institution building efforts with international support, recently reiterated by both the United States and the Quartet. And they should continue to explore what kind of momentum can be secured to complement diplomacy through nonviolent protests, and boycotts of settlement, but not Israeli, goods. Confronting the occupation at every level is essential, but a return to violence, no matter who instigates it, would be a disastrous miscalculation on the Palestinian side.

 I guess I can see what they didn't like about that. But it's crucially important to my overall argument. I think my readers deserve the unexpurgated version.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's proposal earlier today that Israel might agree to a two-month extension of the partial, temporary settlement moratorium expired in late September on condition that Palestinians recognize Israel as a "Jewish state" is insulting and frivolous. It was correctly rejected out of hand by the Palestinian leadership and ignored by the United States government. It's the strongest indication so far that Netanyahu is just not serious about any of this, a suspicion those of us committed to a two state peace agreement have been doing our best to resist since he returned to power.

That this may be, in the end a core Israeli demand for a final status agreement is entirely possible. It would then be a question of negotiating what kind of language might satisfy both Palestinians and Israelis. I have pointed out many times that Netanyahu's idée fixe formula that Israel must be acknowledged as “the nation-state of the Jewish people” is almost certainly unacceptable because of its numerous dubious implications. However, whatever language may or may not be part of any final status agreement, it almost certainly has to come at the end of the process in the context of the establishment of a Palestinian state and a resolution of the refugee final status issue. Indeed, Palestinian acknowledgment of Israel's character as a “Jewish state,” whatever that may mean (Jewish Israelis themselves are deeply divided on the question), is not even a final status issue at all. Palestinians have already recognized Israel in the letters of mutual recognition that kicked off the Oslo negotiation process formally, although Israel has never recognized the Palestinian right to statehood formally or informally. That, for now, is more than sufficient to be going forward with.

The real permanent status issues have been defined a long time ago, and were identified clearly by Pres. Obama during his 2009 UN General Assembly speech: security, borders, refugees and Jerusalem. Obviously there are other well-known lesser issues that have final status aspects such as water and other issues regarding the relationship of the new Palestinian state to Israel. But the ethnic or religious character of the two states has never been an issue in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and was not an issue between Israel and either Egypt or Jordan. If the Israelis most unreasonably nonetheless insist on introducing the concept, it will not be worth continuing the conflict and the occupation to refuse to try to find a reasonable formula. But this will have to be one of the very last things negotiated because of its implications, especially for refugees.

In his speech before the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations on September 20, Netanyahu was very clear about this new demand, and very frank about its implications. He said, “just as the Jewish state has granted Jews around the world the right to immigrate to Israel, a Palestinian state could decide to grant Palestinians around the world the right to immigrate to their state. But Palestinian refugees do not have a right to come to the Jewish state.”

In other words, in Netanyahu's own interpretation of the legal and political implications of any such recognition, the right of return of refugees would be foreclosed and one of the key permanent status issues would be resolved before it had been negotiated. And that's what this is always been about: an end run around the right of return. And the point of that, crucially, is that negotiators, including most importantly the Americans, have always assumed that there would have to be reciprocal very painful and politically difficult compromises on refugees and Jerusalem. The Israeli effort to end-run and foreclose the refugee issue through Palestinian recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” before the refugee question is resolved through negotiations is, ultimately, an effort to preserve an ability of Israel to refuse to compromise on Jerusalem and possibly even get away with it in the eyes of at least the United States.

This was recognized by Bush administration officials at the Annapolis meeting when Prime Minister Olmert and Foreign Minister Livni first tried to get the Palestinians to make such a declaration and then tried to get President Bush to say something similar in his address. Bush simply used innocuous language drawn directly from the Balfour Declaration about Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people, which had no legal or political implications about refugees or the refugee question as a final status issue to be negotiated. Olmert and Livni more or less let the matter go. But since returning to power, Netanyahu has increasingly focused on it. In the past it's been possible to have two equally compelling interpretations about this: 1) it's a sign of his frivolousness about negotiations because he is focusing on language that can never be acceptable to Palestinians and bringing the issue forward in a way that is also totally unworkable or 2) it's a sign of the seriousness because it is something he is going to assure the Israeli right that he, uniquely, can deliver even as he makes territorial and other compromises.

After today's shenanigans, it's much harder to believe in the second interpretation. Netanyahu is essentially asking the Palestinians to give up on not one, but in effect two of the four major permanent status issues: refugees and, you game it out logically, in effect Jerusalem as well. He's asking for this in return for an eight week extension of a partial, temporary moratorium that led to a minor slowdown but not a halt in settlement expansion and never covered Jerusalem. What he's really asking for is an explicit concession on a new, highly problematic and emotional non-permanent status issue, not to mention massive implicit concessions on permanent status issues, in return for a very partial and very temporary meeting of Israel's obligations under Phase One of the Roadmap of the Middle East Quartet. There is no basis in international law for Israel to claim a right to continue any form of settlement activity whatsoever. It has been asked not to do so repeatedly by its major ally the United States. And it is obliged by the Roadmap not to do so. The idea that it would fulfill this obligation partially and for eight weeks in exchange for one of the most far-reaching Palestinian gestures imaginable with extremely serious implications for two of the most important permanent status issues is, frankly, insulting and indeed frivolous.

It's become harder to maintain that the Israeli Prime Minister is taking these negotiations seriously after such a proclamation. The fact that it comes on the same day that his cabinet has adopted proposed legislation that would require only people classified as non-Jews by the Israeli government who are seeking Israeli citizenship to swear a loyalty oath to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic” state only adds insult to injury. The loyalty oath is aimed at Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens who marry Palestinian citizens of Israel, the only substantial group of non-Jews with a pathway to Israeli citizenship. And, since people who are classified as Jewish by the Israeli state, which distinguishes between ethnicity (which it calls “nationality”) as opposed to citizenship, are exempt from this requirement, it is overtly racist and discriminatory. In other words, if this is the context of how Israel's Jewish character is expressed with regard to Palestinians, asking Palestinians to embrace it in any context, let alone in exchange for a paltry eight-week extension of a partial, temporary moratorium that was always more of a gimmick than a reality, is really absurd and disheartening. If Netanyahu is at all serious about the possibility of a negotiated agreement, he's going to have to stop this shameless grandstanding and frivolous demagoguery.

An Ibishblog reader writes:

"I recently saw an interesting view on West Bank building activity.  It posited that both Palestinian and Israeli building activity there created 'facts on the ground' that changed the Oslo 'status quo.'  Hence, building by EITHER side equally implicated the letter and spirit of the Oslo Accords.  So (the opinion writer said), if either side is forbidden to build, BOTH sides should be forbidden to build.  Thus, no unilateral moritorium is fair or warranted (according to the pundit I'm paraphrasing). I don't recall seeing this view expressed before.  Do you think it has any validity?"

Thanks for the interesting question. I've seen this argument cropping up recently as well, although it gets very little traction because it's so obviously fatuous and specious. The whole argument is premised on the idea that there is a moral and legal equivalency between the Israeli settler presence in the occupied territories and the indigenous Palestinian one. Of course that's not the case. It's a subset of the old argument that these are “disputed” territories rather than occupied ones, a claim that relies entirely on ignoring the mountain of UN Security Council resolutions designating East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as territories under foreign military occupation, and Israel as the occupying power. If there is a dispute, it is between Israel and the unanimous voice of the international community, including the body legally authorized to make these judgments. Therefore, from a legal and political standpoint, there is no dispute. There is only an occupation.

The fact that Israel is the occupying power in the occupied territories carries with it tremendous legal and political significance, which of course is why Israel generally speaking denies that it is the occupying power or that the territories are occupied. For a start, a very large body of international law prohibits settling or colonizing territories under occupation, as well as the acquisition of territory by war. Most notably, Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits occupying powers from transferring its civilian population into territories under occupation. Supporters of the settlement movement sometimes try to get around this by arguing that it refers only to forced transfer of such populations. Again, this is obviously specious since there are numerous other provisions of the Convention already prohibiting forced transfers of populations against their will, which would make Article 49 redundant and meaningless. Moreover, the Geneva Convention was adopted in the aftermath of the second world war, and in full memory of colonization and population transfers engaged in by the axis powers, especially Nazi Germany, and this was clearly seen as a human rights abuse against people living under occupation. This is why a prohibition of such activity was included in a human rights instrument designed to protect civilians in a time or context of war. In other words, resting simply on the Geneva Convention, we can say with certainty that beyond simply being illegal, Israel's settlement activities are a human rights violation against the civilian Palestinian population in the occupied territories.

There isn't any aspect of international law that prohibits a population living under occupation from continuing to live and develop its society insofar as it can in spite of the occupation. This claim is a direct attack on the vital Palestinian Authority program for state and institution building, laying the groundwork of an independent Palestinian state in spite of the occupation and with the aim of ending the occupation. But while Israel's settlement activities are illegal under international law and are required to be frozen entirely under Phase One of the Roadmap of the Middle East Quartet, nothing in the Oslo documents, any other treaty obligation, any aspect of international law, or the Roadmap, obliges Palestinians to cease to engage in social, infrastructural, institutional and economic development because Israel is bound by its legal and political obligations not to engage in settlement activity because it is a human rights violation against the Palestinian people living under occupation.

Moreover, Israeli settlement activity is a direct threat to the potential for a two-state peace agreement, which is the only viable path to ending the conflict and the occupation that began in 1967. Among many other things, it makes the future border much more difficult to draw, increases and entrenches the often belligerent Israeli constituency opposed to territorial compromise, and expands the circle of Israelis with a financial stake in continuing the occupation. In contrast, Palestinian state and institution building efforts and all forms of social and economic development promote the prospects of a two-state peace agreement, since the Palestinian state must be functional when it comes into existence and be a successful and not a failed state. As Palestinians continue to demand and press for the right of self-determination, it is not only legal and reasonable, it is necessary, for them to take up the responsibilities of self-government. Any objection to this program can only come from an implicit starting point that is hostile to a two state agreement as a peaceful outcome. There is no doubt that anybody who makes this case is a supporter of the occupation and wishes to see it continue indefinitely. Why else would they try to impede Palestinian development? There is no other plausible motivation. In the same sense, I think it's fair to say all of us who oppose continued Israeli settlement activity take this position because we are first and foremost opposed to the occupation and wish to see it come to an end. This is an a priori assumption that defines opposition to settlement activity.

So, it boils down to this: those who are in favor of peace are generally opposed to settlement activity, recognizing that it poses a serious threat to prospects a workable, reasonable agreement, and are generally supportive of Palestinian state and institution building as a necessary bedrock for that two-state arrangement. Conversely, those who are opposed to peace, at least on the Israeli side, are creating spurious and pseudo-legal arguments opposing Palestinian state and institution building and economic development because they correctly see it as a very significant, and quite possibly decisive, long-term strategic threat to the occupation which they support. As for the argument itself, it's so transparently absurd we needn't bother with it. It's not creating any traction, even in Israel, and internationally will be laughed off any multilateral table at which it may be presented. It's a joke, and not a very funny one at that.

I suppose it was to be expected, but the brazenness with which extremists on both sides are trying to sabotage upcoming Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is simply breathtaking. The far more serious effort is on the Israeli side, in which activists, and even members of the government, to the right of PM Netanyahu are trying to destroy the key to the talks, which was a private understanding between Netanyahu and Pres. Obama that after the “settlement moratorium” expires on September 26, Israel would largely restrict building to the main settlement blocs, Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem and other areas generally understood to be the subject of a future land swap. The difficulty here is that this was merely a private understanding, although a clear one, between two political leaders, not an agreement between governments or states, and certainly not anything public. In fact, the whole idea hinged entirely on it not becoming public — the point was that while the settlement issue has proven itself to be toxic for both the US-Israel relationship and the process of getting peace negotiations started again, Israel simply cannot be allowed to continue to change the strategic landscape with further expropriations in the West Bank or projects in Palestinian areas of occupied East Jerusalem. Therefore, the way out was not to renew the ?moratorium,? and in fact probably not say anything at all other than some vague comments from Netanyahu about the resumption of building, and that from then on Israel would be judged by what it did rather than what it said about settlements.

This understanding was that the heart of the American-Israeli quid pro quo achieved during the lovefest at the White House earlier this summer. The Israelis got in return new weapons sales, reiterated commitments to its security, assurances on Iran and the protection of its own nuclear arsenal, and a promise of direct talks without preconditions. Both the Americans and Netanyahu were satisfied, but obviously several of his cabinet partners and Likud party activists were certainly not. The strategy to sabotage this understanding, which also means by definition sabotaging the negotiations, began in earnest a few days ago when Interior Minister Eli Yishai, head of the hardline Shas party, bitterly complained in public that in all likelihood Netanyahu’s policy was going to be to only build in the large settlement blocs after September 26. At the time, the most obvious explanation for this outburst was that he was preparing his own constituency for this and protecting himself politically by registering his disagreement. However, in recent days his comments have begun to look much more like the opening salvo in a campaign by the Israeli right to sabotage the understanding, and therefore the talks, by making it public and therefore politically untenable. The most recent additions to the chorus of objections have been FM Lieberman, who has made very strong statements about the need to start building in earnest (as if Israel has been doing otherwise in the past 10 months) after September 26, and a group of Likud party hard-liners who used the occasion of Netanyahu’s absence from the country to hold a meeting in order to plot major settlement expansions beginning at the end of next month.

As the Israeli extremists are attempting to make it very difficult for Netanyahu to live up to his understanding with Obama, Palestinians, being confronted with all this bellicose rhetoric from the Israeli right about settlement building, have been placed in a position of having to take their own strident positions about a settlement freeze being a precondition for negotiations, something we had gotten beyond only a few days ago. Now, and at considerable diplomatic cost to the Palestinian interest and especially relations with the United States, Palestinian leaders and politicians are finding it politically expedient, and maybe even necessary, to make their own bold pronouncements about settlements in response, suggesting that they will walk away from the talks if settlement activity resumes in earnest, among other things. As a consequence, the effort by the Israeli extreme right to sabotage the talks is developing a momentum of its own and is starting to look like it may spiral out of control and actually work.

I think it’s extremely important for their own sake that Palestinian leaders immediately shut up about the settlement issue and leave it to the United States to ensure that the prime minister of its ally and client Israel lives up to his private commitments to the American president. For them to be pushing the issue only makes it more difficult for the Americans and damages Palestinian-American relations without achieving anything except maybe promoting the nationalist credentials of the various political figures involved. It certainly only has a counterproductive diplomatic effect, and reinforces the idea that the settlement issue is where the battle is to be fought, thereby encouraging the Israeli right in its campaign, and the whole thing becomes a vicious circle that is not likely to play out in a manner beneficial to Palestinian interests. In other words, the only way they’re going to win this fight is if the Americans do it for them, and they need to make life easier for the United States in that regard, not, as they are doing, more difficult.

Meanwhile, although with somewhat less impact, Palestinian extremists on both the left and right are doing their best to also sabotage the negotiations and raise the political cost to the PLO leadership as much as possible, in the hopes that it will ultimately prove unbearable. Hamas’ rhetoric on the issue simply couldn’t be more overwrought: they’ve called the talks ?illegal? and said that they will ?eliminate? the cause of Palestine. Left-wing factions in the PLO opposed to Fatah and Pres. Abbas tried to hold a well-publicized meeting in the West Bank to denounce the whole concept of the direct negotiations. Worse still, the meeting was broken up by thugs, apparently affiliated with Fatah, which will do nothing to enhance the reputation of Fatah, Abbas, or the PLO, no matter who was responsible for ordering it. It’s an ugly throwback to the of authoritarianism of the Arafat era which many parts of the PA government have been moving beyond rather rapidly over the past couple of years. Obviously, there’s still quite a long way to go. We knew that already, but this was a fairly depressing reminder. And, of course, it only serves to bolster the case the ultra-left-wing factions were trying to make that the negotiations are bad and calling the PA and PLO leadership into question.

What’s really interesting in the big picture is that very few of the extremists on both sides are actually categorically opposed negotiations as such, they are tactically and strategically opposed to THESE negotiations, for their own various reasons. Yishai and Lieberman are probably not opposed to negotiations in principle, although it’s hard to imagine either of them agreeing to an arrangement minimally acceptable to the Palestinians. What they’re upset about is the prospect of limiting settlement activity. Because that is essentially the condition that produced the dual American-Israeli and American-Palestinian quids pro quo that allowed the direct negotiations to be agreed, they’re willing to sabotage the talks in order to defend major settlement expansion. They do not believe that an agreement is either possible or necessary, but they think settling the occupied territories is both.

For Hamas, I think it can be assumed that if they ever seize control of the Palestinian national movement, they will be not only ready, but possibly even eager, to negotiate with Israel as the focus most of their energy on the project to ?Islamize? areas under their control, which seems to be what they care about the most. Their main political aim is the defeat and marginalization of the PLO, and to secure their own control of the Palestinian national movement. It’s certainly possible to argue that as long as they are driven by the agendas of their fellow Muslim Brotherhood parties regionally and by their patrons in Damascus and Tehran it’s hard to imagine them seriously negotiating with Israel. However, should they ever secure power, they probably won’t have much choice unless they consciously decide to place the Palestinian national cause in the service of regional Islamism or Iranian foreign policy, or both, and completely abandon any form of Palestinian nationalism. There are certainly some figures in Hamas one can imagine doing this, but others who might actually want to govern a Palestinian theocracy that has some kind of long-term modus vivendi with Israel, and one can see the prototype of that in the Cold War that now exists between Gaza and Israel. Hamas is completely addicted to the rhetoric of armed struggle but, with the utmost hypocrisy, deeply and indeed violently opposed to it in practice under the present circumstances, at least in Gaza. In the West Bank, where they don’t have to pay the price or have any responsibility for the consequences, they are all for it.

So I think it’s fair to say that most people in both sets of extremist camps who are attempting to unravel the negotiations before they’ve even begun are not actually opposed to negotiations in theory, but are playing political hardball over domestic issues and putting their own ideological considerations and political power in front of national interests in a most repulsive and irresponsible manner. And, naturally, one of the things all of these extremists are most animated by is the idea that the talks could eventually actually succeed at the expense of their narrow ideological or political agendas. If, over the long run, there wasn’t any real possibility of successful negotiations, none of these detractors would be kicking up this kind of fuss. They must not be allowed to get away with it, for if the direct negotiations can be killed or severely wounded before they even begin, they are more vulnerable than we ever thought and both the likelihood and the consequences of a spectacular failure will be much higher than even the most concerned skeptics have been imagining.