A couple of months ago on the Ibishblog, I had the pleasure of describing John Mearsheimer as “the Kevorkian of Palestine” because of the dreadful, destructive advice he was offering to the Palestinian people, and now it’s incumbent on me to point out that George Will is working overtime to become the Kevorkian of Israel. The politics of assisted suicide is an amazing phenomenon, in which zealots operating out of emotion provide people in other societies the worst possible advice that will inevitably lead to self-destructive outcomes. Will has been on a tear on the pages of the Washington Post and elsewhere during his apparently ongoing visit to Israel, taking policy positions and presenting tendentious, self-contradictory and even fabricated versions of history that would make even the most jaded settlers blush. This is beyond being a friend who lets friends drive drunk. This is a "friend" distributing a steady stream of tainted smack and frequently used needles all over the neighborhood.

In the fourth installment of his seemingly endless anti-peace campaign, today Will dismisses the prospect of Israel ever withdrawing from the West Bank because without it, he claims, Israel would supposedly lack strategic depth (this argument could be made about any territory in almost any context, of course — all it takes is a simple assertion). He assumes, without making any argument to defend this idea, that a Palestinian state centered in the West Bank would inevitably be Islamist and launch violent attacks against Israel. The only thing he can come up with to defend this assertion are totally invalid analogies to Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon and unilateral redeployment in Gaza. It’s true that both yielded instability and violence in both directions, although much more violence from the Israeli side than the Palestinian or Lebanese ones, which of course he does not acknowledge. He even bizarrely compares the stupid and counterproductive but almost entirely ineffective projectiles launched from Gaza in the general direction of southern Israel to the Nazi bombardment of London, which gives a strong indication of his nonexistent sense of proportion and reliance on preposterous hyperbole. What Will and all his extremist Israeli friends who are addicted to the occupation are deliberately eliding in these wildly inaccurate analogies is that these unilateral actions were taken strictly for Israeli interests and out of Israeli strategic concerns, and were not pursuant to any agreement whatsoever with any Palestinians or Lebanese, and that the other side, including extremist groups, therefore had no vested interest in any resulting arrangement.

What Will doesn’t acknowledge is that a wise and workable Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories would perforce be pursuant to an agreement with the PLO and a Palestinian government which would have a vested interest in making that agreement work. In other words, the correct analogies are not Israeli unilateralism in Gaza and southern Lebanon, but the negotiated peace agreements Israel has already concluded with Arabs, such as the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and even the armistice with Syria. When Arab governments have entered into agreements like this with Israel, they have had a vested interest in making them work, and so it would be with a new Palestinian state. In fact, the one scenario that might produce the results Will predicts is a third act of Israeli unilateralism, a withdrawal from the parts of the West Bank it decides it doesn’t want and the de facto annexation of the rest, perhaps more or less along the lines of the West Bank separation barrier or any other new de facto border Israel cares to draw. There are many in Israel who are not only thinking in those terms, but actively preparing for such an eventuality. Will doesn’t seem to understand that unilateralism almost inevitably perpetuates and exacerbates the conflict, whereas agreements end conflicts. The problem is that he simply cannot stretch his fossilized brain to imagine an effective, well functioning and responsible Palestinian state even though the framework for that is being built in the West Bank as we speak — a reality he seems blissfully unaware of — that is most notably characterized by a well-functioning security force that coordinates with Israeli forces in order to contain violence and allow for greater access and mobility on the part Palestinians. He writes as if the entire Palestinian national movement was simply Hamas, and as if the PLO and the PA do not exist.

In the third installment, Will expresses an understandable sensitivity to the number of Israelis who have been killed in the conflict, but does not acknowledge whatsoever the far greater number of Palestinians and other Arabs who have perished or been maimed, and who appear to be of no consequence to him. He offers one of the most tendentious, misleading and self-contradictory narratives of the conflict I have ever read, which boils down to a history of “Arab violence” towards Israel, as if the conflict has been an entirely one-way street and Israel’s actions were always and entirely self-defensive. In numerous instances his dates don’t add up, so he doesn’t even have his own warped chronology correct. Needless to say, he doesn’t mention the occupation, the situation facing the Palestinians living under the occupation, Israel’s occupation policies, the settlements, any of the various wars launched by Israel for its own purposes, or anything of the kind. He does however glibly assert that the creation of Israel did not involve the destruction of a Palestinian state, because such a state did not exist. That’s technically true, but it’s a lawyerly manipulation to avoid recognizing what the creation of Israel did to a Palestinian society that otherwise could and almost certainly would have become a state as the rest of the mandated territories in the Middle East became. It’s a half-truth designed to cover up the reality that in 1948 an existing and thriving Palestinian-majority society was destroyed in the process of the creation of Israel, a fact that haunts the entire region to this day. Anyone who is familiar with my work knows that I do not care to dwell on this and prefer to move forward, yet it is a fact that cannot be denied or papered over with this kind of dishonest technical legal obfuscation.

In his second installment, Will presents the brief, apparently directly from the desk of Netanyahu, for an Israeli attack on Hezbollah and Lebanon, and on Iran, replete with lavish helpings of the moldiest clichés in the back of the Likudnik cupboard. Clearly such actions cannot come too quickly for him, and he doesn’t seem to have the least reservations about the consequences. The opening gambit in this dreadful series was the first installment, a ham-handed attempt to attack the supposedly weak, unpatriotic and cerebral Pres. Obama by comparing him to the idealized caricature of a robust, patriotic and unflinching PM Netanyahu. Will joins the chorus of those who object to Obama’s acknowledgment Palestinian suffering in his Cairo speech, and as far as I can tell Will has never once in his life expressed the least sympathy for the very painful history and even basic humanity of the Palestinian people because he identifies so completely with their rivals in this complex and overdetermined conflict. He seems to be one of the worst examples of the kind of dangerous outsiders who are more Israeli than the Israelis or more Palestinian than the Palestinians, seeing the other side entirely as villains and their own friends entirely as victims or heroes. It’s not only stupid, it’s unworthy of small children.

Will is also deeply impressed with a 2000-year-old artifact Netanyahu famously keeps in his office bearing the name "Netanyahu." That’s very interesting, and even though no one in their right mind would deny the deep Jewish history in and ties to the land, Netanyahu’s name was adopted by his father sometime in the 20s or 30s (originally it was a pen name), and the actual family name is Mileikowsky, which makes sense for a family whose traceable history appears to be largely in Warsaw and other parts of Poland. I do not raise this point to challenge Jewish history in or attachment to the land, but frankly the connection between the Mileikowsky family of which the Prime Minister is a part and this 2000 year old seal with the name they adopted for political reasons in the 1920s is, to be polite, somewhat forced. I agree with Will that the correlation is impressive, but it’s impressive as a prop for political theater and doesn’t prove or suggest anything about present realities other than something everyone already knows, which is that there is a deep Jewish history in ancient Palestine. On the other hand, I’ve never seen Will acknowledge Palestinian history, presence in, and attachment to the land of Palestine, and he spends a great deal of time and effort implicitly denying that they have any political rights in it.

To sum up Will’s four-part rant (assuming there isn’t going to be a fifth installment): the Jewish Israelis have a deep history in Palestine which grants them exclusive political rights in the territory, and that this, combined with glib arguments about strategic depth and fatuous analogies based on unilateral actions rather than agreements, mandates that there be no agreement providing for an independent Palestinian state to live alongside Israel in peace and security. Instead, the occupation must continue indefinitely. He also advocates attacks against Lebanon and Iran, and the sooner the better. All of this is backed up with some of the most embarrassingly tendentious and misleading, not to say dishonest, historical narratives I’ve read in quite some time, much worse than one would get in most of the mainstream Israeli press.

Will ends his first installment of the series with the following quote from Netanyahu, supposedly delivered to an unnamed US diplomat 10 years ago: “You live in Chevy Chase. Don’t play with our future." Well, it just so happens that Will himself does in fact live in Chevy Chase, and his relentless cheerleading and incitement of the extreme Israeli right couldn’t be a better example of playing, recklessly, fast and loose with Israel’s future. He never offers any alternative to his vision of an endless occupation. He never acknowledges the millions of Palestinians who live in the occupied territories, or what to do with them, or how he expects them to react to this permanent occupation with which he is so enamored. He seems to share the bizarre attitude of the most extreme part of the Israeli right wing that Palestinians are simply not a strategic problem for Israel and can be managed through brute force (a proposition, I think, thoroughly disproven by this stage to even the most bloody-minded thug), that Israel’s security must be based entirely on military force and not diplomacy or reaching any kind of modus vivedi with its neighbors (who he regards as "perpetual enemies" in spite of the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, the ongoing security cooperation in the West Bank, the Arab Peace Initiative, etc.), and that Israel’s military superiority is a permanent fact of life that obviates any need for concessions on the Israeli part in order to make peace with any of its neighbors, especially the Palestinians.

Like the Israeli extremists whose views he shares and whose attitudes he seems to admire so much, Will doesn’t seem to be able to imagine how dangerously this conflict can evolve or the obvious fact that long-term security ultimately comes not only from military force but creating stable, tenable political relationships with other forces in the region. There is almost no question that if Israelis follow Will’s advice and perspectives, they will find themselves sooner or later embroiled in a holy war with forces beyond their control and, I daresay, both their comprehension and his. George Will and others like him in the United States are indeed the Kevorkians of Israel, pushing it down a suicidal path of self-destruction by living permanently in bitter enmity with almost all who surround it and refusing to make the painful, difficult compromises that all parties will be required make in order to end the conflict and achieve actual security. Sitting safely in his home in Chevy Chase, and indulging in his childish and frankly stupid Disneyland imaginary version of Middle Eastern history and realities, he’s wishing on this and many future generations of Israelis nothing but warfare, occupation, conflict and probably eventual calamity. The only question is, why does he hate them so much?

The pathetic and ridiculous ?controversy? about the plan to build an Islamic community center a few blocks away from ?Ground Zero,? the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has sharply brought into focus, for me at least, one of the most troubling trends in the Arab American and Muslim American communities: the scandalous lack of serious political engagement and the deterioration of virtually all national organizations that are supposed or claim to represent these communities or major constituencies within them. There is nothing, obviously, legally that can be done to stop the community center backers from going forward with their plan which is fully protected by both private property and religious freedom rights. Mayor Bloomberg deserves enormous credit for his bold stance in defense of these rights and President Obama some credit for taking a firm position, which he then hedged slightly. Short of acts of vandalism and sabotage, which are not impossible but are unlikely if the building project goes forward, the only thing that can be done to try to stop it is to culturally, socially and politically harass the project’s backers into abandoning it as an intolerable burden. That is, of course, exactly what has been happening.

Everyone else allowed a small group of Islamophobic and extremist bloggers and other fanatics to define the issue, most obviously encapsulated in the utterly misleading phrase ?Ground Zero mosque,? which is not at but near ground zero (in a part of lower Manhattan in which almost everything is near everything else) and is not exactly a mosque for that matter. They were then joined by all kinds of scoundrels and opportunists, most notably Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, seeking to play on fear and hatred (two of the most powerful political motivators) to consolidate their positions as right-wing opinion leaders. Because of the way the narrative was shaped, even some liberals like Harry Reid felt unable to take positions they know to be correct, while an unfortunately small group of courageous conservatives stuck up for religious liberty. The whole conversation quickly became toxic as well as utterly irrational, and in its most sinister manifestation has led to protests against a number of mosque projects all over the country. In other words, opposition to the Manhattan community center project has given people authorization to oppose plans for building mosques to serve local Muslim communities without even hiding behind lies about traffic and parking and similar fabrications and base it all bluntly on an Islamophobic narrative.

The mini-narrative about the so-called ?Ground Zero mosque,? in which this rather unremarkable project is bizarrely presented as anything ranging from gross insensitivity to a triumphalist statement of victory by Muslim extremists crowing over 9/11, has dovetailed with the broader Islamophobic narrative that has been developing steadily since 9/11. This is an extremely dangerous situation because once a narrative becomes coherent and familiar, its political power can be fully realized. The main reason that there is so much more overt Islamophobia in 2010 than there was in 2002, immediately following the terrorist attacks, is precisely the development and propagation of the Islamophobic narrative. The bigots have had almost a decade to refine their arguments, congeal their ideas, create a semi-coherent narrative (no matter how nutty) and, most importantly, hammer away at the general public for week after week, month after month and year after year. There have been some violent incidents, of course, such as the Fort Hood shootings, that have reinforced elements of this narrative and done a great deal of harm. And it’s probably worth again noting that obviously the principal culprits responsible for the growth of Islamophobia in the United States were the 9/11 terrorists and their Al Qaeda backers. Nonetheless, I don’t think it’s possible to argue that objectively there are more grounds for Islamophobia in the United States now than immediately after the 9/11 attacks. It’s plainly the consequence of the maturation (if you can call it that) and the accumulation of cultural capital and political influence of the Islamophobic narrative.

Many of us who have been systematically tracking the growth of Islamophobia in the United States have been struck by the way it has developed in spurts, sometimes tied to specific incidents, and sometimes to a sudden eruption of cultural artifacts reflecting this form of bigotry, and then plateaus, only to suddenly reemerge, stronger than ever. The present ?controversy? reminds me a lot of the gobbledygook that was so influential during the Dubai Port World brouhaha. Just as it is now necessary to call the backers of the Islamic community center ?radicals,? ?extremists,? and, in effect, terrorists, at that time a wave of people, including many self-righteous liberals, found it expedient to describe Dubai and the UAE more generally as ?an enemy to the United States,? “a sponsor of Al Qaeda,” and a country to be feared and greatly disliked.

That controversy was completely irrational and ridiculous, as the present one is, but what was important about it was not whether or not DPW ended up managing ports in the United States, but the cultural impact of what was being said and implied. I think that’s absolutely true of the present ?controversy.? It really doesn’t matter in the end, I think, whether the community center is built or not. For one thing, almost everyone who is going to have an opinion has already chosen sides between the two narratives: 1) defense of religious liberty and tolerance as important American traditions, or 2) identifying some kind of intolerable objection to the project, inevitably based on some degree of Islamophobic sentiment, and therefore opposing it in spite of religious and property rights and the principles of tolerance and diversity. In the broader cultural sense, the whole thing is already over, and whether the building is built or not will not to make much difference, I think, to the lasting impact (unless, of course, some people respond to it with an act of sabotage of some kind).

As with the DPW ?controversy,? what is really going to have a lasting impact is what is being said and implied about Muslim Americans and Islam in the United States, and all of this discursive accretion is having the long-term effect of promoting and consolidating Islamophobia in American cultural and political life. It is this cumulative discursive effect of a vile but maturing and strengthening Islamophobic narrative that is the reason that there is so much more Islamophobia the United States now than in the immediate aftermath and indeed the first few years following, the terrorist attacks. In other words, this narrative, and this subculture of fear and hate, has a life of its own, largely independent from what happens or doesn’t happen vis-à-vis terrorism, whether or not this community center or any other is actually built, or any other practical realities for that matter.

What all of this demonstrates is the grave vulnerability, especially at the cultural and social levels, that Muslim and Arab Americans are presently facing. There are a lot of people who are exaggerating the situation, of course, saying preposterous things like ?it?s 1938 for Muslims in the United States,? comparing the present situation to Kristallnacht, or some other offensive and completely unhelpful hyperbole. However, the fact is that there is a worse situation at present, believe it or not, overall than the Muslim and Arab Americans faced in the aftermath of an unprecedented terrorist attack. This does not surprise me. Fear and hatred as cultural and political phenomena are born of worldviews that are shaped by narratives and discourses, not by events themselves. The events have to be interpreted in a certain way to feed into patterns of fear and hatred. With this many passionate Islamophobes, motivated by a plethora of different forms of malevolence and presenting variations on an Islamophobic theme, hammering away for years and years it was bound to have an increasingly negative impact. And, it’s almost certainly only going to get worse.

What IS surprising to me, even shocking, is the extent to which the Muslim and Arab Americans are by and large, collectively, and worst of all increasingly, simply passive observers in this entire cultural development that targets them. I’m not saying there is no one doing anything, but these communities as a whole have simply checked out of the cultural and political process in this country, at least in an organized manner at the national level. A fact that is probably not appreciated by enough people is that these communities are much less organized, and ready to defend themselves or push back against bigotry and discrimination, than they were 10 years ago, before 9/11! I’m not going to single out any group because this is a phenomenon that affects both Arab and Muslim Americans, left and right, secular and religious, pretty much across the board. The fact is that there is no national Arab or Muslim American organization that is not in some significant way or other smaller, weaker or more ineffective now than they were 10 years ago, and there are no new significant national community organizations either. There are effective local organizations like ACCESS in Michigan, social groups like the Ramallah Federation, policy-specific organizations like the American Task Force for Lebanon and the American Task Force on Palestine, and others that are able to play the roles that they have defined for themselves in a serious manner. But none of those groups claim, seek or attempt to represent the communities generally at a national level or even the generalized interests of constituencies within the communities.

So what this means in practice is that the Muslim and Arab Americans are content to be less defended at the national level on broad cultural and political issues than they were before 9/11. As communities, they are watching their organizations deteriorate, become marginalized, lie fallow or simply remain ineffectual in one way or another without seriously attempting to do anything about it. It’s really an extraordinary and bizarre reaction to a very dangerous situation. The reasons of course are completely overdetermined: probably most people aren’t aware of this because organizations like to present themselves as thriving and effective even when they’re in dire straits or otherwise unable to perform the functions they have defined for themselves; some argue that serious engagement with mainstream American culture and politics is unacceptable, impossible or degrading and voluntarily not only opt for but insist on not being represented within the mainstream of the national conversation (in an inverse of the founding of the Republic, they demand to be taxed without representation); some are so frightened that they think any form of political communal engagement will immediately place you on a list compiled by some form of American mukhabarat or lead to some other kind of dreadful difficulties; some enjoy their victim-status and the moral authority that parts of our society, particularly on the left, ascribe to objectified, exoticized Others. There are many more causes of this effect. Atomizing them is not that interesting in the long run. But it is truly striking, and to me shocking, that the Muslim and Arab Americans in general and at the national level are so self-deluded, self marginalized, self-defeating and alienated that they appear to be willing to be moving quickly in the direction of being absolutely passive observers in their own tragedy.

Obviously there are a lot of individuals and groups that must be exempted from this generalized indictment. There are lots of people doing outstanding work. But the truth is they don’t get the support they need from the people in whose interests they labor, and in general get less support now that the problem is much more extreme than they did 10 years ago when the situation was relatively calm and stable. And there is a pervasive pattern of not only ineffective or barely effective leadership, but also absolutely terrible and counterproductive leadership. The amount of self-styled ?leaders? among Arab and Muslim Americans who have no real sense of the political culture and system of the country they?re living in and an absolutely tin ear for how their words and deeds will be perceived by many other Americans is simply extraordinary, and it?s not getting better. If anything, it?s getting worse. Demagoguery is always popular but in a situation like this, the real task is not to please but rather to serve wisely the constituency. Leadership is required, and that means doing the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. That is in exceptionally and perhaps even increasing short supply among Arab and Muslim American ?leaders? and organizations, such as they are.

In spite of being able to identify some of the main causes of this extraordinary collective behavior, I’m really at a loss to explain how communities of millions of people can consciously watch the threat against them at every level steadily increase over many years while at the same time being willing to allow their ability to collectively push back against that threat erode and begin to approach something like a zero-level. I’m afraid to say I’m also unable to offer any solution. I don’t know what it will take to snap the variously apathetic, fearful, cynical or alienated Arab and Muslim American majorities out of their stupor and decide to engage seriously and meaningfully with mainstream American culture and politics in an organized, sustained, responsible and patriotic manner. If the situation isn’t bad enough yet, I don’t know when it will be, and of course at some point, it may have become too late to prevent some genuinely ugly developments. I scorn comparisons to 1938 or Kristallnacht, but that doesn?t mean the situation isn?t grave enough, in its own way. In the end, I’m sure American and other Western Arab and Muslim communities will successfully assimilate and also help further develop their societies. But along the way there are significant dangers and there is simply no excuse for the kind of passivity and self marginalization these communities at large are indulging in at the moment, or the generally dwindling, often dreadful, and almost entirely ineffective leadership they seem to be satisfied with.

In the context of the Obama administration’s strong push for direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, the frankly undignified and needlessly complicating behavior of almost all the national leaderships in the Middle East has never been more apparent. Arab and Israeli leaders alike are not being honest with their publics about decisions they know full well they’re going to have to take because the United States is insisting on them based on the national security priority the Obama administration places the achievement of a negotiated agreement and its single-minded policy of arranging direct negotiations before the end of the month.

The most obvious recent example of this unfortunate tendency was the Arab League decision last week to approve direct negotiations with some very vague conditions and essentially leaving it up to Pres. Abbas to decide when and where they will commence. The Arab states have known for many months that the United States was going to insist on direct negotiations no matter what and that the Palestinians would be asking for their approval and that therefore they had, as a practical matter, no choice but to take the decision they did. However, in the weeks and months leading up to the unanimous decision, many of the 14 governments on the relevant Arab League committee pledged they would never do any such thing and demanded all kinds of preconditions, and it’s not clear how much, if any, of any of them have been met. To be sure the Obama administration has provided some kind of written assurances to the Palestinians and the Arabs, but their public reaction strongly suggests they are at best not fully satisfied with this response. The Arab states essentially did the minimum necessary, in many cases reversing their previous positions, and at the same time punted the ball to the Palestinians.

Let me be clear: the Arab League committee vote was the correct one both strategically and politically (indeed, it was unavoidable), and the move to cede real decision-making on this issue back to the Palestinians is in many ways a helpful one as it recognizes the primacy if not the exclusivity of Palestinian decision-making on these issues (exclusivity would be best, but primacy is better than nothing). What is striking and unfortunate is that these governments knew full well they were going to make this decision for quite some time and many of them were simply not honest about what they knew very well they would have to do, leading to what appeared to too many people to be an undignified reversal. The real indignity was not the decision itself or the recognition of American power and influence in the region, which is simply a fact, but the sometimes shameless posturing that led up to it. The most striking example was the attitude of Syria, which not only strongly opposed the idea of the resolution but actually denounced the decision of the committee on which it serves in the immediate aftermath of the meeting, although it’s not at all clear that actually voted against the resolution or did anything to really try to stop it.

Much the same can be said for the present behavior of Pres. Abbas, who knows two things by now: 1) he’s gotten just about all the assurances he is going to get (whatever they may be) from the Obama administration for the time being and 2) he has no choice strategically but to agree to enter into direct negotiations sometime in the next few weeks under the conditions that exist now. Palestinians have been looking for clear and specific terms of reference (and they’re not satisfied, apparently, with whatever has been arrived at thus far), benchmarks, timetables and a third-party (i.e. American) mechanism for holding parties accountable for fulfilling their agreements. I think it’s clear that neither the Israelis nor the Americans are terribly interested in benchmarks, and the Israelis are dead set, and have always been, against timetables. But I do think for negotiations to succeed in the long run at some point the Israelis and Americans have to agree to clear and specific terms of reference and, above all, a means of holding the parties accountable for fulfilling their obligations. As I wrote in a recent Ibishblog posting, the Catch-22 for the Palestinians is that if they’re not satisfied with what they have thus far received from the United States on these two fronts, they probably cannot get much more without entering into direct negotiations first, which relieves pressure on Israel in a certain sense. Of course, if they play their cards right, direct talks could be as much of a trap for PM Netanyahu as they are for the Palestinians, because everyone will have to then put their cards on the table. And, it should always be remembered that the Palestinians have both the most to lose and the most to gain from diplomacy, and that they have the least options and are most vulnerable to American pressure, especially compared to states like Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The bottom line is that Abbas is going to have to go back into direct negotiations because the United States is insisting on them and the only real leverage the Palestinians have available at the moment at the highest diplomatic levels vis-à-vis Israel is to leverage the American national security priority in ending the conflict to their own advantage. At some fundamental level, the Obama administration and the PLO share a core goal of ending the conflict through a negotiated agreement that also ends the occupation and establishes a Palestinian state. It’s not at all clear that this is something the present Israeli government either wants or could agree to, and they haven’t been tested yet because of the lack of direct negotiations. Netanyahu has been able to maintain a degree of ambiguity on his attitude towards a real two state solution that has minimally satisfied both his right-wing coalition partners and the Obama administration, but this will be much more difficult as direct talks proceed if the Palestinians play their cards right. So while many people warn that direct talks can be a trap for the Palestinians, and they certainly could be, they can also be a trap for Netanyahu, or at least a real test of his willingness to go along with an agenda the United States considers imperative for its own national interest.

The problem at the moment is that Abbas and other PLO leaders, although not all of them, are continuing to speak in terms of more conditions and cast doubt on whether or not they may agree to the direct negotiations when they know very well they’re going to have to. One could argue that this is Negotiating 101 and that you always hold out for more even when you know you’re going to have to accept less. I think there’s obviously some truth to that dictum, but there’s also the question of diminishing returns. It’s not just a question of alienating the United States and losing the prospect of leveraging the American national interest in the Palestinian favor, it’s also a question of preparing the ground politically for what is the inevitable policy decision. My ATFP colleagues and I have said many times that the underlying problem preventing the realization of a peace agreement in the Middle East is the gap between politics and policy here in the United States, among the Arabs and the Palestinians and, of course, in Israel. At a certain point it becomes necessary to subordinate domestic politics to the policies of national interest.

The same critique applies, very much, to Netanyahu and his cabinet colleagues on the question of settlements. The partial, temporary moratorium proved fraudulent since there was at least as much building in the West Bank during its 10 months as there was in the year before. In a sense, the United States has moved past the question of settlements, realizing it’s a dead end with the Israelis especially when they were able to maneuver the question into an argument about the status of Jerusalem rather than more land expropriations in the West Bank. The Obama administration has made it clear it doesn’t want to fight with Israel over formalized settlement announcements anymore and I don’t think the United States cares whether Israel formally extends the moratorium or not. In fact I don’t think there’s any chance they will. But I do think the administration has made its views very clear to the Israeli government: it will not react well to any new land expropriation in the West Bank or building in Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. I think if the Israelis want to continue to build after the moratorium expires on September 26 in the large settlement blocs and some obviously Jewish neighborhoods in occupied East Jerusalem, that is to say in areas that are likely to be the subject of a land swap, especially if they do so modestly in practice (what they do is much more important than what they say on this issue), this will not create a crisis with the administration or even with the Palestinians. But I think the Obama administration has quietly but resolutely told the Israelis what the limits are and I suspect Netanyahu understands perfectly well that he’s going to have to respect them. It seems clear this is the quid pro quo for the direct negotiations not between Israel and the Palestinians but between the United States and the two parties separately, and that this is, if anything, what one can claim has been achieved by the proximity talks.

Lots of Israeli leaders are making all kinds of bold claims about what they’re going to do after September 26, but as I say, I think a lot of this is empty bluster. In fact, I think given the administration’s attitude it’s entirely possible, no matter how counterintuitive it might seem, that we will see less building in the 10 months after the ?moratorium? then we did during it. My point here is that Israeli leaders are not being any more honest about the policy decisions they’re going to have to make with their general public than the Arab or Palestinian leaderships are being. Nobody wants to frankly acknowledge American power and influence in the Middle East, but everyone accedes to it when push comes to shove. When that pushes past the point of diminishing returns, it becomes a pretty undignified spectacle and right now Arab, Palestinian and Israeli leaders are all putting on a pretty unimpressive show.

I had not intended to comment at all on the ridiculous controversy surrounding the construction of a Muslim community center near the site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but Abe Foxman, the head of the ADL, has left me no choice. Most of the opposition has come from the usual suspects: known racists, opportunistic politicians bereft of any sense of propriety and denizens of the quasi-xenophobic right such as Newt Gingrich. No surprises there. I am, however, surprised that the ADL, which has generally been quite good about religious and immigrants’ rights, and about hate crimes directed towards Arab and Muslim Americans, would join the chorus of opposition. But even that wasn’t enough to prompt me to add yet another voice to the shrill, silly ?debate? on this subject (especially silly because it’s pretty clear that with Mayor Bloomberg’s support, this building is in fact going to be built and when the dust settles the project will in all likelihood go forward without further incident).

What spurs me to this reluctant intervention is the logic Mr. Foxman used in defending his opposition to the project, which is explicitly designed to promote interfaith amity and is being run by an organization that, while certainly not my personal cup of tea, promotes as mainstream and moderate a version of Islam as one could hope for. Mr. Foxman is quoted in the New York Times as saying that, ?Survivors of the Holocaust are entitled to feelings that are irrational.? He added that the families of the 9/11 victims’ ?anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorize as irrational or bigoted.? This is an important moral and intellectual point that needs to be engaged immediately, because it’s so wrong and so dangerous. I’m not the greatest living expert on impulse control or self-restraint, but I feel absolutely compelled to make the following argument.

First of all, everyone of course is entitled to, and is probably continuously bombarded with, feelings that are irrational. If people weren’t irrational at some level we would never fall in love, commit acts of radical altruism and self-sacrifice, or be willing to sublimate our own most immediate and selfish personal interests for one version of the greater good or other. Human beings depend on these irrational affects, which are clearly in large part the product of evolutionary processes based on species survival. Without them, it’s unlikely humans would’ve survived, let alone thrived. Similarly, I doubt there’s a human being on the planet, if one is to be completely honest, who isn’t in the grip of negative, as well as positive, irrational impulses frequently during any given day. Who hasn’t been tempted to punch somebody in the face, grab someone else and kiss them, run another motorist off the road or some other ill-advised response to another person’s behavior or even simply presence? The whole process of child rearing and socialization is to explain, from the earliest age, to young children that these impulses, while they may be unavoidable, mustn’t be acted upon or often even expressed. Does the person deserve to be punched, and is it morally and legally reasonable to punch them? Is it plausibly acceptable to grab and kiss this individual and is there any basis for suspecting that it will be anything other than an unwelcome assault? Can there ever be a justification for running another motorist off the road except if that’s necessary in some scenario in which that driver is threatening the public safety? Almost always the answer to those questions will be no, so of course we don’t act on such impulses even when we, in my own case at least, frequently have them.

Mr. Foxman argues that victims of monstrous crimes such as the Holocaust or families of those murdered by the terrorists on 9/11 have a right to irrational feelings because of the extent of their injury and their grief. So far so good. As I explained above, everyone not only has irrational feelings, they have a right to those feelings, both positive and negative, because they are unavoidable. Victims of terrible crimes such as murder can be said to have greater grounds than most people for extreme levels of negative irrational affects such as rage aimed at those not responsible for the killings but in some other sense identifiable with the culprits. I’m not sure the fact that a murder is committed in the course of a larger and more monstrously widespread act such as a genocide as in the case of the Holocaust or an atrocity on the scale of 9/11 provokes or justifies greater levels of outrage, anger and grief in survivors and their families than any other murderer might. But they certainly have broader social and political significance because they are more likely to become the subject of the policy debate, or the parody of one which we are now having about the Islamic Center near Ground Zero.

Which brings us to the main point: people have the right to irrational feelings, especially since no one can control them, but they do not have the right to have irrational opinions, or at least no right to have those irrational opinions taken seriously by the rest of us. One can’t justify racism, collective guilt and bigotry based on crimes committed by some members of an identity community because one or one’s loved ones have been victimized by that crime. This is the crucial divide between thoughts and actions. We all have many thoughts, most of which we cannot control, and many of them are unworthy in one way or another. One cannot be held accountable, I think, for one’s unstated thoughts or unacted-upon impulses, whatever they might be and from wherever they may arise. The question is, always, what does one do and say, not what does one irrationally feel. The human thought process, especially when it comes to matters of deep emotion, is exceptionally complex and does not follow any clear or controllable patterns. One may easily feel many different contradictory things at any given moment that, if all given way to simultaneously, would render one entirely incoherent and possibly somewhat psychotic. No amount of victimization provides immunity or impunity from irresponsible words and deeds. Suffering is not necessarily ennobling, as some weird religious claims suggest (if so prisons would be the noblest environments in any given society, and they’re obviously not), but it needn’t be debasing either. Anger, even irrational anger, is understandable. Allowing it to give way to words and deeds that express bigotry, collective guilt and other plainly immoral and irresponsible interventions is not justifiable on the grounds of suffering.

After all, perhaps not everyone has been cruelly victimized in their life, but very many people have in one way or another, and it would be a very dysfunctional society or world that allowed a carte blanche for words and deeds of hatred and anger based on that victimization. We do not, after all, allow the relatives and friends of murder or rape victims to sit in judgment of accused defendants as members of juries. Judges must recuse themselves if they have an obvious bias. Acts of retribution against family members, or even those accused of the crime, are in themselves serious crimes. This is because the law recognizes that even the most understandable irrational affect based on victimization cannot be allowed to express itself either through unacceptable individual acts such as vigilante “justice” or, far worse, in the actions and policies of the state. Yet this essentially is what Mr. Foxman is advocating: that some of the relatives of the 9/11 victims who are allowing their understandable outrage to be expressed in indefensible generalized anger and condemnation of Islam and Muslims and to falsely and deeply irrationally equate Islam and Muslims generally with the terrorist culprits ought to have such special standing because of their suffering that public policy is actually built around it. It’s quite bizarre.

If we followed Mr. Foxman’s logic, vast numbers of people throughout the world would be ?entitled? to have irrational and bigoted opinions and have those taken seriously in questions of public policy and state behavior. It’s not only the victims of the Holocaust or 9/11 this could apply to. How about the victims of the arch swindler Bernie Madoff? The dispossessed and exiled Palestinian people, or those living under Israeli occupation for the past 40 years? The black South Africans who suffered for so long under apartheid? African-Americans with their own history of enslavement and abuse? The list is endless. Mr. Foxman’s logic not only leads to dreadful public policy, because it accepts not only the legitimacy but even the primacy of what he agrees is an irrational reaction to suffering, but if accepted as a generalized principle of acceptable human behavior, it would lead to endless civil strife, wars of hatred and vendettas between individuals, families, clans, tribes, societies and nations. In many cases it does, and many of the worst crimes in human history have been rationalized and motivated by this very sense of victimhood. To privilege any form of irrationality, especially in political or public policy terms is incredibly irresponsible and totally indefensible. But to embrace and promote the logic that underlies so much of the worst behavior people can indulge in out of a sense of victimhood is simply grotesque.

The compulsive liars at Campus Watch just can’t stop the geyser of falsehoods that continuously erupts from their website. Last June I pointed out in an Ibishblog posting that “campus watch… had in its initial mission statement an overtly racist complaint about the number of Arab and Middle Eastern professors in Middle East studies departments,” which is absolutely true. Someone with excellent name of Cinnamon Stillwell responded on the Campus Watch website by denying flatly that there had ever been any such statements on their site, which of course was a lie. I demonstrated the depth and shamelessness of this lie in a subsequent posting on the Ibishblog. Using both my own archives and, more importantly, the excellent “Wayback Machine” at archive.org, I demonstrated that the following bigoted passage was indeed in the initial “about us” section of the Campus Watch website:
Middle East studies in the United States has become the preserve of Middle Eastern Arabs, who have brought their views with them. Membership in the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the main scholarly association, is now 50 percent of Middle Eastern origin.

I also showed that the original site included the following stated intentions: “Identify key faculty who teach and write about contemporary affairs at university Middle East Studies departments in order to analyze and critique the work of these specialists for errors or biases,” and, “Keep the public apprised of course syllabi, memos, debates over appointments and funding, etc.” You’ll note the word appointments in that sentence, which strongly indicates an intention to be involved conversation about in hiring and promotion at American universities.

Because both of these passages were blatant and blunt about the mentality and the intentions behind Campus Watch, they were taken down fairly quickly after the site first went up. But they were there, and to deny that is to lie shamelessly and in a demonstrably false manner, as I easily demonstrated last year.

I am absolutely amazed that in a new posting on the Campus Watch website yesterday, Cinnamon reiterates her lie from last year in the following passage: After falsely accusing Campus Watch of intervening in tenure decisions (the "CW Positions on Speakers and Tenure" page at our website explicitly states otherwise) and making "overtly racist complaint[s]" in our "initial mission statement" about professors of Middle Eastern background, Hussein Ibish, writing at his blog, concludes that CW "should admit failure and be gone forever." In light of all these mistakes, Ibish might want to take his own advice.

These people are damned liars. Cinnamon Stillwell is a damned liar. In fact she is a compulsive liar. She can’t stop lying. And she can’t stop repeating the same stupid lie even when anybody can discover its blatant falsehood with three or four clicks of a mouse. Listen, Pipes, Cinnamon, and all of you mendacious bigots at Campus Watch: you’re busted! It’s too late. You can keep repeating that this isn’t true all you like. It’s on the Internet. You put it there. You put it there because you meant it. You meant it because you are racists. And now, not satisfied with that, you insist on proving yourselves compulsive liars as well. I can’t believe you are stupid enough to issue these shameless denials of the truth again when I’ve already demonstrated that they are there, online from your own website, preserved for all eternity by the “Wayback Machine.” Bigoted, untruthful AND stupid. What a combination!

The PLO is now facing one of the most difficult problems it’s had to deal with in quite a while, as it comes under very heavy pressure from the Obama administration and, as Pres. Abbas said at the African Union summit in Kampala two days ago, the ?entire world? as well, to return to direct negotiations with Israel. For most people, although on two different sides of the equation, this is a no-brainer. One position will argue that the bottom line of a full settlement freeze has never been adopted by Israel and that since this was the original precondition for negotiations established by both the Obama administration and the PLO last summer, and is Israel’s primary commitment under Phase 1 of the Roadmap which is still the operative model for achieving peace, until that is accomplished direct negotiations shouldn’t even be considered. The other position will recognize that Palestinians can only achieve their goals through direct negotiations with Israel, albeit with third-party (practically meaning American) mediation and engagement, and that therefore any prolonged avoidance of them is completely unacceptable. Neither of these knee-jerk positions recognizes the complexities of the diplomatic and political situation with which Abbas and his senior PLO colleagues are presently confronted.

I think it’s important to try to tease out these difficulties in some detail.

First of all, it’s absolutely true that the Palestinians are under extremely heavy pressure from the Americans, the Europeans and many others, including some of the Arabs, to reenter direct negotiations under the present terms and conditions on the table. If they don’t, they risk placing themselves back into the position of the party that says ?no,? into which PM Netanyahu rather deftly maneuvered them between the UN General Assembly meeting in October and the fiasco of the Biden visit and the confrontations between Israel and the United States over settlements in Jerusalem earlier this year. Anyone who gets positioned as the primary obstructionist in Middle East diplomacy is in a dreadfully unenviable position, especially when they have the limited degree of options, power and prerogatives available to the Palestinians. So saying no incurs an extremely heavy price diplomatically and internationally and it’s something any sensible Palestinian would be deeply loath to do.

One of the reasonable points the Obama administration has been making in no uncertain terms to the Palestinians is that it cannot help secure concessions from Israel outside the context of negotiations and that the proximity talks are not sufficient to do that. The fact is that outside of the context of direct negotiations, in which all parties will be forced to really put their cards on the table, Netanyahu can continue to obfuscate, postpone, dither and focus on procedural and minor matters. Avoiding direct negotiations allows the Israeli government a luxury they dearly cherish but should not be allowed: the ability to avoid being tested on their commitment to making serious compromises or taking any real political risks to advance peace. Moreover, it allows them to maintain the carefully constructed ambiguity that has at least minimally satisfied both the Obama administration and the Israeli far right over the term of the present Israeli cabinet. The only thing that can really shake them out of that ambiguity might be direct negotiations.

Worse still, since the Obama administration’s entire strategy since October has been based on the idea that direct negotiations will create their own momentum or at least produce sufficient clarity to inform the next step the United States will take to try to achieve its national security priority of a peace agreement that involves the establishment of a Palestinian state, being perceived as the primary obstacle to direct negotiations places the Palestinians in an increasingly direct confrontation with American desires which they have much less ability to finesse and manage than an Israeli government in a similar position can, as we have recently observed. The one thing the Palestinians absolutely cannot afford, under any circumstances, is to alienate the US administration because leveraging American power based on its own vital national security interest in ending the conflict is the only real means Palestinians have of strengthening their position vis-à-vis Israel and making real progress towards ending the occupation. Obviously, the Palestinian leadership has to do everything it can to avoid any such development, because it will leave them with almost no options and certainly no ability to advance their position.

However, the Palestinians have two very real problems to contend with on the question of direct negotiations.

The settlement freeze issue is largely resolved, in the sense that it’s no longer really on the table: the United States has put the matter to one side practically speaking, while maintaining its position that settlement should not expand and new settlement activity is illegitimate, so the Palestinians really cannot hang their hat on it being the essential precondition for direct negotiations, because it’s not going happen. On the other hand, it also seems clear that if the United States, especially if it feels things are going relatively well diplomatically with the Palestinians, is not going to stand idly by if there is a major expansion of settlement activity after the temporary, partial and largely fraudulent ?moratorium? expires in September. It would appear the Obama administration doesn’t care what Israel calls it, or even if they formally say anything at all, but that it doesn’t want to hear about major new projects anywhere in the occupied territories and certainly not in Arab neighborhoods of occupied East Jerusalem.

Of course the outcome of the November midterm elections will be extremely important in shaping the next phase of US policy, which is probably on hold until then. There are many different possible electoral results, and this seems a particularly tricky midterm to predict, and many different possible consequences on policy and conclusions the administration may reach after the election. I don’t think either Israel or the Palestinians should have any confidence that the elections or their consequences will necessarily strengthen their position. There are far too many imponderables for that. But I do think we can say that not only is making re-engagement in direct negotiations contingent on a complete settlement freeze an implausible diplomatic position in the long run, but also that the Palestinians have realized this.

However, what this points to is the profound political difficulty Abbas faces in any decision to return to direct negotiations in the absence not only of a settlement freeze but anything concrete to show from Israel for Palestinian diplomatic efforts in recent months. During his recent visit to Washington, Netanyahu spoke of “confidence building measures” on the ground to be implemented “within weeks.” If anything remotely of the kind has taken place since then, I’m completely unaware of it. What we have seen is a new round of home demolitions and a number of other significantly unhelpful gestures. As in the fall and early winter, the PLO simply doesn’t have anything it can point to politically to justify to the Palestinian people why it would feel that the proximity talks and diplomatic process in recent months produced any results or conditions that would justify upgrading to direct negotiations.

The Palestinian leadership strongly, and with a great deal of justification, fears the consequences of a failed, and especially a spectacularly failed, set of direct negotiations. People remember the dreadful consequences of failure at Camp David in 2000, and especially the public blaming of Pres. Arafat by Pres. Clinton (who had solemnly promised him that there would be no blame if the talks failed) and the hideous video imagery of Arafat being manhandled into the negotiating room by PM Barak, even if it was genuinely an effort at “you first” politeness on the Israeli part. It seemed to sum up so much of what Palestinians felt they were being put through, and contributed mightily to the outbreak of the catastrophic second intifada that in a few months more or less killed constructive Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy until today. They are also concerned by memories of the less dramatic but still damaging consequences of the failure of the Annapolis talks during the Bush administration, even though they didn’t go badly from a Palestinian perspective. It’s more the lack of any tangible deliverables or political successes, and a narrative on the Palestinian side, especially in terms of public opinion, that has seriously compromised the flexibility Palestinian leaders and diplomats have with their political constituency.

A huge number, probably a large majority, of Palestinians feel that at least since Oslo and probably since Madrid, meaning for the past 20 years or so, they’ve been sucked into negotiations that have been all process and no peace, and that the occupation has entrenched itself, expanded and deepened during this time rather than been negotiated to a conclusion. Of course there’s a whole other story to be told about what the past 20 years have done in terms of the eventual prospects of Palestinian liberation and peace in the Middle East, but from the point of view of realities on the ground, it’s not a pretty picture and the skeptics and critics have an exceptionally powerful case to make. So as long as the PLO can’t produce tangible deliverables, let alone real diplomatic and political successes that strongly point in the direction of liberation, the credibility of both negotiations and negotiators is quite tenuous. The large majority of Palestinians according to almost all polls support negotiations and a two state solution to the conflict, but that same majority (like their Israeli counterparts) doubts it will be achieved and doesn’t believe the other side is interested. On the Israeli side there is a lack of trust in negotiations, but on the Palestinian side there is also a lack of trust in their own negotiators, and Israel has very rarely over the past two decades taken actions to bolster their credibility or prevent its continuous erosion. So there is a real political problem for the Palestinian leadership to enter into direct negotiations under the present conditions in spite of all the pressure and the very real diplomatic costs involved, not least of which is that it lets Netanyahu and his colleagues completely off the hook. In a nutshell, it will be very difficult for the Palestinian leadership to justify politically, no matter how much sense it makes in terms of national strategy.

To make matters more complicated, there is a real diplomatic difficulty as well, putting the question of the, at present, implausible and apparently unavailable complete settlement freeze aside. The Palestinians have a very real concern and an important point when they say, as they continuously have, that clear and specific terms of reference are essential to make direct negotiations meaningful. Those of us who have not been privy to the details of the proximity talks cannot really be sure what kind of conversations about terms of reference, benchmarks and mechanisms to hold the parties accountable for fulfilling their agreements have been discussed between the three parties, but it’s clear the Palestinians are totally unsatisfied with what they’ve heard from the Americans directly and the Israelis indirectly. It’s also quite clear that the Israelis dislike the idea of specific terms of reference, reject the concept of benchmarks, and only support mechanisms that would hold Palestinians accountable for their commitments (they’ve been extremely hostile to any effort to extend the privilege to themselves, naturally). It’s not clear how much the Obama administration has been or will be willing to do to provide those essential components of a process that is actually going to work, and the Catch-22 may be that in order to get more out of the Americans in that context, the Palestinians would have to agree to enter direct negotiations first, which might serve to let the Israelis off the hook on these questions anyway. But then, of course, there is no way of forcing Netanyahu’s hand on the final status issues in any other context than direct negotiations.

There are a number of other less important considerations, but this is the essential framework of the extremely difficult situation the Palestinian leadership presently faces between the Scylla of saying no and the Charybdis of saying yes under the present circumstances. In the end, no party needs direct negotiations as badly as the Palestinians do, because they have the most to gain from success and the most to lose from failure. And they cannot, by any means, afford to alienate the most sympathetic American administration in recent decades, and probably in decades to come. But their fears of the consequences of a spectacular failure are rational, and their demands for ?clear and specific? (in Abbas’ own phrasing) terms of reference, benchmarks, and mechanisms for real accountability are not only legitimate, they are extremely important for eventual success.

The bottom line is this: the ideal scenario for Netanyahu is to continue to sit there and say that he wants immediate talks without any preconditions and that he is the one who is saying yes, while the Palestinians continue to say no, even if it is for understandable and justifiable reasons. Therefore, it is essential that the Palestinians find a way to say yes as soon as possible, and that the Obama administration and all parties that are serious about resolving the conflict find a means to help them do that. They need something to show for their efforts thus far, and it doesn’t have to be that dramatic. Everyone interested in peace needs the Palestinians to say yes, and the PLO leadership clearly wants to, but they do have to be given a reason that can justify that decision to their own people.

The Taffety Punk Theater Company, which recently produced Richard Byrne’s superb new play Burn Your Bookes, tonight staged one of their annual ?bootleg? performances at the Folger Theatre in Washington DC, in this case Shakespeare and Fletcher’s The Two Noble Kinsmen. The performance was extraordinary, and in some ways revelatory, and was even more impressive than last year’s ?bootleg? Troilus and Cressida. The Two Noble Kinsmen is seldom read and even more rarely performed, and is the only play considered an authentic work of Shakespeare not to have been in any way produced for film, television, video or DVD. There are several reasons for this, not least of which that the play appears to be much more Fletcher than Shakespeare, who apparently was more or less retired by the time of the collaboration on this very late work. The play is basically bookended by Shakespeare’s writing, but the bulk of it seems to belong to Fletcher. No doubt Act 1, scenes 1 and 2 (and probably 3) are indeed the work of Shakespeare, as are scenes 3 and 4 in Act V, plus some other elements scattered around the play. But it wasn’t included in the first Folio, probably because Hemmings and Condell didn’t want to include plays which Shakespeare was involved in drafting but in which someone else had the larger part (they didn’t include Pericles either, probably for similar reasons). And, of course, this means that The Two Noble Kinsmen doesn’t compare very well in the final analysis with most of Shakespeare’s other work.

But, and here’s the really interesting element of this evenings’ performance, it’s this very quality that made it perfect play for a bootleg production. I should, no doubt, have already explained what Taffety Punk means by ?bootleg.? Essentially the actors are recruited and cast quickly and individually about a month before the performance and spend their own time studying their parts from paper whenever they want to. The cast and company meet for the first time the morning of the performance and do one rehearsal only, maybe throw some costumes and props together, and perform the entire thing in the evening, again only once. It produces very interesting effects, as were seen last year in their fascinating bootleg Troilus and Cressida. However, even in that creditable effort the real limitations of the ?bootleg? production process were pretty evident. It was great fun, and revealed some interesting things about the play, but in the end Troilus and Cressida is a very complicated Shakespeare play, one of his darkest, essentially an extremely grim parody of some of his earlier tragedies, especially Romeo and Juliet. The Two Noble Kinsmen is a much more straightforward proposition than most of Shakespeare’s other work and it sparkled this evening. I’m not sure a month of rehearsals would have wrung out very much more entertainment, excitement or, more importantly, signification than Taffety Punk was able to achieve with one morning’s rehearsal.

It’s true the actors had to resort to prompting much more frequently than in a regularly rehearsed performance, but it did almost nothing to break the spell. It’s true enough that the lighting and the sound were largely improvised, but again the effect would probably not have been particularly more powerful if they had been more polished. The extremely rudimentary costumes, such as they were, and props (ditto) certainly demanded a more than usual suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience, but in that sense it was probably a lot closer to the experience of Shakespeare’s audiences, especially his early audiences at The Theater, The Rose and The Globe (probably less so at Blackfriars). And while the Folger Theatre is probably a lot more like Blackfriars than the earlier, larger and more downscale South Bank open-air theaters, it was still a very good fit for the spartan production values of the bootleg performance (think, for example, of Shakespeare’s appeal to his audience’s imagination in the Chorus opening to Henry V — we’re going to have to suspend our disbelief anyway and a willing audience engaged by a spirited cast will disregard a great deal, especially when the language of the play can carry the day more effectively than props, costumes and special effects). Certainly it all goes to show that spirit, enthusiasm and a sense of playful adventure is a lot more important than the fancy nonsense that has tended to mar many of the recent productions by the smug and pompous Shakespeare Theater Company of DC.

What I think this evening’s triumph at the Folger shows more than anything is not just that the bootleg production process can reveal interesting things about Shakespeare’s plays, but that non-Shakespeare English Renaissance drama is even better suited to this method and is an exceptionally good fit for it. I think in fairness to do real justice to most of Shakespeare’s work requires more than a bootleg performance can possibly produce, especially in terms of getting the language right, effectively navigating its meaning in delivery and coping with both the rigors and the ever-instructive guidelines of the pentameter itself (very rarely done with precision even at the highest theatrical levels). Throughout his career, but especially in his later plays, Shakespeare wrote in a highly idiosyncratic and extremely complicated, elliptical, dense and often convoluted manner that produces dizzying proliferations of signification, and plainly even the finest actors can be challenged by a good deal of it. It’s sometimes almost impossible to parse what clauses and qualifiers in a given passage specifically refer to each other, it being possible to apply multiple readings. That’s great for reader, but poses serious challenges to actors and directors, presenting a series of detailed choices are both complicated and important. Moreover, Shakespeare wasn’t the only English Renaissance playwright to work at the level of masterpiece by any means. Most of Marlowe, a lot of Jonson and at least some of Middleton would require similar scrupulous attention to detail to be fully realized on stage.

But even the second-tier of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was composed during what was clearly by far the greatest explosion of literary invention and talent in the history of the English language, and calls for and rewards serious attention. What the bootleg performance of The Two Noble Kinsmen, which as I say is much more the work of Fletcher than Shakespeare, suggests is that there is a good deal of excellent, if not transcendent, Renaissance drama that is too frequently passed over for performance and could be perfectly suited to this kind of production (it really shouldn’t be necessary to have the name Shakespeare attached to a play in order to get people to come see it). Certainly plays by Kyd, Chapman, Dekker, Ford, Marston, Massinger, Beaumont and/or Fletcher (without Shakespeare), some of Middleton’s less challenging work, and much more would probably respond very well to this kind of treatment. Early interesting and significant, but not artistically sophisticated, plays like Gorboduc and Ralph Roister Doister probably don’t deserve anything much more extensive than a bootleg under any circumstances, but it would certainly be a fun and rewarding project. I think it would be fascinating for both actors and audiences to engage bootleg productions of neglected but artistically significant plays like The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, Philaster, or my number one suggestion for this performance method, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, especially since there aren’t likely to be any full-scale productions of any of them anytime in the foreseeable future.

Taffety Punk took some serious liberties with the production and even some aspects of the language of The Two Noble Kinsmen, especially the introduction of large amounts of playful contemporary popular culture, and of course they were right to do so. The whole thing about the bootleg production process is it has to be loose, lighthearted and fun. It can work for dark plays and tragedies, but it’s especially effective, think, with comedies and tragicomedies that are essentially sendups of established genres. Amid a truly excellent cast that deserved the sustained standing ovation they received, Kimberly Gilbert stole the show as the Jailer’s Daughter. The role, which often comes across as a parody of Ophelia and other tragic heroines of earlier Renaissance dramas, is perfectly suited to her exuberant style and really calls for the kind of over-the-top, leaping-about-the-stage, wild approach she gave it. She was very good as Edward Kelley’s daughter Westonia, herself a noted Renaissance poet, in Byrne’s Burn Your Bookes, but was even better tonight. Indeed, the entire cast and the whole production made no effort to be restrained or judicious. This was an enthusiastic, exuberant and fearless embrace of a very good and too often ignored play, and it suggested real possibilities for marrying the bootleg production process with some important, excellent and even more often ignored Elizabethan and Jacobean English drama. I hope Marcus Kyd and his Taffety Punk colleagues seriously consider one of the many important and generally ignored Renaissance but non-Shakespeare works for next year’s bootleg production. Tonight’s largely Fletcher play, with some Shakespeare present but not dominant, was a great example of how well that could work.

An Ibishblog reader asks: "The Jerusalem Post reported: ‘Israel argued this week that a major human rights treaty, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, did not apply to its treatment of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, because those areas were outside the country’s national boundaries.’ This is the first time I’ve heard Israel define the Occupied Territories as "outside" its national boundaries. Is this indeed the first time Israel has so clearly made this statement that defined the West Bank and Gaza outside its boundaries? Obviously the UN HRC has thrown this argument out, but putting human rights aside for a moment, how can Israel so clearly admit the Territories are outside its national boundaries yet still have an argument that justifies the legality of the settlements? I must be incorrect in my assessment of the weight of this statement as I seem to be the only one noticing it."

Well, the reader is certainly not the only one who noticed this. This is an unusual, although hardly unprecedented, admission from the Israelis, and it comes in a very interesting context. Israel’s position regarding the applicability of the fourth Geneva Convention (under which the settlements are clearly illegal) to the occupied territories has traditionally been that the territories are not occupied but “disputed,” because there was no valid sovereign before the 1967 war and other specious arguments, and that therefore the territories are not occupied in spite of a veritable mountain of UN Security Council resolutions beginning with 242 in 1967 holding that they are. If the territories are not occupied, then the Geneva Convention does not apply, Israel argues. However, it’s going to be very difficult to square that in the long run with an apparently contradictory argument about the inapplicability of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights based on the West Bank lying outside the borders of Israel.

Logic would dictate that even the Israelis would have to pick one perspective: either these areas are inside Israel’s boundaries and therefore the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights applies (no doubt it applies anyway, I’m just proceeding on the “logic” they submitted to the UN) or they are not inside Israel’s boundaries and therefore the Geneva Convention applies. Indeed, the UN Security Council has ruled many times that the Geneva Convention does of course apply to the occupied territories, as, no doubt, does the Covenant. To argue that neither applies is typical of the Israeli approach to the occupied territories, placing it in a sui generis category completely outside the bounds of established international legality and normal dictates of political logic. As I’ve written elsewhere, what the Israelis essentially have established is a virtual Israel that exists wherever a settler happens to be and an unresolved, ambiguous occupation everywhere else in the occupied territories.

The bottom line is that there is an international arbiter of such questions that transforms them from matters of opinion into those of legal and political facts: the UN Security Council, which has made its view that these territories are under foreign military occupation very clear on countless occasions since 1967. If there is a dispute, it is a dispute between Israel and everybody else, beginning with the Security Council, not between Israel and the Palestinians or the Arabs. It’s a bit like an argument in which one person says the sky looks green and everybody else says the sky looks blue: that does not constitute a legitimate dispute, it constitutes one party trying to have things its own way in a manner nobody else accepts. This is particularly true when there is an established arbiter for such matters, as there is in this case, and the arbiter has made its position crystal clear. Now the Israelis have formally agreed that West Bank lies outside of its international boundaries, it should plainly be held to that. This argument should be remembered and repeated into the foreseeable future, in case they forget they made it.

Moreover, the Israeli position regarding its boundaries requires some serious interrogation, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that Israel may be the only member state of the United Nations without clear and declared boundaries (all the other candidates for such a category are much less dramatic examples, if they qualify at all). For example, Israel would certainly claim, on the basis of its virtual annexation of occupied East Jerusalem (what they actually did was extend Israeli civil law to all of what Israel defines as “municipal Jerusalem” but not a formal annexation as such), which was flatly and indeed angrily rejected by the UN Security Council in several resolutions at the time, that Jerusalem is within Israel’s international boundaries.

Indeed, Security Council Resolution 476 (June 30, 1980) reaffirmed, “the overriding necessity to end the prolonged occupation of Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem.” So the Security Council felt that the occupation was prolonged a full 30 years ago, “only” 13 years after it began, and was thoughtful enough to reiterate that Israel must end its occupation of Jerusalem. This was needed because ever since the adoption of 242, Israelis have been arguing that the absence of the definite article “the” in the cause “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict” somehow meant that Israel could keep hold of some of the occupied territories outside the context of an agreement that it can do so. This is always a very dubious argument because the Security Council opened 242 by “Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.” The idea that the missing definite article (not missing in the French text of the resolution, mind you) invalidates the principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war is admirable from the perspective of lawyering, but logical and legal nonsense. Either it is, as a rule, inadmissible or it may, in some cases, be admissible. But of course missing definite articles do not turn what is flatly stated to be an inadmissible process into an admissible one. Of course the territory most specifically in question in terms of Israel’s insistence that it unilaterally retain portions of what it conquered in 1967 is occupied East Jerusalem, which is what gives Resolution 476 its special significance: it makes very clear that the Security Council regards Jerusalem as part of the territories that are occupied and from which Israel must withdraw.

To return to the admission/claim made before the United Nations last week, as I say it’s certainly not unique but it is very rare. Perhaps an even more interesting version of this same highly unusual acknowledgment of reality came a few weeks ago when the Israeli military, which effectively and under Israeli regulations controls the occupied territories, ruled that army decisions regarding settlers and settlements need to be tested primarily against international law and not Israel’s basic law. This extremely unusual ruling is a deviation from the general Israeli practice that extends the protections of Israeli citizenship and basic law to the settlers. It was designed to give the military more leeway in dealing with settlers, especially the extremists in question who were being banned from most of the West Bank. The question, as I understand it, is still being adjudicated in the Israeli appellate system, as the settlers claim that the IDF must be subject to Israeli law when dealing with Israelis in the occupied territories (but not Palestinians). But the fact that the military would point international law rather than Israeli law as the guiding principle in dealing with settlers and settlements, even when it’s manifestly in an effort to bolster its own leverage with other Israelis, is another very significant gesture in a similar direction.

In the final analysis, whatever the Israeli position might be it has no choice but to negotiate the boundaries of a Palestinian state or continue the occupation indefinitely with a kind of grim consequences I keep writing about. There are presently three main recognized dangers to Israel in official and quasi-official Israeli discourse: Iran and its nuclear program, delegitimization, and the lack of peace with the Palestinians. It depends a great deal who you’re listening to which of the three of these problems is considered the most grave. PM Netanyahu and many other officials are obsessed with the question of Iran, regarding everything else as comparatively irrelevant. Many Israeli diplomats, analysts and others are even more concerned about what they call "delegitimization," by which they tend to mean an illogical potpourri of genuine efforts to deny and challenge the legitimacy of the Israeli state with an effort to replacing it with some other kind of state, legal challenges to Israel and Israeli officials that may or may not have factual and political merit depending on the case, and completely legitimate Palestinian critiques of and actions against abusive occupation policies and other, not only legitimate but necessary, critiques of Israeli excesses. Others, including DM Ehud Barak, are blunt in their view that neither of these two problems is as serious as the problems posed by the ongoing occupation and the lack of a peace agreement with the Palestinians, which they say has to be the utmost strategic priority for any Israeli government.

Obviously I think the third opinion plainly is most convincing even from a strictly Israeli perspective, if nothing else because the occupation provides Iran with its excuse to be critical of and confrontational with Israel and to support clients that are directly antagonistic to it, and because it is mainly the occupation that fuels almost everything regarded as “delegitimization.” Ironically, those most concerned with delegitimization tend to also be those supporting the very policies that lead to that very phenomenon, whether in any given case it deserves the term “delegitimization” or not. In other words, the occupation remains at the heart of all of the most severe strategic challenges Israel faces, and this is only likely to intensify insofar as it refuses to seriously discuss ending it on reasonable terms. Continuously reminding Israel of its now formally stated position that the West Bank lies outside of its borders will be doing it quite a significant favor.

It is frequently asked, although rarely directly to my face, ?why does Ibish always talk/only seem to care (some version of that) about what Jewish Israelis will accept rather than what Palestinians want?? This question was recently repeated in a tweet, although not, as usual, directly addressed to me. Nonetheless, I do want to answer it because this confusion lies at the heart of a gulf of misunderstanding between the analyses I have been developing in recent years and much conventional wisdom among Arab-Americans and other pro-Palestinian groups. I think it defines a sustained surprise, and even bewilderment, that someone with such a strong, unequivocal and extremely public record of pro-Palestinian advocacy would raise the questions and points that I have been making in recent years. I think it also is a question that gets to the heart of the growing distance between idealistic activists who think largely in abstract, and often even theoretical, terms and those of us who are trying to find a solution to the occupation as a practical and more importantly political problem in the real world based on the actual array of forces that can produce outcomes. It is the gap between the politics, or perhaps I should say faux-politics, of emotion and longing versus the real politics of, to employ a shopworn but nonetheless indispensable cliché, the art of the possible.

First of all, the whole accusation is a misrepresentation of the thrust of my work over the past few years. I mainly, in fact, talk about what the Palestinians want and need, and especially about their national and diplomatic strategies, when I write about the conflict. My whole book about the one-state agenda was mainly about what Palestinians minimally need to accomplish for their national goals to be realized, and why. Just like the rest of the overwhelming majority of my work, it was not primarily about what the Israelis want or need, although it did frequently touch upon the subject, and with good reason. Because it seems to confuse so many people, I want to try to explain why I do this.

Let’s begin with some very simple axioms: 1) there is no military victory available to either Israel or the Palestinians to resolve this conflict; 2) if the conflict is to be resolved, it must therefore be resolved by an agreement; 3) this is therefore the only way to end the occupation and achieve Palestinian national independence; 4) the only alternative to an agreement that ends the occupation and the conflict is continued occupation and conflict. A fifth probability, that does not rise to the level of an axiom but that comes extremely, disturbingly, close, is that this continued conflict will almost certainly become increasingly religious, bitter, violent and intractable, and is likely to morph from an ethnic struggle over land and power to a religious holy war over God’s will and sacred spaces. I take these four points as axiomatic and virtually self-evident as I see no arguments capable of contradicting any of them. If anybody has any such ideas that are not fanciful and actually take into consideration the array of forces (social, economic, political and military) that produce real political outcomes in the real world, please forward them to the Ibishblog immediately as they will be an original contribution and possibly a breakthrough in thinking on the conflict. I’m not holding my breath.

One usually gets, in response to some version of these four axioms, fanciful alternative scenarios that I have often described as ?science fiction? because they do not take into consideration the forces that produce outcomes I keep referring to. The consolidation of a greater Israel, the victory of an Islamic state from the river to the sea, the democratic, South Africa style one-state solution, the so-called Jordanian option, various notions of Israeli-Palestinian Confederation and regional EU-like ?unions of the children of Abraham? or some such folderol, are all examples of fanciful scenarios that fail at the most fundamental level because in each and every case at least one of the parties that would have to accept such an outcome cannot plausibly be imagined as accepting it. As long as one party central to an outcome will neither accept such an outcome nor can be plausibly militarily forced to accept it, we can say with a great deal of confidence that such an outcome is extremely unlikely to the point not being worth serious consideration.

The latest example of this is the right wing and settler version of the ?one-state solution? being proposed by some extremist Israelis in which Israel would annex all of the West Bank, including Jerusalem, but not Gaza, adding about 1.5 million new Palestinian citizens to Israel, but keeping their political rights in various forms of check to ensure the state remains ?Jewish? and Israel rather than anything else. This is the subject of a feature article in this weekend’s version of Ha’aretz. The idea that this would end the Palestinian national struggle and the conflict because West Bank Palestinians would be delighted for the occupation to become permanent and to receive third or fourth class Israeli ?citizenship? over time, of course while being colonized and repressed more ardently than ever, and that the rest of the Palestinians don’t count and the national movement would simply collapse is a wonderful example of political ?science fiction.? From a serious point of view, we needn’t bother with it, but one is unfortunately obliged to take the time to debunk the idea lest sensible people be seduced by it any way.

In considering the range of possible outcomes and strategies for ending the occupation and the conflict, as I’m trying to explain, one must take the minimal interests and bottom line perspectives of all the central parties, especially Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, into profound consideration. It is a ubiquitous and uniting feature of all fanciful outcomes that they strikingly, blindingly, fail to do so, instead privileging one set of national imperatives over all the others, at the expense of remaining within the realm of the possible. Serious observers, and especially those who seriously want to contribute real ideas that can really make things better and, hopefully, lead ultimately to real solutions, have no practical or rational alternative but to take the perspectives of all the parties involved very seriously on their own terms and not imagine that they can be wished away or magically overcome by some secret formula for sudden success.

This means that the central failure and the central delusion of the right wing Israelis promoting the preposterous version of the “one-state solution” I outlined above is that their so-called “plan” is highly sensitive to Israeli concerns and interests about control of historically and religiously emotive land in the West Bank but fails utterly to take into consideration the minimal requirements of the Palestinian national movement. It somehow assumes that West Bank Palestinians will be mollified enough by some limited and highly attenuated Israeli ?citizenship? that they will therefore become Israeli in much the same way that the Palestinian citizens of Israel have become since 1948. One can only nurse such an assumption if it remains implicit and unstated since to ask the question of whether that would happen or not is to answer it, quite firmly, in the negative. I think there’s almost no doubt whatsoever that under such circumstances many, if not most, Palestinians in the West Bank would refuse Israeli citizenship in the way that most Jerusalem residents have, and refuse to accept the permanent consolidation of the occupation and canceling of their entire national project. It would be seen as, and in practice probably look a lot like, the ?East Jerusalem-ization” of the entire West Bank – hardly an acceptable prospect from a Palestinian point of view. This is not to mention the reaction of the Palestinians in Gaza, the Palestinian citizens of Israel, the refugees, the Arab world, particularly states ? Egypt and Jordan ? with diplomatic relations and peace treaties with Israel (which such a move would violate), or the international community which has a strong consensus in favor of ending the occupation and a large body of international law holding that Israel must withdraw from the occupied territories in exchange for peace, not unilaterally annex territory seized during warfare.

I think this most recent example illustrates pretty well what happens when one party proceeds based entirely on its own needs and assumptions, disregarding everybody else including the other main protagonist, regional actors and the international community, all of which will play a major factor in determining the plausibility of any outcome. Even when that party believes itself to be making every effort to be fair and reasonable and just, based on the principle of extending democratic enfranchisement within a given territory to ?the enemy population? or at least “the other side,” such failures produce proposals that look eminently reasonable from one blinkered, tunnel-vision and purely theoretical outlook but which seem absurd, not only to the other side, but to all informed observers who take the needs of all parties seriously in the consideration of the plausibility of outcomes. This, in fine, is why when various scenarios for ending the conflict are brought forward, especially the increasingly popular one-state agenda, one of the factors I look at carefully every time is the likely response of the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis. We’ve just seen a good example of what happens when Jewish Israelis try to think outside the box without considering the response of the overwhelming majority of Palestinians. I think it’s extremely important, if one is going to think seriously about the problem, rather than use politics as psychotherapy, to avoid such an obvious and dangerous pitfall.

I think about what Jewish Israelis will accept or not accept because if I don’t then I’m not thinking politically at all. I’m indulging in the ?science fiction? version of politics that is deliberately pleasing and fanciful but disconnected from fundamental realities that must always be taken into consideration. Jewish Israelis, and indeed the State of Israel, exist. They have power, considerable military means, economic success of a kind, technological expertise, and most importantly international support at a very significant level. I think most pro-Palestinian advocates don’t understand how much more influence Israel and the pro-Israeli groups have developed in Washington even over the past five years and how profoundly deeper the military and intelligence links have become. In fact, it’s clear they both don’t know about this or understand its significance. On its own, Israel is a formidable force. When placed in the context of the international forces committed to its continuation, but not its occupation, it is even more formidable. It is not going anywhere. It is not a house of cards on the verge of collapse. It is unlikely to prove a crusader state in waiting, to be driven away sometime in the next 200 years (although honestly, who cares what happens in 200 years?). It is not going to be brought to its knees by a boycott. It is a reality, a national reality, that has to be taken into consideration as seriously as possible by anyone genuinely trying to think through the Palestinian national strategy and the goal of ending the occupation (or any other goal for that matter). Some people don’t think about this because it is too painful. Some, because it disrupts their science fiction stories. Some, because they just don’t understand the basic facts. These are all unacceptable excuses for such a fundamental error.

The same precisely applies to the Israelis and pro-Israel types who do not think clearly and seriously about the Palestinians as a people and a national movement, indeed a nation, that cannot be defeated or dismissed but must be dealt with either through agreement or through ongoing, irresolvable conflict. The Palestinians exist. They have their own forms of power, sometimes the power of the weak perhaps, but their power cannot be ignored. Some of these forms of Palestinian power are their demographic reality, their undeniable history, the will of their national movement, strong and growing international support for their independence (it is, in fact, really US policy for there to be a state of Palestine), increasing global disgust with the nature and the reality of the occupation and impatience with Israel’s refusal to accept that the occupation must end. Then there is the simple fact that if the Israelis do not agree with the secular nationalists of the PLO who wish to live side-by-side in peace and security in two separate, independent states, they will almost certainly end up dealing with bearded Islamist fanatics, and will probably by that stage be themselves led by their own bearded Jewish fundamentalist fanatics as well. The Israelis must know, as must the Americans and others, that they will play a significant role in deciding which Palestinians they will have to deal with over the long run. But the bottom line is the Palestinians are not going anywhere, they are not going to be defeated, they are not going to give up and abandon their national movement, and, in the end, they are going to continue to fight, in one way or another, for their dignity and bottom-line national rights.

So, when we talk about any of the fanciful, ?science fiction,? alternative outcomes other than a negotiated end of the occupation and the conflict, it is incumbent upon those of us who understand this simple and all important principle to remind others on our side about the fundamental reality and the basic, bottom line national interests of the other party that are almost certainly being ignored in these scenarios. I’m sure that there are plenty of people in Israel who have or will point out to the right-wingers pushing their new, preposterous, version of a ?one-state solution? for the West Bank only, and with highly attenuated fourth class citizenship for Palestinians there, that they are talking nonsense because the other side will not accept any such arrangement and the conflict will therefore continue in one way or another and probably intensify and deteriorate (as it continuously has since the 1930s). Obviously it’s up to all of us to keep each other honest and to raise the most obvious and fundamental questions about what we are all proposing.

For those of us who advocate a two state solution and an end to the occupation, there are very serious challenges such as the existing settlements, ongoing settlement construction, settler and pro-settler ideology, Palestinian divisions and many other major problems and concerns that would have to be overcome in order to achieve this outcome. Neither I nor any serious advocate of ending the occupation downplays these serious challenges. But what we do say is that such an outcome is still possible because it, alone, meets the minimum national requirements of both parties and is urgently required by the international community and most regional actors. There is no doubt there are huge forces pushing against it, including on the ground, although Palestinian state building efforts (however nascent and fledgling they clearly are) are an interesting new push-back on the same ground, but there are also huge forces pushing and militating for it. I’ve never maintained it was the likely outcome, only a genuinely plausible and really imaginable one, one that does in fact correspond to the array of forces that can produce outcomes. But what I’ve also maintained is that without it, as is becoming increasingly clear, the only real alternative is increased occupation, dressed up in whatever new costumes Israel decides to force on it, and therefore, over the long run, increased conflict which will almost certainly become increasingly religious, violent and intractable. As far as I can tell, in all seriousness, those are the only two outcomes the array of existing forces can really produce. The fact that a two state agreement is the less likely of the two is no excuse for not preferring it to the gruesome, unspeakable alternative, and working, with all determination and seriousness of purpose, to make sure that it happens in spite of the obstacles.

A rather predictable group of Jewish right-wing supporters of Israel including William Kristol, Rachel Abrams, and Noah Pollak, along with their strange bedfellows allies in the end-of-days evangelical Christian ultra-right, in this case led by Gary Bauer, have apparently founded an organization called the ?Emergency Committee for Israel.? And what “emergency” would that be? Well, by the looks of things it’s certainly the emergency of not having a Republican president or Congress, since the group’s efforts seem to be entirely targeted at Democrat candidates for Congress in the upcoming November election. In other words, the ?emergency? would seem to be the election and the intention would be to use bizarre scare tactics about ?anti-Israel? policies of the Obama administration and other Democrats as a scare tactic to promote Republican candidates.

All’s fair in love and whatsit, I suppose, but who would the actual targeted voters be in such a campaign? Jewish voters are mostly Democrats and they are unlikely to be convinced that Obama-supporting Democratic candidates for Congress should be rejected because of Obama’s policies towards Israel. The long-established fact is that most Jews are Democrats and they mostly don’t vote based on Israel. Does anybody really expect a large number of them to suddenly vote Republican because Bill Kristol and Gary Bauer say Obama is anti-Israel? I suppose the more plausible target would be the evangelical Christians, but how many of them would have been tempted to vote for any of these Democrats in the first place? Wouldn’t the teabagging orgy of Obama-hatred be sufficient to bring them out anyway? So while the structure of the organization seems entirely geared around the midterm election, the logic of its strategy isn’t evident at all. I mean, whose votes are they really trying to influence?

It’s certainly all very anti-Obama. And maybe in the end you don’t have to have a plausible electoral strategy for actually influencing the outcomes of congressional races to justify a Republican attack on Obama, or any Democratic president for that matter, on any basis whatsoever. Might as well throw Israel into the mix, along with the death panels, the debt crisis, the BP oil spill and the defection of Lebron James Did I forget anything? Oh yes, the failure to win the Olympics for Chicago. That too. So perhaps this new ?emergency committee? is just another way of getting some rich people to pony up for a campaign against Obama and the Democrats on yet another issue among many (that almost no Americans base their vote on anyway), simply to pile on the pressure in a gigantic war of attrition by the right against the left. That is almost a satisfactory explanation. But not quite.

Perhaps it will be more accurate to say, as it turns out, that the ?emergency committee? is not simply a familiar group of Republicans, and therefore predictably and indeed professionally anti-Obama, but in fact proves to be a group that is much more deeply pro-occupation and anti-peace. In other words, what if the ?emergency? in question is not the election and targeting Democrats like Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania but rather the new consensus in the Washington foreign policy and indeed military establishments that a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians that ends the occupation is a vital national security interest of the United States? What if this constitutes an effort by a neoconservative and evangelical coalition to try to systematically push back against the idea of the centrality of peace for the American national interest? What if all this electioneering is really a red herring and the long-term idea is to turn back the clock to the days when linkage was generally thought to be a dubious concept proposed by questionable “Arabists” lurking around the CIA and State Department, rather than an established and consensus strategic understanding?

If this ?emergency committee? isn’t it, some such group or coalition of existing groups will certainly have to coalesce soon to challenge this idea because it has gained so much traction that only oddballs of this variety openly challenge it (and that too, mostly in the context of Republicans critiquing a Democratic administration, as is their job, therefore lacking the odor of real conviction). The idea has even strongly taken root in some of the mainstream and center-right Jewish pro-Israel organizations who might in the past have been sympathetic to the attitudes of this ?emergency committee,? but will now find themselves either largely indifferent to its activities or quite possibly at odds with them.

At any rate, something tells me the ?emergency? will not be over even if Republicans take over the House and possibly even the Senate in November (which I don’t think they will). It seems more likely to me that the “emergency” (alarmist terminology reminiscent of the ur-neocon ?Committee on the Present Danger,? is it not?) is mostly represented by the growing national and international consensus that peace is essential, and that peace, whether right wing Jewish supporters of the occupation and Armageddon-yearning Bible bashers like it or not, in fact requires ending the occupation. The very worst part of this ?emergency? is a growing understanding that this is not only in the Palestinian, Arab, international and American (gasp) vital national interests, but that it is essential for Israel as well. If that it isn’t an emergency for supporters of the occupation, then I don’t know what is.