For the second time, I’m compiling a group of questions submitted to the Ibishblog that I think can be dealt with relatively quickly under the rubric of a conceit in which readers interview me on a range of topics. It worked well enough last time. If anybody thinks these questions should be answered in a shorter individual postings, please let me know. I kind of like this format, even though it’s long, because many of the questions do seem to work together in an interesting way, even though they are completely independently submitted. Full disclosure: one of the reasons I like this format is that, like so much else on the Ibishblog, it flouts every rule of the blogosphere. Blogs are supposed be frequent, brief, accessible and full of links and graphics. The Ibishblog, on the other hand, is relatively infrequent (at least not daily), extremely lengthy, often inaccessible, almost entirely free of graphics and rarely includes links! So obviously, why would I ever consider creating eight or nine reasonably long posts when I can combine them into one unbearably long one? That said, please keep the questions coming.

Q: I was wondering what is your opinion on westerners feeling entitled to portray the prophet Mohammad under the banner of free speech. Obviously, there is a limit to free speech. Someone coming up to me and insulting my mother falls outside that limit (I’d probably punch him), so does saying the N word if you’re not black and denying the Holocaust. So why does insulting the prophet Mohammad not fall outside that limit?

A: There are really two issues here: first the question of drawing the prophet Mohammed in general and second the question of what level of provocative speech oversteps protected status and enters into the realm of unwarranted and potentially unlawful provocation (or least provocation serious enough to serve as major mitigation for a violent response). Let’s deal with the first: there is no basis whatsoever for any Muslim, anywhere, under any circumstances, to have a violent reaction to anyone who draws the prophet or anything or anybody else. As I pointed out in an Ibishblog posting some while back in which I went into the whole matter in great detail, figurative representations of the prophet are not, in fact, alien to Islamic tradition, although they are a minority phenomenon. There is a great deal of it in Muslim history and cultures, but it’s also true that the more typical and majority phenomenon has been a disavowal of figurative representations of Mohammed, ostensibly in order to prevent any idolatry of the human personage (as I noted, this, ironically, has led to a very different and indeed heightened form of idolatry, or at least fetishism, in the form of hysterical enforcement of the presumed ban). Rounding off the range of broad camps on this issue across time and space in Muslim cultures, there is another minority that opposes any form of figurative representation of any kind, whatsoever. In other words, in the history of Muslim cultures and civilizations, you find representations of Mohammed, prohibitions of figurative representations of Mohammed, and prohibitions of all figurative representations. Therefore, nobody is violating a universal and core belief of Muslims if they commit representation of Mohammed.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s say that they did. So what? Religious tolerance, religious accommodation and religious freedom in any pluralistic society do not and should not require everyone to respect the sensitivities of all religious groups. Satire is legitimate free speech. Blasphemy is legitimate free speech. A society that does not permit satire and blasphemy is, by definition, an unfree, non-pluralistic society, not fit to live in. It is, by definition, a society that prevents thought, prevents ideas from being challenged, that wishes to wall off certain notions through the intervention of a repressive state apparatus. Now, this is not to say that there is no such thing as offensive speech or that all forms of satire, blasphemy or anything else for that matter are legitimate or equally legitimate. It is simply to say that state prohibitions, extending to recognizing such expression as provocations that mitigate criminal acts such as violence or threats, are inimical to the concept of a free and pluralistic society. In the posting cited above, I gave a detailed account of how I think one can distinguish between what is genuinely Islamophobic speech on the one hand and what is respectable, albeit challenging or offensive, on the other hand. Not everything that is challenging, obnoxious, offensive or infuriating to others is illegitimate.

However, there obviously is such a thing as speech that goes over the line, as the reader points out. The legal threshold ought to be extremely limited so as to provide for maximal free speech, pluralism and freedom of thought. However, when speech does cross a line of social respectability, the appropriate response usually is not a civil, or even less criminal, legal response, let alone vigilante violence, but rather should be the response of a self-respecting society that draws the line at bigotry, intolerance and anything that seeks to stigmatize large groups of people based on their identity. The appropriate response, then, is to identify such speech as not respectable and apply the appropriate informal social sanctions accorded to extremists, racists, supporters of terrorism, neo-Nazis or other individuals with ideas deemed repugnant or dangerous by most rational people.

Here I think is a legal distinction that the United States has more correct than any other society of which I’m aware: speech ought not to be regulated by the government unless absolutely necessary, and even civil remedies ought to have an exceptionally high standard of proof (it is notorious that libel is the most difficult torte to successfully litigate in the American system, and rightly so). The reader’s e-mail address suggests that he’s writing from the UK. It is by no means clear that if someone insults your mother and you punch them in the United States you will not be arrested, tried and convicted for assault and battery. In most cases, I think you would be. Perhaps if the provocation is extreme, your lawyer clever and the jury fortuitously sympathetic, one might get off at trial. But I wouldn’t bet on it. As for the N-word, it’s plainly protected in the United States under almost all circumstances, as are other racial epithets. Denying the Holocaust is a crime in some European countries, and the crackpot although talented historical writer David Irving spent no less than 10 months in an Austrian jail for this thought-crime. I consider this scandalous in the extreme (many European states also have blasphemy laws, official secrets acts and other affronts to, at least American, bottom-line standards for free speech). Irving’s views are ridiculous and his position on the Holocaust is pernicious and unacceptable. But freedom is, and can only be, the freedom to be wrong.

The freedom to be right means nothing at all, since everyone will happily give everybody else the freedom to agree with them, which they think is correct. Anyone who frames freedom in terms of the freedom to do or say only what they think one ought to do or say doesn’t understand the concept (i.e., the claim that Islam gives women the “freedom” to wear a compulsory hijab, or that French “secularism” gives schoolgirls the “freedom” to be forced to remove one). Obviously there are going to be limits, and I think the American ones are pretty sound. Speech that involves a clear and present danger of provoking imminent and specific criminal activity is unlawful. Such speech would involve inciting a specific act of violence against a specific person that is likely to be directly acted upon, or reckless acts such as the cliché of “shouting fire in a crowded theater.” While there is no official secrets act restraining journalists from publishing what they know and, crucially, no power of prior restraint against publications, government officials are constrained by their oaths from revealing information such as the identity of covert operatives and other sensitive matters (although journalists who discover such facts and publish them are not liable because they have no such oath or contract). As a civil matter, there is always the question of libel, which is very difficult to prove, but which is a recoverable action. And, of course, there’s the matter of obscenity, which is presently left up to “community standards,” but in which there is a generalized tendency to exempt anything that has any demonstrable redeeming social importance. In other words, there is very little speech in the United States that is criminal, and somewhat more, but as a practical matter also very little, that is subject to civil action. This is, I think, as it should be.

The bottom line is any respectable individual should avoid being racist or bigoted, and there’s no point in deliberately provoking other people’s religious sensitivities, but if it’s really important to you, it is absolutely essential that we have a society in which people can feel free to draw the prophet Mohammed or anything or anyone they like, and publish it to the widest possible audience, without any threat of violence or fear of intimidation from the government or anybody else. Freedom of speech and conscience protects minority groups and individuals much more than majority groups or perspectives. Muslim Americans and their friends ought to always bear in mind that as soon as speech begins to be restricted in a systematic way, the likelihood that it will simply protect their sensitivities and not impinge on their freedoms is extremely remote. I think all of this is, thus far, pretty well understood, which is why we didn’t see any major outcry in the United States over the Danish cartoons, which as I said in my earlier post, were a mixed bag, or for that matter over South Park which figuratively represented the prophet Mohammed many years ago in a somewhat substandard episode called “Super Best Friends” which has been repeatedly aired in syndication without complaint or incident. The two subsequent episodes in which Comedy Central seem to have pressured South Park not to figuratively depict Mohammed was a pointless capitulation to a nonexistent threat. The United States has been and must remain free of the kind of intimidation that extreme Islamists have brought to bare in much of the Middle East and parts of Western Europe against those who provoke them with blasphemy and/or satire, or perceived instances of those perfectly legitimate forms of free speech.

Q: One of the things you caution of when arguing against adopting the one-state agenda is that the Palestinians would then have to explain why they’re breaking with the world’s position on ending the conflict, starting with the Arab world. On the other hand, when the PA sought “approval” from the Arab League about whether to engage in proximity talks, you expressed disappointment in “renewed Palestinian reliance on ‘approval’ from the Arab League for what ought to be strictly Palestinian decisions regarding negotiations with Israel.” The latter to me merely looks like an attempt from the PA to get political cover for engaging in proximity talks despite the absence of a settlement freeze (trying to immunize themselves from the “surrendering/selling-out” charges (as happened with Sadat when he broke with the Arab world & engaged in negotiations to secure the return of the Sinai). Are you disagreeing with the PA’s position of seeking Arab League approval? Or are you merely expressing disappointment that things have to come to a stage where seeking the approval of the League has become a necessity?

A: Probably a little of both. I can understand why the PLO (it’s not the PA, of course) felt it necessary to seek two forms of cover before the Biden fiasco when they were under very heavy pressure to return to negotiations not only from the Americans, but also from the Europeans and even some of the Arabs. Their problem was mainly derived from the settlement freeze issue. In the summer, the US administration pushed the Israelis very hard for total settlement freeze, and obviously it wasn’t possible for the Palestinians be less opposed to settlements than the Americans were. I suppose they could have left themselves some kind of a back door (and I certainly would have), but they didn’t. The problem was that it was a simple political matter for the American president to pivot, as he did at the October UN meeting, and say “we’re not satisfied with Israel’s answer and we continue to feel that all continued settlement activity is illegitimate, but we’re going to put the issue to one side and concentrate on talks for now, given the temporary moratorium on settlements.” This was cost-free for Pres. Obama. However, it wasn’t politically possible for Pres. Abbas to do the same thing. There were additional problems such as the PLO mishandling of the Goldstone Report, some badly phrased and hence misunderstood comments by Sec. Clinton, and some other matters that added to the woes the PLO was feeling, being trapped between an angry, dissatisfied public with real complaints on the one hand and major diplomatic pressure to go back into negotiations on the other hand.

I do think it was clearly in the Palestinian national interest to return to negotiations for a variety of reasons, most of which I think are not very mysterious. I’m not going to spell them out here (I’ve been over this in earlier blog postings). So the problem was really a political one and they spent most of the fall and early winter asking the other parties for something, anything, politically useful to bolster their position in terms of domestic politics and allow them to return to the negotiations without a prohibitive cost. The first answer was proximity talks, which are by their very nature attenuated and don’t allow for photo ops (with the bitter memory of the extremely damaging footage of PM Barak manhandling Pres. Arafat into the room at Camp David, which was so symbolically resonant in 2000). The second answer was Arab League approval.

The first time the PLO went to the Arab League, shortly before the Biden fiasco and the subsequent confrontation between the US and Israeli governments over settlements in Jerusalem, the unfortunate nature of the development was more heavily weighted in terms of its necessity than any miscalculation. The Palestinian leadership was absolutely convinced they needed this kind of cover, and under those circumstances they may well have been right. Like the proximity talks, which take us back to the pre-Madrid era during which Palestinians and Israelis didn’t meet directly, the gesture of going to the Arab League is a throwback to the “even worse old days.” So, it’s to be regretted that the Arab states are asked to sign off on what ought to be purely Palestinian decisions made on the basis of their own national interests.

The second time the PLO went to the Arab League, after the US-Israel standoff was resolved to the satisfaction of Washington — which included some very significant gains for the Palestinians regarding the talks, especially the agreement that all permanent status issues, including Jerusalem, would be on the table — might put me closer to the category of disagreement with the gesture in the first place. I have to say that if, for whatever reason, the Arab League had declined to sign off on the negotiations after the standoff was resolved, even though that meant significantly more advantageous conditions for negotiations for the Palestinians than when they had first approved the negotiations before the standoff, I think it would have been appropriate and necessary for the Palestinians to go ahead with proximity talks anyway. There is too much to lose from staying away from them and too much to gain, although probably not any kind of major diplomatic breakthrough on final status issues in the immediate term, from entering into them. So, I guess it’s a little of both.

Q: You write: “An even worse throwback is the renewed Palestinian reliance on “approval” from the Arab League for what ought to be strictly Palestinian decisions regarding negotiations with Israel.” This is the clue: It is Israel vs. the Muslim world, is it not so? Hopeless, is it not so?

A: I don’t think so. First of all, please don’t confuse the Arab and the Muslim worlds. I’ve explained my position on this matter in more detail above, and I don’t think that indicates a degree of hopelessness. Palestinians have generally not looked for Arab approval for their national decisions in the past couple of decades, and I don’t think they should start doing so again. This could be, and should be, seen as an anomaly, although I can imagine the potential for some very difficult but needed decisions that would require further political cover of this kind in order to fly. On the broader picture, it’s certainly not hopeless, because an agreement is, in fact, in the interest of both parties and most of the international community. Many people on both sides think it is hopeless, and as I’ve argued many times before, an agreement is not the most likely scenario, but it is not hopeless and concluding so is irresponsible when the alternative is so grim. It’s no good saying, “this can’t work.” Our task, historically, is to make it work, since it still plausibly could.

Q: A recent publication from the Washington Institute for Near-East Policy issued a publication called “rethinking the two state solution”. Specifically, it posited the idea that, as part of a regional peace initiative, Egypt cedes a very small piece of territory in the Sinai adjacent to Gaza to the Palestinian Authority. The idea then being that this can provide room for expansion for the Gazan population, and to allow the development of a new, planned city with sea and airport gateways. On your recent Q&A blog, your statement about Egypt’s desire to avoid any responsibility for Gaza in the future made me consider this. Given Egypt’s wishes to distance itself politically from the fate of Gaza, would such a prospect be impossible to obtain? Do you consider it reasonable and/or realistic?

A: I doubt it. I suppose it’s possible, if an agreement absolutely hinged on this and the Egyptians found themselves completely counting on an agreement for their national security. But I think the Egyptians are pretty sensitive about the question of their territory in the Sinai being lost to them in the course of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. So I don’t think it’s likely. It is a reasonable idea, but I doubt it’s a realistic idea politically. Nonetheless, there’s no point in not considering the matter.

Q: Do you think that the Palestinian side should drop the demand of ‘right of return’?

A: No, I don’t. I think all the refugee issues, including the right of return need to be negotiated, and that rather than being dropped, the question of return in all likelihood will be a matter of major and reciprocal compromises between the parties. As ATFP has been maintaining for years, we have to face the fact that no Israeli government is going to accept the return of millions of refugees but no Palestinian leadership is going to formally renounce the right of return. Therefore we have to separate the right from the return, upholding the principle but not making its realization a sine qua non for an end of conflict agreement that includes the resolution of all outstanding claims. I’ve written in my book on the one-state agenda about the very real benefits, short of return to Israel, for the refugees that would be provided by the establishment of a Palestinian state. There are considerable, and much better than nothing, which is exactly what the lack of an agreement will deliver to the same refugees. Without belaboring the point, I think that in spite of the rhetoric around the issue, a two state solution is the only practically achievable agenda that will deliver anything of major value to the refugees, and that therefore to oppose it in the guise of defending the interests of the refugees is either irresponsibly unrealistic or downright hypocritical.

Obviously, this is going to be the most painful and politically difficult compromise the Palestinians will have to make, but every serious person has realized by now there is no potential for a negotiated agreement with Israel without a major compromise on the question of return. There is a reciprocal issue for Israel, since every serious person has also realized there is no potential for a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians without a major compromise on the question of Jerusalem. If we are ever to see a realized peace agreement, I think it’s inevitable that a major Palestinian compromise on the implementation of the right of return will be in effect reciprocal for a major Israeli compromise on sharing Jerusalem and allowing the Palestinian capital to be in East Jerusalem. I don’t think there’s any other way to get to where we need to go.

Q: Why is it in anyone’s interest to set up a Palestinian state where most of its inhabitants desire application of Shari’a (79.9% according to Palestinian Center for Research and Cultural Dialogue)? Is it really worthwhile setting up a state at this time if it doesn’t respect gay rights, freedom of religion etc.?

A: First of all, as anyone who reads my writings will be well aware, I have been very clear that Palestine needs to be a secular state and I’d certainly agree that it’s not worthwhile setting up a state that doesn’t respect basic human rights, although this is also not an argument for continuing the occupation. And, I’d note, that the mainstream of the Palestinian national movement is essentially secular, and remains so in spite of the rise of Islamism in Palestine and in the region. If that number people were really driven by a domestic agenda that focused on Muslim Brotherhood-style Shari’a law, Hamas would have a solid, unbreakable majority and not be floundering at around 15% overall and 11% in the West Bank according to the last opinion poll I’ve seen.

The explanation for the apparent dichotomy is, of course, that when you ask people vaguely about the application of Shari’a in the contemporary Arab world they are more likely to have in mind the way it operates in most Arab states, and to a very large extent the way religious laws function for Jews, Muslims and Christians in Israel as well for that matter, as a system of “family law” rather than civil or criminal justice. In other words, in much of the Middle East matters such as marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance are often adjudicated by religious courts based on religious law. In a sense, this is a throwback to the old millet system of the Ottoman Empire in which different religious communities adjudicated their own “domestic” matters in religious forums independent of mutual interference and undo meddling from the Sublime Porte. Indeed, this is why so many mixed-religion couples from Arab states, and from Israel (where there is also no civil marriage, only religious unions), elope to Cyprus where civil marriage is readily available and must be acknowledged by Middle Eastern authorities upon the couple’s return. A very significant percentage of the majority in the poll cited above I am quite sure has this system in mind when they answer that question, not Shari’a as a substitute for civil and criminal jurisprudence on other matters. Personally, I’m not crazy about these family law religious systems, but they are tolerable within the general rubric of a secular society, especially with the consent of all adult parties. Indeed, the United States allows them, on a voluntary basis of course, as a form of arbitration, and the Jewish Bettei Din religious courts are a major venue, especially among the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities, for resolving such “family matters” disputes.

Again, I’ve been very clear in my view that Palestine should be secular, and also democratic, pluralistic, non-militarized and neutral in armed conflicts. This is my personal opinion, and the Palestinians will have to do as they see fit. However, that poll result doesn’t in any way diminish the great likelihood that, as things stand now at any rate, Palestine would be a largely secular state with Shari’a almost certainly reserved for “family law” disputes and only among Muslims, as the present PA policies suggest (see the program of the 13th Palestinian government adopted in August 2009 for an outline of this). I’d love to be able to insist that in addition this is strictly voluntary and that there should always be an independent and decisive civil legal system, but we really don’t have that in most of the Middle East, Israel in many respects (it kind of depends who files first and in which court system), included. And, I certainly don’t think any of this is an argument for continuing occupation or dissolving any of the states that currently exist in the Middle East that allow for this limited application of various religious legal codes in “family law,” or any existing states for that matter.

Q: Why are the PLO so evasive on the issue of recognizing Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state?

A: They are not evasive. Rather, they decline to do it. It is, everyone must agree, an extremely unusual if not an utterly unprecedented demand, in international relations for a state to demand of another, in this case potential, state a recognition of its own character. Indeed, it’s odd that any state would cede this kind of authority to another state, when in fact every member state of the United Nations is free to define itself as it likes. It’s clear the Israeli state defines itself as Jewish, even though there is no consensus in Israel as to what, precisely, that means, but of course there are other Middle Eastern states that define themselves in both ethnic and religious terms, to whit: the Syrian Arab Republic or the Islamic Republic of Iran. For a more detailed account of the reasons why the PLO doesn’t want to subscribe to PM Netanyahu’s unworkable formula of describing Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people,” please see my speech on the topic at the Washington Institute on Near East Policy on their website, on ATFP’s website, or here on the Ibishblog.

Briefly, they see this, very plausibly, as constituting, at this stage in the process, an attempt to make an end run around the refugee issue we were discussing above. The Bush administration saw it that way too, which is why at Annapolis President Bush, although he had been specifically asked to use similar language by the Israelis, in his speech referred to Israel as “the national homeland of the Jewish people,” language ripped directly from the Balfour declaration and which doesn’t have anything remotely like the legal and political implications of language suggested by the Israelis at the time, let alone PM Netanyahu now. In addition, the Palestinian leadership is obviously and rightly concerned that they might be seen as compromising the rights and full citizenship of Palestinian citizens of Israel. On this score, the precise phraseology of the language the central question.

I think it’s important for both Israelis and Palestinians to acknowledge each other’s deep history and attachment to the land, and to recognize the legitimacy of each other’s national projects. I think the Palestinians have plainly gone further in that regard than the Israelis, at least formally, by recognizing Israel’s right to exist in the Letters of Mutual Recognition that were the first key Oslo process documents, while Israel merely recognized the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, but not Palestinian statehood or Palestine’s right to exist. And, I think mutual language reflecting recognition of each other’s right of self-determination, each other’s statehood, and the legitimacy of each other’s national project could well be an important concluding note to a final status negotiating procedure. But for many important reasons I think it clearly has to come at the very end of the process, and the precise phrasing of the language will be extremely important, especially because of a natural and legitimate Palestinian desire not to compromise in any way the rights or perceived legitimacy of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. I’m sure that in the context of a final status agreement in which other, more palpable issues, have been largely or completely agreed upon, appropriate language can be found.

Q: One argument I constantly hear and read is the “who are these ‘Palestinians,'” when it is said that there is no such thing, and secondly that “Israel was created 3500 yrs ago, in 1922 over 70% of it was given to Arabs and created Jordan’ argument.” Have you ever written anything on either or both of these two arguments?

A: Not exactly. But I will give my views now.

The argument that there is no such thing as the Palestinian people is only made by total ignoramuses, and people being deliberately obscurantist. Obviously the Palestinian identity is a modern, indeed contemporary one, as is the Israeli identity, and they both spring from the same time and history, that is to say what happened during and after the Palestine Mandate that began in the early 1920s. So if one were to observe that there is no such thing historically as a Palestinian, and that’s technically true because as a primary political identity category it is 20th century phenomenon, it is equally true that there is no such thing historically as an Israeli, a term that would have meant absolutely nothing before 1948. Arabs and Jews have been identity categories for a long time, although of course the conceptualization and political significance of these terms has also shifted dramatically in the modern context, especially over the past two hundred years. This whole argument is simply inane, and based on a childish way of looking at history and human realities that no informed or serious minded person would bother with. For a pro-Israel person to argue that while there are Arabs there is no such thing as Palestinians is a bit like Arabs arguing that Jews are legitimately a religious group, but not a nation or an ethnicity. It’s ridiculous, because peoples define themselves, and if they consider themselves to be a coherent, united people, then they are, by definition. That’s how peoples come into being in the first place, by self-definition, as an act of collective will and imagination, and nobody else has the right or the ability to usurp this self-definition process. This is obvious and anyone who doesn’t get that is simply a fool.

As for Israel being created 3,500 years ago, that’s also ridiculous, although everyone should acknowledge the deep Jewish, as well as Palestinian, attachment to the land. There were Hebrew kingdoms in the ancient Levant, and many others, and while Zionist mythology holds that the modern Israeli state is the re-creation, or at least the only natural heir, of those Hebrew kingdoms, that’s patently absurd. It’s a little bit like the Palestinians basing their present political claims on ancient Canaanite history, or, for that matter, biblical Hebrew history since it is very likely that many Palestinians are partly descended from biblical Hebrews. And, for that matter, it’s like Saddam Hussein trying, as he indeed did, to justify his rule as some kind of reincarnation of ancient Babylon and so forth. How many Arabs and other Muslims claim to be descendents of the prophet or some such malarkey? How many Lebanese burble on about being “Phoenicians” or Copts invoke the heritage of the pharaohs? Don’t get me started on the Serbs and Kosovo or the alleged birthplace of Rama in Ayodhya. Contemporary political movements, where there is any potential, generally can’t resist reaching back very cynically into the distant past, and really mostly to myths and legends, to rationalize and justify their own political activities that are very much about power in the here and now and are actually informed by contemporary realities. It’s a pretty universal process of legitimation, and it’s not intellectually or politically respectable.

In fact the state of Israel was established in 1948, and has no political history prior to that, although of course the Zionist movement that intended to establish it had an earlier 50 years or so of very real, non-mythological history. Of course, the Zionist movement like many national projects has made use of mythology, history and archaeology to bolster its contemporary political claims. It is intended for and can only be bought into by gullible people, and one doesn’t have to accept all of the arguments of Shlomo Sand to maintain that. What people need to understand is that both Israeli and Palestinian nationalisms are contemporary phenomena, neither of which date back much more than 100 years. Indeed, I think everyone needs to be constantly reminded that as a matter of fact as recently as 70 years ago the terms “Israeli” and “Palestinian” essentially had no meaning, at least nothing remotely like the meanings they have today. People can dress up their contemporary nationalisms in all kind of assumed ancient and traditional garb, but it’s almost always fatuous and in both of these cases obviously so. But I hasten to add this doesn’t make either national narrative or project any less important, real or legitimate.

As for this business of 70% of Palestine being “given away to the Arabs,” it’s true that the original Palestine mandate included both mandatory Palestine and Transjordan, which became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. But from the outset of the mandate, the British split the two territories and governed them separately, on a collective League of Nations understanding that Transjordan would be excluded from any mandatory provisions regarding Jewish settlement. This was strongly agreed to by all parties to the Mandate at the League of Nations. The League of Nations approved the Palestine Mandate in June of 1922 on this understanding, and the expected clause formally dividing Palestine and Transjordan was adopted a few weeks later in August 1922. So really, we’re talking about no more than eight weeks of theoretical unification, during which everyone agreed the area east of the Jordan River was not subject to the Jewish settlement provisions of the Palestine mandate. So, this is all nonsense.

The quarrel over land and power between Palestinians and Israelis, whose modern national and political identities were produced precisely during the British mandate subsequent to the creation of Transjordan, never had anything to do with Jordanian territory or identity. This is a fatuous sleight-of-hand by pro-occupation types to argue that Jordan is Palestine or some such nonsense. It’s completely ahistorical and totally disregards Palestinian and Jordanian history and identity, although of course it’s very convenient for Israelis, and reflects the old maximalist ambitions of the Zionist movement at its most extreme. The other basis for it is the assumption that the British and the League of Nations had the “right” to assign Arab territories for eventual Jewish control, and that the original Palestine mandate, even though everyone agreed the eastern part did not involve Jewish settlement and even though it was only politically unified for a few weeks, constitutes some kind of definitive grant to the Jews in perpetuity. In this context, the early division between Palestine and Transjordan is weirdly interpreted as some kind of “loss” for Jewish rights and a “giving away” of 70% or some such of “Palestine” to “the Arabs.” It’s just a bizarre way of looking at things and a completely cynical twisting of history in order to justify the occupation and delegitimize the Palestinian national narrative and rights, not to mention Jordanian identity, nationalism and history. Nor does such rhetoric consider the implications for the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. I think anyone pushing this argument needs to be asked about that little wrinkle as well.

Paul Berman’s important and frequently brilliant, but also seriously flawed, new book “The Flight of the Intellectuals” (Melville House, 2010) is an old-fashioned polemic that takes aim at two main targets. Berman’s main subject, judging from the title and certainly the conclusion of the book, are his fellow liberal intellectuals Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, who he accuses of a witches’ brew of offenses involving white liberal guilt and displaced racism, abandoning Enlightenment values and craven cowardice in the face of Islamist bullying, and who he sees as emblematic of a widespread rot in the Western liberal intelligentsia. But to get to them, he has to go through Tariq Ramadan, the Swiss Muslim academic and activist who also happens to be the grandson of the founder of the original Muslim Brotherhood party in Egypt, Hassan al-Banna, and the son of his second in command, Said Ramadan. So actually, the bulk of the book dwells on not only Ramadan but also al-Banna and, in great detail, his ally Amin al-Husseini, the one-time “grand mufti” of Jerusalem.

The book makes a series of loosely connected cases, some much stronger than others, and hits some very important points with extreme precision, but in other cases runs wildly off the mark and occasionally goes running down a rabbit hole of pointlessness. Even within each case, there are moments when Berman seems to lose the plot completely and inexplicably. In my first response to this very significant book I want to look at the strengths and weaknesses of the two main cases one by one.

Case one: Tariq Ramadan

Berman does a very good job of explicating Ramadan’s highly problematic family background and his troubling, albeit perfectly natural, fealty to the frankly baneful legacies of his grandfather and, to a lesser extent, his father. I don’t think Berman is exaggerating at all in his no holds barred description of al-Banna’s extremism and the highly negative impact his thinking has had on contemporary Muslim political discourse. Describing him as the godfather of all practical applications of contemporary Islamism, especially in the Arab world, is exactly right. I also don’t think he’s exaggerating how problematic Ramadan’s championing and soft-pedaling of his grandfather’s ideas and legacy really is. But, he concedes, the son is not the father or the grandfather, and ultimately needs to be considered on his own terms. And, Berman is to be congratulated for, it is sad to say unusually, actually reading his Arab subjects’ writings carefully, taking them seriously and taking them at their word. In this sense, Berman has contributed a significant degree of clarity to several important debates, and one of the most important effects his book could have over the long run is to prompt more Western intellectuals who write about Arab and Muslim issues to read more thoroughly what people from the Middle East, both reactionary and liberal, are saying, and subjecting it to serious and critical analysis rather than assuming they already know.

I think Berman does a largely admirable and sometimes excellent job of critiquing Ramadan’s ambiguities, lacunae, and evasions. These actually do define his public persona, and while we didn’t really need Berman to call attention to them, he makes the case better than it’s been made before. I think any critically minded person has to have already been aware of the slippery nature of Ramadan’s discourse, the difficulty of pinning him down to any clear position. Obviously, and Berman is the umpteenth person to make this observation, the combination of his questionable heritage and the slippery, ambiguous quality of his thinking invites suspicions that he harbors more extreme views that he professes, and this probably informed the Bush administration’s decision to deny him entry into the United States. I strongly agree with Berman that this was a mistake, both because it’s not justified and there is no reason to cower before his rather flimsy and frequently vapid ideas, and also because it made him a cause célèbre more than he already was and certainly more than he deserves. On the other hand, I also agree with Berman that Ramadan basically seems to mean what he says, insofar as it can be clearly identified, and that his agenda to create what amounts to a right-wing Muslim counterculture in Western societies is basically what it appears to be. I, too, don’t think that, for all of his extraordinary evasions, he’s hiding his big-picture intentions and really I think all he has to offer in the end thus far seems to be only his own personality and persona, not a real agenda that can have ultimately either a major positive or negative impact. In my view, as a public intellectual he amounts to an empty shell that may appeal to some and repel others, both pointlessly.

Probably the most telling line in Berman’s insightful portrait of Ramadan is his observation, which I also picked up on many years ago, that “he wants to issue reassurances in every direction.” As with many Ramadan-skeptics, I was initially hopeful that he might prove a useful figure, and this gesture of continuously offering “reassurances in every direction” was part of what made me think he could be a positive influence. The hope raised by an initial reading of “Western Muslims and the Future of Islam” (Oxford, 2004) was that this effort to combine innovation with reassurance was largely designed to assuage the fears of conservatives, traditionalists and even radicals in the Muslim community while engaging in some serious, substantive reform and modernization of thinking in Western, and possibly even international, Muslim religious circles.

Let me describe in a simple but important example how Ramadan tries to deploy this process of universal reassurances, and what I initially hoped was an elaborate dance of steps forward and backward in order to, eventually, leave one in an advanced position. First, Ramadan observes that all texts require interpretation (two steps forward), but that “if there is an explicit Qur’anic verse whose meaning is obvious and leaves no room for hypothesis or interpretation, no ijtihad [independent interpretation] is possible” (two steps back and, of course, there is no such thing as a text whose meaning is obvious and leaves no room for hypothesis or interpretation), and then finally that “the great majority of verses in the Qur’an and the traditions of the Prophet are not of both a strict and compelling nature” (one step forward, but only if the subsequent interpretations are genuinely reflective of universal human values and the enlightened interests of Western and other Muslims, and not reactionary).

I think this is a perfect microcosmic example of Berman’s observation that Ramadan is always issuing reassurances in every direction, even in his methodology. Modern minds are reassured that even religious texts require interpretation, traditionalists reassured that explicit texts do not allow for interpretation, and everybody reassured that there are, in fact, very few genuinely explicit texts, and that lots of interpretation will be necessary. The problem is that having described the process, Ramadan has almost always failed to play a positive role in shaping the interpretation in the right direction, which renders his contribution, at this point anyway, largely pointless if not negative. My hope, frankly, on first encountering his work was that what he was engaging in was a very canny and cagey effort to make modernization, reform and especially healthy assimilation into Western societies and cultures palatable to Muslim traditionalists and conservatives. Unfortunately, these processes can just as easily work in other, and indeed opposite, ways, and I haven’t seen any reason to conclude that this is how Ramadan is actually deploying this edifice of ambiguity. There are just as many reasons for thinking the contrary, unfortunately, since when all is said and done Ramadan is a self-proclaimed Salafist on at least the center-right of the Muslim political spectrum if not, indeed, the far right. In other words, whenever he finally does commit, he does so in a Salafist manner, which may be a kind of “reform” and revivalism, but it’s certainly not liberal, humanist or progressive in any conceivable senses of the terms. Unfortunately, both Salafist and liberal Muslim reformers would both have to rely on this kind of textual and doctrinal flexibility in order to overturn traditionally dominant interpretations that are, respectively, too permissive or too restrictive for their liking. So promising processes can just as easily turn out to be be alarming ones.

Another reason this tendency to issue reassurances in all directions prompted so much hopefulness from so many people on first glance at Ramadan is that, looking beyond the community itself, conciliation and mediation is ultimately extremely important in with navigating a minefield like the emergence of large, fixed Muslim populations in Western societies that have to assimilate, retain their own identity and create a new understanding of Islam in a new social context all at the same time. But ultimately Ramadan’s tendency to try to reassure everyone all the time that their bottom-line concerns are being addressed renders him incapable of taking strong, principled positions against what are perceived as traditions rooted in theology, except from a strongly Salafist perspective. Berman doesn’t seem to fully understand Ramadan’s argument justifying his call for a moratorium but not, for now, a ban on hudud practices such as stoning for adultery, but I do: his argument is that for a ban to be effective it has to in fact be a religious consensus among scholars based on fiqh and sharia and anything less will have little or no impact. The problem is, he’s wrong. Everything is connected to everything else, and even the supposedly and apparently closed circle of fiqh scholarship is in fact not only influenced but ultimately determined by its social context, just as the judicial branch of the American government, including the Supreme Court, is not above politics, but more typically reflects a refracted and attenuated version of the political process and evolving social consensus. Ramadan understands the virtue of a strong stance when there is no doctrinal barrier: he is dead set against any form of female genital mutilation, because there is no basis for it in any legitimate Islamic doctrine. What he’s missing, or possibly avoiding, is that perceptions of doctrine are strongly influenced by a social context of which he has become an important part.

In other words, it’s not true that a strong civil society stance against traditional understandings of hudud would have little or no impact on religious discourse. To the contrary they would have a major impact, and, if widespread, such worldly critiques could have a decisive impact, even on what is, mercifully, largely a theoretical religious conversation because such practices are in fact quite rare in the Islamic world. It seems to me this is a crucial argument that Berman missed due to his non-instrumental moral outrage on the subject, but which ultimately challenges Ramadan’s position much more effectively than a simple moralizing bottom line adopted by Berman, Sarkozy and others (although I’m very sympathetic to that as well). Berman thinks Ramadan is basically playing to the Muslim immigrant street, trying to preserve his credibility with ordinary, working-class European Muslim immigrants. That’s a complete misreading of what is driving him to take this stance, since it’s not about what these immigrants think (there’s no real reason to think they’re particularly enthusiastic about hudud, which isn’t practiced in most of their countries and societies anyway), but rather about how the ulemma and fiqh scholars will be dealing with this question which will have a long-term impact on religious doctrine, not public opinion or even public policy. My point is that Ramadan would be better off recognizing the power of public opinion, and I think Berman is totally wrong to think that this is what is driving him. He is either appealing to traditional and very conservative doctrinal positions or he is protecting them, and thanks to his carefully crafted ambiguity it’s impossible to know for certain which it is. But either way his intervention seems trapped in existing discourses, and is therefore less than helpful.

Berman has a good explanation for why this is the case. The very best part of the entire book is Berman’s dissection of Ramadan’s updating of medieval thought derived mainly from al-Ghazali, and on this I think he really has his number. Casting human reality as operating simultaneously between the twin and binary registers of the sacred and the profane does indeed seem to be the way Ramadan approaches philosophy and the whole question of knowledge, and Berman is right in casting this as a huge throwback to a pre-scientific, pre-modern mentality. The most powerful of his digs at Ramadan is Berman’s observation that, “In Ramadan’s version, the old ideas have reemerged as crackpot ideas. They are a medieval contraption, presented as a modern gadget.” In philosophical terms, the idea that true knowledge, even about worldly matters, is essentially textual and spiritual, and is best understood in gradations of mystical insight, has indeed been overturned in the West and elsewhere by an understanding that testable ideas subject to scientific inquiry and method, while they cannot answer the great existential questions of mankind, nonetheless are, in fact, a far superior mode of knowing than any form of mystical or symbolic divination. And, really, it’s impossible to regard a public intellectual who champions esoterica and mysticism in social, public and political policy conversations, when such an intervention is clearly understood for what it is, as anything other than an absurdity.

I do think that Berman makes the case quite powerfully, as even a casual reader of Ramadan’s writings can at least begin to glimpse, that he does, in fact, offer what amounts to a throwback to “the notion of viewing the world as a text,” as opposed to a testable, measurable reality that can be comprehended as knowable fact rather than interpreted symbol. Ramadan’s work cuts in both directions, as I described above, with two steps forward and two steps back in every direction, but, as I also already noted, in the end he is a committed Salafist. I’m afraid Berman is absolutely right when he concludes that Ramadan “is imprisoned in a cage made of his own doctrine about his grandfather and his grandfather’s ideology” and that he “wants to make his cage look like anything but a cage,” but “cannot figure out how to unlock the cage.” And, sadly, Ramadan has yet to provide us with any evidence to refute Berman’s damning conclusion that, “He cannot think for himself. He does not believe in thinking for himself.”

Berman’s efforts to paint Ramadan as an anti-Semite and an apologist for terrorism are somewhat weaker, and although there is no fire exactly, there certainly is some smoke. On anti-Semitism, the direct case against Ramadan is based on a fairly shoddy article he wrote about French supporters of Israel that casually and in some cases wrongly leveled the accusation of ethnic preference and tribalism. It was a bad article, and a bad argument, but hardly prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism. If it is, the number of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigots in the United States is infinitely greater than anything I’ve ever imagined or claimed, and the standard for such an accusation really ought to be a lot higher than that. Berman has a solid case to make regarding the views of people Ramadan plainly respects and defers to in what is undoubtedly a troubling fashion, most notably his grandfather and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, but this is a case based on what amounts to guilt by association. It’s not meaningless by any means, and certainly anyone, even if it is his grandson, who holds al-Banna, not to mention Qaradawi, in political and intellectual awe and deference needs to be regarded with a good deal of healthy skepticism and maybe even suspicion. But it doesn’t go directly to his own beliefs.

Berman overstates the case when he cites Ramadan’s judgment that for Palestinians “armed resistance was incumbent” and concludes that this amounts to a justification for terrorism, as if the two were necessarily synonymous. They might, but need not, be. And it’s a bit of a stretch, although not a wild one, to observe that Ramadan “understands terrorism so tenderly that he ends up justifying it” and that he “justifies [terrorism] so thoroughly that he ends up defending it.” Defending terrorism is a charge that ought to be reserved for a case that can be made a little less indirectly, a little less based on reading between the lines, a little bit less subjectively. Berman, and for that matter I, may have our suspicions about where exactly Ramadan would draw the moral line regarding political violence, but if he’s ever actually and explicitly endorsed any form of terrorism, I’m not aware of it, and unless and until he does, I don’t think it’s fair to describe Ramadan as having done so or impute it to him by implication. It would obviously be helpful if we had a clearer moral or political statement from Ramadan on this regard, but ambiguity is not the same as endorsement. However, Berman asks, “why, if Ramadan were sincere in his condemnations of terrorist violence, he doesn’t make his own positions more consistent,” and it’s really a damn good question, that only he can answer.

The additional problem is that Berman isn’t a very good judge of the relationship between terrorism and the Palestinian national movement, which is the only context in which he thinks Ramadan really does support or defend, or at least “understand tenderly,” terrorism. I’ve complained a lot in the past, and I will continue to complain, about people, especially Muslim clerics and others, who will condemn terrorism but make an exception for the Palestinians on the grounds that they supposedly don’t have any other options in fighting occupation. But I don’t really see Ramadan making that argument, or at least not explicitly enough to warrant Berman’s charges. More importantly, Berman seems to think, quite wrongly, that from its outset the Palestinian national movement was largely guided by Islamism and the legacy of al-Banna’s ideas. Particularly a series of passages on page 185 would lead any unversed reader to conclude that the Palestinian movement has been an Islamist one for most of its history. On the contrary, after the reformation in the late 1960s of Palestinian national institutions following the Nakba of 1948, most Palestinian discourse, political parties and collective thinking was anything but Islamist. It was revolutionary, Third Worldist, socialist, nationalist and even chauvinist, but filled with Marxist rhetoric and leftist ideas. Most Palestinian nationalists from the 60s until the late 1980s at the very earliest, would have regarded Islamists as retrograde, reactionary, ridiculous and probably agents of the West; in short, as contemptible and absurd figures. Obviously, political culture has changed not only among the Palestinians, but in the entire Muslim world, and as the mantle of nationalism in the eyes of many has passed from left-nationalists to Islamists, a disturbing amount of political discourse has reversed the order of things with Islamists now all too often seen as the nationalist vanguard and secularist nationalists consigned to the retrograde, reactionary and probably agents of the West category. Even so, the Palestinian movement is not yet dominated by the Islamist tendency, although if all efforts to negotiate an end to the occupation fail, it eventually may well be.

Berman complains that Palestinian “leaders might have noticed after several decades that, realistically speaking, violent tactics were advancing the struggle not one whit, and counterproductive tactics ought to be jettisoned in favor of actions better calculated to succeed at building a Palestinian state, side by side with Israel, if need be — as could probably have been achieved at various moments over the years, again in 1947.” Apparently he’s never heard of Pres. Mahmoud Abbas, who was elected in 2005 with a 63% majority running on a strictly anti-violence platform, or Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who is busy building the basic institutional, infrastructural, economic and administrative framework of the Palestinian state in spite of the occupation and significant obstacles and objections erected by Israel, as well as some forms of cooperation. In other words, Berman’s indictment centers on an assertion that the Palestinians supposedly haven’t realized something they quite plainly and palpably have. Nonetheless, Berman argues that “the Palestinian struggle… has not, in fact,… surrendered” the idea that “violence is obligatory,” a circumstance he blames on “the alliance of Amin al-Husseini and Hassan al-Banna.”

In other words, Berman writes as if the Palestinian national movement has historically and largely been defined by Hamas and other Islamist parties, when in fact they were virtually nonexistent until the late 80s, and still, in spite of everything, do not dominate the mainstream of the national movement. He doesn’t seem to be aware of, or at least doesn’t acknowledge, the paradigm shift that has taken place in the secular nationalist, which is to say mainstream, Palestinian leadership at the very least since the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004 regarding violence and how to achieve statehood and independence. So, if it’s possible to say that Ramadan has an irrational and emotional degree of sympathy with the Palestinian movement that allows him to distort and oversimplify the issues to the point that he seems to be denying facts, tenderly understanding terrorism, or defending the indefensible, Berman certainly demonstrates a mirror-image antipathy to it that has rendered him blind to or incapable of acknowledging both the historical and the contemporary political and intellectual trends defining the mainstream of the Palestinian national movement. He is left instead suggesting that it was Islamist during most of its history, when it has never been defined by Islamism (at least not yet), and also suggesting that it has been and remains generally informed by a sense of “obligatory violence,” when that is most decidedly not the case at present and arguably never has been.

Were one to subject Berman to the same standards and processes he applies to Ramadan, one could immediately pivot back to the opening of his book and his dedication of it to the publisher of The New Republic, Marty Peretz (along with its literary editor Leon Weiseltier). One could then suggest that it is possible to read between the lines based on Berman’s “reverence” for Peretz and implicit endorsement of his attitudes, and explain his own distortions of the Palestinian national movement and political history as possibly the symptom of an embrace of Peretz’s shameless anti-Palestinian racism and support for all manner of Israeli atrocities. But I’ll spare him that, just as I will spare the readers needlessly making the case against Marty Peretz, which makes itself in a 15 minute scroll through his blog at The New Republic website. I’m not trying to compare Marty Peretz to Hassan al-Banna or even Yusuf Qaradawi (though how far he really is, in moral terms, from the attitudes of the latter, I’m not entirely sure), but simply to point out that if affiliation and association inform and condition our reception of Ramadan, and I think that’s entirely fair, Berman’s unfortunate dedication ironically renders him also quite vulnerable on this score, especially when it comes to his attitudes towards the Palestinian national movement that he has egregiously misunderstood and/or mischaracterized.

There are some other serious weaknesses with Berman’s largely very solid case against Ramadan, especially his effort to implicitly blame the murder of Theo van Gogh on Ramadan’s writings. It’s slightly elliptical, but the accusation is pretty clearly there at the top of page 204, and it’s exaggerated to say the least. Another instance in which Berman aims and misses badly is in citing Ramadan’s contributions to what at the time was a lawful and seemingly respectable charity later found to be associated with Hamas-related organizations in the occupied territories. He acknowledges that neither were such contributions illegal anywhere nor details about the organization’s associations publicly known at the time he made them. Indeed, many thousands of people donated in good faith over the years to Muslim and Palestinian-oriented charities that, in the post-9/11 aftermath, were discovered or alleged to have operational and political associations with Hamas-related charities and have been shut down. It’s one thing to hold the operators of those charities, who, assuming the allegations are correct in any specific case, knew exactly what they were doing, to account, and quite another to hold contributions to what at the time seemed to be respectable humanitarian organizations against people who simply wrote the checks, for all we can tell, in good faith.

Two thirds of the way through his argument, Berman, having acknowledged all of this either explicitly or implicitly, very unfairly refers to Ramadan’s “contributions to Hamas and the other little incongruities in his stand on violence and terrorism.” Gestures such as trying to implicate Ramadan in the van Gogh murder or accusing him of contributing funds to Hamas because he gave money to charities that seemed respectable to most observers at the time are deeply unfortunate, because, in grasping too far and appearing too eager to indict without proper evidence, they tarnish Berman’s otherwise powerful critique. Most of it stands up extremely well, but these moments in which he plainly goes too far for any informed and skeptical reader seriously weaken his argument by making it look like he’s not evaluating the evidence on a case-by-case basis, but is rushing to judgments, both sound and wild, simultaneously.

Case two: Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash

The second case that Berman is making, and judging from the title it’s his main subject of attack although you wouldn’t necessarily get that impression from the bulk of the text itself, is aimed at his fellow liberal intellectuals Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash, and by implication an entire class of others. It mainly centers around a critique of their treatment of former Dutch-Somali politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the one hand and Tariq Ramadan on the other hand. His point is that here are two examples, presumably among many, of liberal Western intellectuals who fail to defend the values of the West and the Enlightenment by implicitly or explicitly endorsing the likes of Ramadan who Berman persuasively argues does not uphold these traditions, and implicitly or explicitly critiquing Hirsi Ali, who Berman argues does uphold them.

He makes two, I think essentially contradictory, arguments explaining why such Western liberal intellectuals, who he says he used to think were “the best of the best,” would perform such a craven betrayal. The first is that this is internalized Western guilt and white racism masquerading as compassion for the non-Western world and therefore fetishizing the “authenticity” they imagine Ramadan possesses. I find this a perfectly plausible argument. It can be debated as to whether this is really what has been going on in this case, but it’s obviously a phenomenon that does exist and has many analogues. His second explanation, however, is infinitely weaker, and it’s slipped in the right at the end of the book in order to explain this supposed “flight of the intellectuals.”

Berman argues that since the Rushdie affair, the threat of potential and in some cases real violence against strong critics of Islam and Islamists has become so widespread that “Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class.” The second argument is that these Western intellectuals are driven by “fear — mortal fear, the fear of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip of a bizarre ideology.” I find this almost entirely unconvincing. That such fear legitimately exists in many quarters especially in the Middle East but also Europe, there is no doubt. But why it would infect the work of people like Buruma and Garton Ash, who could just as easily start writing about something else, rather than seriously trying to engage with Ramadan and Hirsi Ali and coming to strikingly different conclusions about both of them than Berman does, does not follow in the least. Mortal fear would seem to dictate writing about another subject, something both of these liberal Western intellectuals are more than capable of doing, and neither has spent most of their carrier on this subject. So I find the idea that Western liberals are simply fleeing from a confrontation with soft Salafists like Ramadan because of “mortal fear” simply silly.

No doubt mortal fear is a rational affect for some people who want to challenge Islamists in many Middle Eastern societies, and also some in Europe who wish to approach the question using, for instance, certain forms of satire that are particularly goading to extremists. But I’m not aware of any reason for this kind of “mortal fear” in the United States, which has so far been free of this kind of repressive violence by Muslim extremists designed to inhibit speech (the insane handful of, apparently largely Jewish, self-proclaimed converts at Revolutionmuslim.com do not count because their threats are plainly fatuous). More to the point, Berman posits his own work as the antithesis of such fear and intimidation, and can anyone possibly imagine him coming under any kind of threat for this book? I certainly can’t. So it would have been perfectly possible for Buruma and Garton Ash to reach the same conclusions about Ramadan that Berman did, and indeed publish them in the same way Berman has, without any rational “mortal fear” or any other fear for that matter. Given the way Theo van Gogh approached his anti-Islam agitation and the brutal murder to which he was so foully subjected, moral fear in the present Western European climate under certain circumstances is, unfortunately, reasonable, and no one can be begrudge Hirsi Ali her bodyguards given the threats to her life, even though they were made on another continent and she’s now living in a society which has yet to be infected with this kind of brutality. But I don’t think these experiences are particularly relevant to the work and experiences of people like Buruma and Garton Ash, or Berman for that matter. The fear explanation for the alleged, and I think real, codling of Ramadan by these two writers just doesn’t hold up.

The other problem with the second case Berman is making is that it is predicated on his championing of Hirsi Ali, which I think is very difficult to justify. He makes the case against Ramadan quite well, and his critique of Buruma’s and Garton Ash’s illusions about him, or at least unwarranted positivity, is also quite powerful. Where it all starts to break down is in his contrast of their attenuated enthusiasm for Ramadan with their grave skepticism about Hirsi Ali, and Berman’s own profound enthusiasm for her views. He sees their negative evaluation of Hirsi Ali as symptomatic of a kind of Western liberal self-hatred, because he sees her as a champion of humanist and Western values, and, more importantly, of the Enlightenment and Enlightenment values. That’s certainly how she presents herself. But I think Berman is profoundly blind to very serious problems with her positions and their implications, and why, therefore, any skeptical, intelligent person should be at least ambivalent about her contribution. Berman castigates Buruma for characterizing her as “a fanatic with silly and cartoonish views” because Buruma observed that what he called her “absolutist view of a perfectly enlightened West at war with the demonic world of Islam [might not] offer the best perspective.” Berman is appalled Buruma would suggest that “she lent respectability to bigotry of a different kind: the native resentment of foreigners, and Muslims in particular.” “What terrible thing has Hirsi Ali done,” Berman asks indignantly, “sufficient to merit this series of sneers in one magazine after another?” as if there were no good answer. Unfortunately for him, there is.

Hirsi Ali is, unfortunately, an anti-Muslim bigot, and this is hardly the hallmark of a “persecuted dissident intellectual” champing Enlightenment values. She insists that the worst actions of any Muslims (i.e., the 9/11 terrorist attacks) represent ?true Islam,” and that all believing Muslims must support the actions of the most brutal extremists. Hirsi Ali is a proponent of political secularism, as am I, but inexplicably she seems to feel the need to define Islam, but interestingly not any other religion, only in the terms of its most extreme adherents. In her otherwise unremarkable and inoffensive book Infidel (Free Press, 2007), which is essentially a rather boring memoir almost entirely free of analysis and uncluttered with reflection, the most revealing passage is her description of her reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Her Dutch colleagues were insisting, rightly, that even if this was the work of Muslim extremists, it was not a reflection on Islam as a faith or Muslims in general. Hirsi Ali was having none of it, as she thought to herself, ?But it is about Islam. This is based in belief. This is Islam.? Then, she reports, she did some “research” to check this preexisting conclusion (hardly a skeptical or properly secular, let alone intellectually respectable attitude) and not surprisingly found her assumption was vindicated by this alleged research (though we never learn what that might have consisted of). She concluded that, ?Every devout Muslim who aspired to practice genuine Islam? must have at least approved of [the 9/11 attacks].? ?True Islam,? she adds, is, by definition and in apparent contrast to all other religions, ?totalitarianism? and ?leads to cruelty.?

It?s a perfect example of one of the most damaging and pernicious genres in the present Islamophobic playbook, and has obvious and devastating implications for Muslim communities in Western societies. Logically, it can only lead to fear, hatred and discrimination against Western Muslims and Western Muslim communities. Any other reaction to these assertions, if accepted at all, would be completely irrational, since the most brutal, violent behavior by any Muslims anywhere, and the most extreme forms of doctrine and practice, are ?true Islam.? Anything else is false, diluted, or inauthentic. Obviously this stance leaves religious traditionalists, moderates, reformers, modernizers, liberals, mystics and anyone else not in the Salafist-Jihadist camp disempowered, dismissed and fresh out of luck. Hirsi Ali and many other anti-Muslim ideologues say that all of these traditional, moderate or liberal Muslims are simply wrong and their ideas invalid, and the worst extremists are right in their interpretation of the faith. More benign interpretations are foreclosed, and moderation and reform invalidated. Why, one wishes to ask, must these people insist on so passionately championing the views of Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri? In terms of Islamic discourse, that is precisely what she is doing, whether she, or for that matter Berman, understand it or not.

Following her move to the United States after a scandal involving alleged fabrications she used to obtain asylum in the Netherlands and her subsequent resignation from the Dutch parliament (none of which Berman acknowledges), Hirsi Ali became even more strident about presenting Islam as such, in all its forms and as a faith, as an enemy of the West that need to be ?crushed.? In a November, 2007 interview with Reason magazine, she said that the faith could be socially and politically useful, ?Only if Islam is defeated.? Reason asked her, ?Don?t you mean defeating radical Islam?? She replied, ?No. Islam, period.? She explained, “I think that we are at war with Islam. And there?s no middle ground in wars. Islam can be defeated in many ways. For starters, you stop the spread of the ideology itself; at present, there are native Westerners converting to Islam, and they?re the most fanatical sometimes. There is infiltration of Islam in the schools and universities of the West. You stop that. You stop the symbol burning and the effigy burning, and you look them in the eye and flex your muscles and you say, ‘This is a warning. We won?t accept this anymore.’ There comes a moment when you crush your enemy.” She concludes, ?There is no moderate Islam. There are Muslims who are passive, who don?t all follow the rules of Islam, but there?s really only one Islam, defined as submission to the will of God. There?s nothing moderate about it.? And, just to put the cherry on top of an interview that conclusively demonstrates that Hirsi Ali understands nothing at all about civil liberties, tolerance and the other values she purports to defend, she proclaims, echoing so many other Islamophobes, ?Islam is a political movement.?

Based on her books, her analysis, such as it is, seems entirely solipsistic and based on her own experiences in Somalia, Saudi Arabia or Holland. From these experiences she extrapolates “the truth” about Islam generally and the Muslims globally, in spite of the fact that she is thereby talking about approximately 1.2 billion people, 1/5 of humanity, not to mention countless schools of thought, philosophical traditions and denominations, based on a couple of decades of personal experiences by a single individual in three or four countries. Even if we allow that this can produce many interesting insights, the narcissism of it is pretty extraordinary. And it’s simply a fact that she doesn’t bring to bear a strong body of scholarship to back up these experiences, although she certainly has very strong opinions, many if not most of which I share (which is entirely beside the point), but some of which are not only bizarre but extremely dangerous. Berman seems to feel that these experiences entitle her to say things like “Islam must be crushed”, but in fact how can they? Isn’t this the first refuge of every peddler of intolerance? “Let me tell you about my experiences with fill in the blanks (Blacks, Jews, Arabs, Japanese, Americans, Christians, Muslims, Hutus, Tutsi, etc.).” As an argument, it’s particularly debased and unconvincing. Moreover, Berman doesn’t seem to reflect on the implications of Hirsi Ali’s comments, their probable effect, should they become influential, upon millions of Muslim immigrants to the West and their ability to construct healthy, well functioning lives in their new societies.

I can only imagine what Berman’s reaction would be to any Palestinian, or any Israeli Jew for that matter, who would say, to any audience, that because of their experiences in Israel that “we are at war with Judaism” or “we must crush Judaism.” Indeed, he spends much of his book rightly upbraiding Palestinians, Arabs and other Muslims who said exactly that. But why he is attracted to someone who says the same thing about Islam, albeit in the name of “liberal values,” or a misconstrued version of the Enlightenment, he never really explains. He soft-peddles Ali’s aggressive, intransigent and intolerant attitude towards Islam, and implicitly the Muslims (she’s never made any serious effort to draw the distinction and anyway one can’t, in practice, be drawn because Islam doesn’t exist except as a set of social texts embodied by the Muslims in all their diversity), in the same way that he accuses, with plausible justification, Buruma and Garton Ash of doing with Ramadan. Berman asks, “what if it were true [that Hirsi Ali has been] hurling a few high-spirited insults at her old religion?” suggesting such comments are reasonable, understandable or harmless. The comparison he makes between her and Salman Rushdie, who has never made any comments remotely resembling these, is utterly spurious. Hirsi Ali isn’t a radical internal, or external for that matter, critic pushing for severe reforms with powerful and learned critiques in order to save Islam or the Muslims from themselves. Instead, she’s someone who simply condemns both, tout court, hurls down totalizing, essentializing, reductive and collective excoriations, and calls for them to be violently “crushed” by others. In other words, she’s less Israel Shahak and more Israel Shamir.

Forgive me, but this desire to “crush,” whatever that might really mean in practice, the entirety of the world’s second-largest religion, which is also to be defined only by the most extreme fringe of its followers, does not reflect any Enlightenment values I am aware of, or at least not any that are worth preserving. Of course it’s true that, along with its more positive aspects, the Enlightenment gave rise to modern colonialism, racism and anti-Semitism, but I don’t think this is what anybody has in mind when we talk about preserving and defending the legacy of the Enlightenment. So in my view, it’s no surprise at all that Buruma and Garton Ash, along with a very great number of other people, myself included, have the gravest doubts about the value of Hirsi Ali’s contribution or the idea that she can be seen as a standardbearer for humanist or Enlightenment values or as a worthy proponent of liberalism and/or secularism. Indeed, this attitude of wanting to “crush” Islam generally (but not other faiths) and seeing it defined only by its most extreme adherents is distressingly reminiscent of comparable intolerant, paranoid and chauvinistic attitudes held by al-Banna, al-Husseini and Qaradawi, the disturbing and deeply bad influences on Ramadan that both Berman and I find extremely troubling.

So while Berman has seen through Ramadan with crystal clarity in most ways, and especially on the most important issues, he reveals a debilitating blindness when it comes to other crucial subjects, such as the nature and evolution of the Palestinian national movement, which he misrecognizes as an Islamist one even though it has never yet been dominated by Islamist thought and is currently undergoing a paradigm shift towards nonviolence, and, perhaps even more strongly, the substance of Hirsi Ali’s interventions which he indefensibly misreads as championing universal, humanist Enlightenment values. Berman is almost entirely right on Ramadan, and if he isn’t Ramadan has every opportunity and the bulliest pulpits around to prove both him and me foolish and wrong. But I’m not holding my breath. And, of course, Berman is right to take Buruma and Garton Ash to task for not seeing through these ambiguities and evasions. Most importantly, he may well have a good point about a certain type of Western liberal intellectual who fails to defend humanist and Enlightenment values in the face of presumed non-Western “authenticity.” However, when Berman takes up Hirsi Ali as his example of how to get it right, just like his antagonists he’s lookin’ for love in all the wrong places. He may have gotten the diagnosis right, but Berman’s prescription is no improvement on the disease.

Readers of the Ibishblog who have stuck with me until the bitter end of this posting have, I hope, not been unduly put off by the length of this response to Berman’s new book, and I hope it proved justified by its content. However, I will have more to say (I know, I know) about Berman’s discussion, and the broader issue, of Amin al-Husseini, the Arabs and the Muslims, and the Holocaust in the very near future. It’s a whole other argument. Stay tuned for that.

David Frum recently suggested that Israel and the Palestinians can have “peace without the process,” based on the separation barrier becoming a de facto international border without the creation of an independent Palestinian state:
The Israelis keep what they have, the West Bank Palestinians commit to keep order on their side of the fence, Hamas remains an international pariah, foreign aid continues to flow to the West Bank so long as good behaviour continues. No process, no treaty, just quiet and development.

“It’s not a great deal for the Palestinians, obviously,” Frum allows, “But the alternative to a signed peace does not have to be fighting.” But, of course, it’s a fantastic deal for the Israelis. Indeed, it’s an Israeli wet dream. I think obviously Frum is completely wrong that the alternative to a signed agreement doesn’t have to be fighting, and history demonstrates that in the absence of not only an agreement, but even the hope of an agreement, fighting is exactly what you’re going to get. If he can’t figure that out by now, he’s got no business commenting on Israeli-Palestinian matters.

Presumably Frum’s delusion arises from the present relative order that has been created by the Palestinian Authority in the areas under its control in the West Bank. What he doesn’t seem to understand is that this is not based on “quiet and development,” as he puts it, alone but rather quiet and development in the context of state and institution building and other measures designed to peacefully but steadily and purposively advance towards independence and an end to the occupation. None of it can be sustainable in the context of any lack of real prospects for an end to the occupation. What Frum is hoping for is that Palestinians will calmly and quietly accept unilaterally dictated new de facto borders designed to Israel’s liking (the West Bank security barrier), without independence or an end to the occupation. It’s an informal way of achieving the “nuclear option” I was describing in a recent posting, and while it might not create a full-blown crisis with Egypt and Jordan the way de jure annexation would, it’s certainly not a situation that PA can sustain.

The Palestinian leadership has bet everything on a negotiated peace agreement with Israel, and doubled and tripled and quadrupled down on that. They have nothing left, ultimately, other than that and in spite of all the accusations they’re not in the business of attempting to establish a quasi-autonomous bantustan within the context of an ongoing Israeli occupation or a de facto greater Israeli state. If this dream dies in the way Frum is describing, they will never survive and it will be extremely difficult to prevent an Islamist takeover of the Palestinian political scene in the West Bank as well as Gaza. Frum’s indefensibly sanguine attitude about the local and regional, and possibly even global, impact of this development only further demonstrates his profound lack of understanding of the entire problem and its implications.

But putting the practical concerns aside, let’s look at what Frum is really suggesting. And, let’s bear in mind, he is a neocon who prides himself on being interested in “democracy” and “human rights.” What’s missing from his argument, beside the fact that it couldn’t possibly be sustained politically, is the fact that his proposal will still leave millions of Palestinians as noncitizens in a world of citizens of states. This is the anomaly that both Frum and most other supporters of Israel simply refuse to get through their heads. It is not sustainable or in any way acceptable to have millions of people, most of whom are not refugees but who are living in their own homes on their own land and in their own country, to be stateless noncitizens, outside the global whale. He’s asking Palestinians to be satisfied with being the only group of millions of non-citizen, non-refugee persons in the entire world, without self-determination, without effective recourse to the government that really controls their territory in the end (it would still for all intents and purposes and as a legal matter be Israel in his formulation) and without any form of meaningful representation in it. It is one thing to be an ethnic minority facing discrimination. It is something quite different to be a noncitizen of any state.

None of this applies to the other examples he cites such as the Falkland Islands, the India-China border area, Korea, or even the Western Sahara. He compares the West Bank to Kosovo and Nagorno-Karabakh, noting, “The international community does not invest much energy worrying about the precise status of either of these autonomous self-governing regions.” “Why not allow the Palestinian Authority to stumble along in the same way?” he asks. Well obviously because it’s a surefire recipe for another explosion of violence with major regional and international consequences, but more to the point both of them are functionally independent while nominally claimed by a larger state. Neither are under direct occupation, as is true in the West Bank, and as will be true even if Frum gets his way (his passage about foreign aid continuing to flow to the West Bank based on good behavior strongly suggests who is going to be judging that “good behavior” and controlling that flow). Nagorno-Karabakh is an area contested between Armenia and Azerbaijan, much like Kashmir is being fought over by India and Pakistan, or numerous other regions around the world disputed between states. The analogy to the West Bank and the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories is extremely weak at best. Moreover, Kosovo’s independence is recognized by the United States, Britain, France and Germany, among many others, in spite of Serbia’s ongoing claims. There are a great many other examples he might have, but did not bother to, cite. In almost all of these cases there is a surfeit rather than a lack of citizenship, states fighting over whose citizenship people should have rather than a state fighting to deny people the right to any citizenship at all. Even more ridiculous is Frum’s analogy between his idea and Israel’s no-peace, no-war arrangement with Syria.

Obviously, there are lots of ethnic and other oppressed minorities, but almost all of them are citizens of the states that oppress them, which affords them some means, even if it’s theoretical at any given time, of pursuing their rights through the political system in which they live. Palestinian citizens of Israel are quite a good example of this. Oppressive governments and dictatorships of any variety can wither away and die over time, they can implode, they can be brought down by revolt or velvet revolution, they come and go. Oppressed citizens, including ethnic or religious minorities, are positioned to take advantage of sudden explosions or gradual accretions of greater rights. Minority groups can and have advanced their communal interests through political and social processes, and this has happened all over the world. The basis for all of this is extremely simple: citizenship. To be the citizen of the Palestinian Authority, or any nonmember state of the United Nations, that is to say any sub-national authority which doesn’t really enjoy sovereignty in its own territory, is meaningless. I can only assume that Frum hasn’t taken this reality into consideration, or he wouldn’t be so glib about it or so blind as to think it’s a sustainable arrangement.

“Obviously,” as he says “it’s not a great deal for the Palestinians” to remain not citizens of the state that truly rules them, and in his vision will continue to rule them, and not citizens of any other state for that matter. Millions of people will therefore be without the rights and responsibilities of citizenship for the foreseeable future because it’s inconvenient for Israel to either give them citizenship or allow them their own independence. The question David Frum needs to ask himself is, were he in this position, would he accept it? Would he allow it in any other context? And if not, what would he do about it? What on earth makes him think this is okay?

I don’t usually use the Ibishblog for this kind of thing, but sometimes variations on a theme are absolutely necessary. As my regular readers will know, I was alarmed enough by the failed Times Square car bomb to agree to a couple of TV interview requests I would’ve normally turned down in recent years, and made, among others, two appearances on Fox News. The first, on the O’Reilly Factor, was largely without incident and was probably as reasonable a discussion as one could expect under the circumstances, although the fundamental premise was predictably off-base. The second was an interview with me by a Fox News journalist called Lauren Green, and I wasn’t aware that once they were done with me, some panel or other discussed my remarks in my absence. I learned this last night when I ran across a blog posting from the anti-Muslim hatemonger Phyllis Chesler, who was apparently part of the conversation about my remarks from which I was excluded. She writes the following instructive rubbish:

Fox News had convened a panel to discuss the relationship between “faith and terrorism.” We began by discussing the interview with Hussein Ibish, formerly the director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, now the Executive Director of the Foundation for Arab American Leadership, a non-member organization. Ibish made a series of false claims, all of which sounded reasonable, “fair,” and logical, and he did so in excellent American English. For example, he said that Muslims were persecuted by pagans when Mohammed was alive and that’s why there are some Qu’ranic verses that encourage or permit violence.
Poppycock! Muslims under Mohammed were busy raping, pillaging, plundering, and enslaving the so-called pagans, trying to convert them; Mohammed and his soldiers genocidally slaughtered the Jewish tribes of Arabia. So, what Ibish is really saying is that when Muslims cannot convert another faith group to Islam, that Muslims feel “persecuted” and therefore resort to violence.
Nothing’s changed.

The only thing Ms. Chesler is right about is that my English is much better than hers. Other than that, her comments are not only hate-filled, they completely misrepresent the substance of my discussion with Ms. Green. Green was asking me about faith and violence in the context of Islamist extremists, and I said I didn’t care for the phrase "religion of peace" which she mentioned, because all religions are social texts determined by the interpretations of their followers and all major religions had historically proven amenable to legitimating both peaceful and aggressive intentions. Green disputed this, saying that the Bible contains a narrative in which the relatively more violent, militaristic Old Testament texts can be reinterpreted in light of the New Testament texts in order to create a peaceful ethos, but that no such narrative existed in the Koran. "Or does it?" she asked me.

I noted first of all that while Green is absolutely right about the way many Christians have interpreted the chronology of scripture composition to allow more peaceful texts to condition the interpretation of more violent ones in the Bible, historically that hasn’t stopped many Christians and Christian societies from behaving in an extremely violent manner, frequently in the name of God. However, I also pointed out that Muslims too have a narrative, which Green was clearly unaware of, that allows for the same kind of interpretation of more violent passages of the Koran in the context of more peaceful ones. I pointed out that the Koran was revealed over a period of historical time and that Muslims are well aware of and have discussed in detail throughout their history the understanding that most of the aggressive and militant passages had to do with the period in which the early Muslims are said to have been persecuted by pagan tribes. It is therefore possible, and indeed common, to find Muslim scholars interpreting the more militant texts in the context of more peace-oriented ones, in a manner that is indeed analogous to the way many Christians interpret the more militant Old Testament texts in the context of the more peace-oriented New Testament ones. Indeed, this process of contrapuntal interpretation is supported by the several passages of the Koran itself, including Surah 2:106. This is an absolutely accurate explanation of an important element of Muslim religious thinking that Green was unaware of and was suggesting doesn’t exist, and it was important to correct her misapprehension. What I was "really saying" was, of course, that there is a strong basis in Islamic theology and doctrine for interpreting more violent texts in the context of more peaceful ones just as there is in Christianity. It’s as simple as that. And it’s true.

From all this, Chesler got the impression, probably willfully but possibly out of ignorance and/or a simple lack of brainpower, that I was justifying Muslim violence by stating as a fact that Muslims were persecuted by pagans when Mohammed was alive. Of course what I was actually doing was defending and explaining peaceful interpretations of Islam. What I understand perfectly well, but she doesn’t, is that in all of these ancient religious narratives we are dealing in the realm of myths and legends, not facts. Green was asking about the supposed lack of any Muslim narrative analogous to the Christian rereading of the Old Testament in light of the New Testament, and because there is in fact such a narrative I tried to explain it. Chesler leapt to the indefensible conclusion that I was presenting this narrative as a historical fact, when there was nothing whatsoever in my remarks to indicate this, any more than agreeing that Christians have the narrative Green was referring to indicated an acceptance of the literal truth of any aspect of the Bible. Chesler baselessly misrepresents me as endorsing rather than describing this narrative, and accuses me of making "a series of false claims," which is itself a completely false claim.

What’s most amazing about her is that while I’m capable of discussing religious narratives while retaining a healthy understanding that all of this is firmly in the category of myth and legend and not historical fact, she’s certain she knows the historical truth, and of course it’s the most negative possible interpretation of the early history of Islam. Frankly, there isn’t much in the historical record to independently support the Muslim version of events, but that version is the majority of what we have, so while it’s right to view it with skepticism, her complete dismissal of every aspect of the Muslim narrative is even more silly than a complete acceptance of it. Moreover, she is 100% certain, without any historical basis, in describing the early Muslims as pretty much the worst group of people who ever lived in a transparent effort to malign present-day Muslims across the board since "nothing’s changed."

Which brings me to her extremely telling comment that I spoke in "excellent American English" as if this is an extraordinary, eyebrow raising phenomenon. The implication, of course, is that I am some kind of slick, fast-talking Muslim spin merchant serving up to the innocent American viewers a dish of "reasonable, fair and logical sounding" falsehoods all sauced in duplicitously "excellent American English." The point of her intervention is transparently to promote fear and hatred of Muslims and Islam, and to cast me — a skeptical, rational agnostic — preposterously in the role of someone who is surreptitiously justifying Muslim violence in a very crafty manner and in duplicitously good English. Her clear-cut and unavoidable message is: nothing has changed, all the Muslims were always evil and bad or at least extremely dangerous, and they’re all the same, so fear and hate them. She would have made a fantastic Christian or Muslim anti-Semite.

I receive a lot of very interesting questions through the “ask Ibish” form on the Ibishblog, and I try to answer most of them either directly via e-mail or, when warranted, through blog postings. I have a backlog of questions I think can be answered relatively briefly but deserve a public hearing, so rather than tackling each one individually, I’ve created a collective virtual interview based on a series of very recent interesting queries on matters related to Israel and the Palestinians. They are set out below in a Q&A based on the conceit that a group of Ibishblog readers is interviewing me. It seems an interesting way of answering them.

Q: What is your opinion of the pessimistic view of Mosab Hassan Yousef in his recent book “Son of Hamas” regarding the seemingly irreconcilable differences between Hamas and Fatah? How can a two state solution be negotiated with splintered factions who abhor each other? If, as he contends, the ideological core of Islam is and always will be at odds with the ideological core of Christianity and Judaism, what is the future for peace in the region?

A: I haven’t read this book, and I’m not sure I would regard it as a credible account, not because I have any illusions about Hamas, but because it seems to be mainly a commercial and ideological project, probably without a great deal of intellectual or factual integrity. We’ve seen a lot of Arab-American converts to evangelical Christianity talking an extraordinary degree of rubbish in order to make money with books, and this may or may not be another of those. I’ll be honest: zealous converts to any religion immediately have an extra burden of credibility for me because their passionate embrace of one irrational ideological perspective and rejection of another, and often the whole culture and civilization that goes along with it, strike me as a fundamentally unhealthy reaction to what admittedly may be a fundamentally unhealthy situation. It suggests not only a political but a religious agenda that could well, if not would probably, color everything with some kind of prefabricated ideas that interfere with not only sound analysis but fidelity to the truth. It just doesn’t inspire any confidence in me.

My problem with it as an account is also that there would be no way of having any sense of how much hyperbole and self-aggrandizement it represents as opposed to anything factual, and I’d note that his former Israeli employers have disputed or at least cast doubt on the veracity of key elements of his story (most notably, his own importance). Moreover, I’m very skeptical about the accuracy of any commercial projects like these that purport to tell a dramatic life story for $26.99 a pop. So because of religious, ideological and pecuniary interests that are so obvious, I’m not going to bother reading it.

That said, I don’t have any illusions about Hamas, and anyone who reads my blog or other writings will know that perfectly well, and I don’t need this somewhat dubious book to convince me. Your characterization of his view that there is something inherent in Islam there will always be at odds with Christianity and Judaism only reconfirms my lack of interest in the book. All great religions are vast social texts, equally capable of inspiring the impulse to coexistence or the impulse to conflict. In the present-day United States there is a desire to link Christianity and Judaism in an ahistorical and theologically unjustifiable manner as distinct from Islam, but in fact the three religions are completely distinct from each other and therefore equidistant. Historically, the Christian world tended to view Judaism and Islam as closer to each other than to Christianity, and now, especially in the United States, for social and political reasons, this trend has reversed with Islam seen as the outlier, Judaism rehabilitated and Christianity normative.

It’s all garbage. These are three distinct religions, although they all spring from a common source, and all three have shown the capacity to produce both coexistence and deep antipathy, and attempts to pathologize any of them in favor of the others is plainly indefensible and inadmissible. Bigots will run at you with laundry lists of arguments about why one, or two, of these three is particularly worse than one or both of the others, but neither history nor theology can sustain such claims. The only critiques worth listening to are skeptical, rationalist critiques that take a dim view of all irrational and superstitious faith-based belief systems, not those that try to pick and choose between one set of arbitrary assumptions versus another. This is the difference between rational skepticism and religious bigotry or supremacism. My irrational beliefs are better than your irrational beliefs is a pretty pathetic argument.

As to the main point, plainly Hamas and the PLO are engaged in a zero-sum contest for power among Palestinians, based on totally incompatible visions of the present situation and the future. The secular nationalists of the PLO seek a negotiated peace agreement with Israel, while Islamists led by Hamas seek armed conflict until victory or, at least, a fifty-year “hudna” (truce) followed by who knows what. Moreover, they are completely at odds on the character and nature of Palestinian society. In fact, they really don’t agree on anything at all. Now, one side or the other will win out, and one national strategy will become a consensus, and until that happens I think national reconciliation is quite impossible because there is no way to reconcile these visions.

In the meanwhile, everything Hamas does is refracted through the lens of a single goal: to marginalize, replace or take over the PLO and ensure that the Palestinian movement and society become an Islamist one. Everything else is secondary, and this explains why even though they are fully aware that independence in the occupied territories is the maximal achievable Palestinian national goal, they will not accede to the Quartet demands even though this comes at a very heavy price to them. If they did accept the Quartet’s terms and rehabilitate themselves as a legitimate actor, they would be presenting Palestinians a choice between two parties seeking the same national goal, but one of them secular and the other Islamist. Obviously, extreme religious and social conservatism alone is not a path to power among Palestinians under the present circumstances. So, Hamas has to yoke its social agenda to a nationalist one and continuously outbid everybody else in order to have any appeal beyond its base which is certainly not more than 18%, and probably not more than 15% of Palestinians in the occupied territories.

This isn’t as much of a barrier to negotiations as many people like to think since there is no question from a legal and political point of view who is authorized to represent the Palestinians in negotiations. Every single Palestinian, Arab and international document, including most notably the Letters of Mutual Recognition signed during the Oslo process with Israel, state that the PLO is the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Even Hamas recognizes this, although they call for the restructuring of the PLO (by which they mean they should take it over). So in his capacity as Chairman of the PLO, Mahmoud Abbas is plainly authorized to lead the negotiations with Israel. The question is not about negotiations but about implementation of an agreement.

I think it’s clear that Hamas’ future will be largely determined in the West Bank, and not in Gaza. It’s true that Hamas only rules in Gaza now by force of arms and its popularity across the Palestinian territories has absolutely tanked, and for good reason. In the latest opinion poll, they registered 15% total support as opposed to 53% backing for Fatah. Nonetheless, if the PLO strategy of seeking a negotiated peace agreement with Israel permanently collapses over the next 10-15 years and the PA state building enterprise in the West Bank similarly fails, I don’t think there will be much standing in the way of an Islamist takeover of the Palestinian national movement, which would be a disaster and possibly the end of the movement as such. If however the state building project proceeds apace and negotiations begin to bear fruit, I think it will be very difficult for Hamas to maintain its position of power in Gaza, and this issue can be resolved without too much difficulty one way or the other in order to implement an agreement that covers all of the occupied territories.

Of course, the only reasonable, rational and fair means for Palestinian national reconciliation is through new elections. The core problem, of course, is that there were two elections following the death of Arafat, a presidential election in 2005 won by Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas, and a parliamentary election in 2006 in which Hamas backed candidates won a majority. Government cohabitation proved impossible because of the vast differences on all issues and the present situation was initiated by Hamas’ violent takeover of Gaza in 2007. The terms of both the elected president and parliament have, by the way, expired. It’s obviously long since time for a new election, both parliamentary and presidential, but Hamas is absolutely blocking that because of the political realities and poll numbers I outlined in the last paragraph. The PA wanted to hold elections in January according to Palestinian law and Hamas refused. The Egyptians presented a national reconciliation agreement allowing for elections in July, and while Fatah signed, Hamas refused. For very good reasons the PA doesn’t want to hold national elections in the West Bank only, so as not to reify the distinction and division between the West Bank and Gaza, but they did schedule local, municipal elections, which don’t have national implications, for this July, and Hamas has again denounced this and told everyone not to participate. Obviously Hamas is profoundly opposed to elections, which they don’t believe in anyway as a matter of principle, because they know how badly they will be defeated.

Meanwhile, while its grip on power in Gaza is secured by a monopoly of arms and the indefensible and politically counterproductive blockade which it uses to consolidate its rule, Hamas is facing a political and financial crisis due to lack of money and credibility. Its leaders are openly fretting about the prospects of a popular revolt due to new onerous taxation and other unacceptable policies, and they’re being harassed by Al Qaeda style extremists on their right flank. This is a window on where things can go in the future regarding their stranglehold on Gaza. If the contrast persists between the results of their policies and those of the PA and the PLO, and if diplomacy begins to move the Palestinians meaningfully towards independence in the West Bank, Hamas will be presented with a simple choice: the train is leaving the station, are you getting on or are you staying behind? I can’t believe the people of Gaza will put up with a situation in which West Bank is visibly and seriously moving towards independence while they continue to languish under an endless siege.

Q: What is your opinion of the potential of the two state solution as outlined in the most recent Regional Peace Plan based on the original Geneva Accord?

A: As my regular readers will know, I think the two state solution is the only available option other than continued conflict and occupation, leading to increased violence and intensified warfare, which will be increasingly religious and intractable. However, I am sorry to say that I also think it is the less likely of the two. I think the two state solution is still possible because it is in everyone’s interests and majorities on both sides say they would accept it and have every reason to accept it. But it’s going to be very difficult.

I think the Geneva Accord and the subsequent Regional Peace Plan are excellent efforts at outlining some of the details of what could be possible in a two state agreement. The Accord was particularly important in that it showed at a crucial time that there were partners on both sides and that progress in good faith really could be made, even if it was only an intellectual and academic exercise rather than an actual negotiation. In full disclosure, my ATFP colleague and friend, Ghaith Al-Omari, was the lead Palestinian drafter of the Geneva Accord with Daniel Levy as his principle Israeli interlocutor. But I certainly think that document, the Clinton parameters, and many other draft plans or similar ideas all point to the same direction: a two state agreement involving an end to the occupation, a limited land swap to account for anomalies and some settlement blocs, a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, and an agreement on refugees that provides many benefits but not the mass return of millions of Palestinians to Israel. It’s no coincidence all serious, critical thinking leads in this direction: it’s the only set of ideas that can possibly work because it addresses the minimal national requirements of both parties. As I say, I’m not an optimist and it’s going to be difficult to make it work, but our task is to find a way to make it work because it is plausibly achievable and it is the only way out of a desperately dangerous situation.

Q: How do you respond to recent polling results that indicate: residents of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are opposed to the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders with some land exchange as part of a final solution to the current impasse with Israel, according to a poll by An-Najah National University. 66.7 per cent of respondents reject this notion. In addition, 77.4 per cent of respondents reject making Jerusalem the capital for both an eventual Palestinian state and Israel.

A: I’m not convinced at all about this poll, which is greatly at odds with all other polling on these questions over the past 20 years. I cited a poll above about Palestinian partisan politics, but it’s consistent with all other polling in recent months. Any individual poll is always suspect, because polling is a deeply inexact art (I hesitate to call it a science at all). The only way polling is really useful is if multiple polls done by multiple entities with multiple methodologies over an extended period of time produce a similar set of results or mark a notable trend in a similar direction. Under such circumstances we can say that the polling is giving us a real indication of what people actually think. But this poll comes at us out of left field, and doesn’t correspond with the results of almost all the other polls. So I’d say that it’s a phenomenon that’s well-known in polling: an anomaly that doesn’t disprove or even cast serious doubt on the well-established pattern of all the other polls. However, if a series of polls comes out over the next few months that reflects similar, or even remotely similar numbers on these issues, then I think we have to take note very carefully. If not, and I don’t expect it, then this poll has to be taken with the same fistful of salt any individual poll always has to be. None of them ever stand alone with any validity.

Q: What are the prospects for the Palestinian Arab towns that are located in Israel, but adjacent to the green line, to be incorporated into a future Palestinian state. As negotiations resume in the coming days, do you expect this to become an issue for discussion, perhaps as part of a settlements’ deal?

A: I think this is an extremely dangerous idea, although it’s one dear to the heart of the current Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who openly wishes to decrease the number of Palestinian citizens of Israel through this kind of land swap. I suppose it’s possible that a very small number of Palestinians in Israel are living in areas that might be included in a land swap, and I think in that case the maximum possible accommodation for them from both states needs to mitigate the fact that their land will change sovereignty without their explicit permission. But I think it’s very important to try to find as uninhabited areas as possible, and indeed this is possible, in order to make the land swap as smooth as possible and avoid these problems. I don’t think the Palestinian towns and villages in Israel can be compared to the settlements, and I don’t think they should be part of the negotiations either, except insofar as the necessary land swap involves places that are sparsely rather than totally uninhabited. Honestly, I don’t think this is going to be a big deal unless the Israelis try to offload some significantly populated areas, in which case I think the Palestinians would do well to insist that this is not acceptable. In any case, I don’t anticipate this eventuality.

Q: What is the official PA posture on existing Jewish villages in Yesha? On the one hand, the diplomatic track has anticipated their dismantlement. On the other hand, high ranking individuals within the PA – including Salam Fayaad – have indicated the villages will be incorporated into a Palestinian state. Still, on other days you’ll find the same Salam Fayaad burning economic products produced in the settlements. Please shed some light on Palestinians expectations and intentions in with regard to settlements outside the three or four major settlement blocks near the green line.

A: The PLO doesn’t have, as far as I know, an “official position” in writing on what the reader calls “existing Jewish villages in Yesha,” which are otherwise known as the settlements, except that this is a central permanent status issue to be negotiated. Generally speaking and historically the Palestinian expectation and PLO rhetorical demand has been for the dismantling and evacuation of all the settlements, but the reader is absolutely correct that this is not an official position and that numerous Palestinian officials including several senior PLO leaders and PA Prime Minister Fayyad have repeatedly stated that there is no reason why Jewish Israelis whose settlements are not annexed to Israel in a land swap should have to leave the new Palestinian state. This is a very important principle that I think needs to be maintained at all costs. There are Palestinian citizens of Israel, and there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be Jewish citizens of Palestine, or dual citizens of Israel and Palestine, or possibly even Jewish Israeli residents of Palestine. All of these are possible arrangements. The Palestinian state must be a pluralistic one, since it will include Muslim, Christian and other Palestinians, and must be open to complete citizenship and/or equal treatment for a Jewish minority as well. This is a matter of values and principles, and I think it has to be held onto at all costs.

However, I would think it is extremely unlikely for there to be a Jewish Israeli minority in a Palestinian state, but not because of a Palestinian position but rather because of what any Israeli government is likely to feel is necessary to maintain an agreement. It strikes me that it would be politically untenable for an Israeli government to really keep hands off if Jewish Israelis in a Palestinian state began to have extreme difficulties with their neighbors and the authorities. Given the attitudes of some of the settlers such as those in Kiryat Arba in Hebron, for example, which will certainly be part of a Palestinian state, such difficulties are almost inevitable. There are plenty of settlers who I’m sure are capable of living in a reasonable relationship with their Palestinian neighbors and the new Palestinian authorities. But there are others about whom I’m extremely skeptical, and I’m sure the Israeli government, which has had to deal with some of these people, would be skeptical as well. Indeed, it would be an obvious way for extremist settlers to sabotage the long-term viability of any agreement to provoke all kinds of confrontations with Palestinian neighbors or the Palestinian state in order to demand that Israel come to the rescue, thereby abrogating and possibly scuppering the agreement in toto. Imagine the domestic political difficulties faced by any Israeli government that refused to come to the rescue of settlers facing severe difficulties, even if it was of their own making.

I suppose it’s possible that Israeli society might ultimately turn to the settlers choosing to stay in a new Palestinian state in spite of many requests that they do not and say, in effect, “you’re on your own, good luck and don’t ask us for any help.” But I find that very hard to imagine. So my sense of things is that there actually won’t be any Jewish Israelis left in a Palestinian state at first because the Israeli government will insist on that. I think the best-case scenario is that after a peaceful period, when coexistence is well established, that Israelis could, for religious and cultural reasons, begin to take up residency in places like Hebron under Palestinian law and protection. I can imagine that, but I can’t imagine the Israeli government leaving some of the present settlers exactly where they are at the outset of a two-state agreement if they really want it to work.

Q: Please tell me why it is in Israel’s interest to negotiate and make concessions when the place they will ultimately get to is the deal made at Taba, or, even better for the Palestinians, the Olmert deal. What is the goal if even those former offers are not acceptable?

A: First of all, I’d suggest the reader look at my recent Ibishblog posting on whether or not the Palestinians made a mistake in declining the Camp David and Olmert proposals made by Israel. I don’t think the Palestinian goal is unclear at all, and I outlined it above. If both parties agree on the essential structures of informal agreements such as the Geneva Accord and international proposals such as the Clinton parameters, and then it becomes a matter of negotiating the details, and negotiators from both sides suggest that at Taba and between Abbas-Olmert it was the details and not the broad outlines that were being seriously negotiated. As I tried to demonstrate, progress has been made at every stage from Oslo to Camp David to Taba to Abbas-Olmert, and I think this demonstrates that future progress can, in fact, be made if both parties approach the talks in good faith in order to negotiate the details of the kind of arrangement cited above. I’m sure the reader understands why it’s in Israel’s interest to have a negotiated agreement, and I’ve spent a good deal of the past few years of my life repeating ad nauseum why it is in the Palestinian and American interests as well. If anybody wants more clarity on this, many of the postings on the Ibishblog deal with this question and you can also take a look, for free, at my book on the one state agenda, which also contains detailed arguments about the importance of a two-state agreement, either on the Ibishblog or on the ATFP website.

Q: When you keep talking about the siege of Gaza (and I do agree, it doesn’t help the Israelis, only Hamas), why do you and everyone else seem to forget that Egypt has a common border? If the Arab brothers of the Palestinians aren’t opening the border, why should Israel, the target of rockets and terror attacks, be expected to open their border?

A: I certainly don’t forget Egypt’s border with Gaza, and I’ve written about the problem on numerous occasions. They are two issues here: is anyone expecting Israel to simply open its border with Gaza, and why does Egypt keep the Gaza border closed? First, while I think the blockade is terrible, morally unjustifiable and politically counterproductive as you agree, I wouldn’t expect Israel to throw open its border crossings to Gaza as long as it’s under Hamas control and Hamas maintains the policies it has today. But at the same time I think it’s crucial that all the crossings, including the Egyptian border crossing, are opened as soon as possible. There is a way to do this: a return to the status quo ante at the borders, which would mean PA security forces on the Palestinian side of all the crossings with international monitoring and participation, and a renewed and intensified effort to close all the tunnels. This is undoubtedly the way to proceed and it has the added benefit of placing Hamas in the position of either agreeing to this means of allowing the Palestinians of Gaza to breathe again or being the ones responsible for taking the ultimate decision that the siege must stay in place rather than cede any power anywhere in Gaza to the PA. They probably wouldn’t accept the idea, but I think they need to be put in the position of publicly refusing it and taking full, complete and final ownership of the siege. If they did agree to it, all the better.

For all your rhetoric about “Arab brothers,” I’m sure you understand why the Egyptians don’t want to open their border to Gaza. I once counted the reasons that were obvious to me, and they went beyond 10, and I won’t bother you with all of them. Suffice it to say that the Egyptians are absolutely paranoid about the prospect of being sucked back into responsibility for Gaza again and it is without doubt the number one foreign policy priority for the Egyptian state not to have that happen. Look at the contortions they are tying themselves into and the political damage they are incurring in order to ensure that that doesn’t happen. The reasons for this are obvious, and it is a long-standing ambition of right-wing Israelis to ensure that Egypt is forced to take control of Gaza and Jordan of parts of the West Bank Israel does not wish to annex in order to foreclose Palestinian statehood and avoid any need to negotiate an end to the occupation with the Palestinians. This is very strongly against the Egyptian, the Jordanian and, above all, the Palestinian national interest and none of the three will accept it. The bottom line is that Israel is still legally, technically and in fact the occupying power in Gaza, the unilateral redeployment notwithstanding, and that therefore Israel has still has primary responsibility for the civilian population there, not Egypt. I certainly agree that Hamas has to bear its responsibility and share the blame for the present situation, but I don’t think it’s the fault of Egypt in a meaningful way.

For the Egyptians, there are many additional concerns, mostly arising from the fact that Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood party connected and in some way subordinate to the Egyptian MB “mother party,” which is the primary opposition group seeking to overthrow the Egyptian government. The idea of Palestinian Muslim Brothers in Gaza linking up with the Egyptian Muslim Brothers is something of a national security nightmare for the present Egyptian regime. In addition, Hamas’ strong relationship with Iran provides another source of extreme anxiety for the Egyptians. It is a source of instability, potential insecurity and very grave concern, and there’s no way the Egyptians are going to allow the Israelis to manipulate them into getting sucked back into Gaza again. No way. As long as Israel is the occupying power, it’s not going to be able to pass the buck to anyone, except maybe Hamas. But since the siege only strengthens Hamas’ grip on power in Gaza, it’s high time to revisit the border crossing issue with at the very least the proposal I mention, which would be a step in so many right directions.

Several years ago I decided for a number of reasons to try to cut back on the amount of television appearances I was making to concentrate on writing and other activities that allow for more thoughtful development of ideas and the communication of more serious concepts, most recently through the development of this blog. However, following the failed Times Square car bombing incident I accepted a couple of invitations because of the gravity of the situation, including from my old interlocutors at the O’Reilly Factor on Fox News. An appearance on the program invariably generates considerable response, and this time was no exception, including the following question posed to me through the Ibishblog:
"Why is it that leaders of Islam do not speak out against such anti-Koran acts as suicide and murdering innocent people?"

Indeed, the very next morning on a return visit to Fox News I got the very same question from another interviewer who also asked me whether my organization would condemn the failed Times Square car bombing or not! One hardly knows whether to laugh or cry, and also where to begin with such kind of silliness, so my answer was simply to aver that no organization I was with had condemned the act because it goes without saying and it’s a silly question. And yet it persists.

The idea that Muslims, especially Muslim leaders, in the United States and around the world, do not condemn terrorism has been one of the most persistent accusations in the post-9/11 era. Perhaps the most prominent and early of these attacks came from Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer who, in November 2001, asked
"after Sept. 11, where were the Muslim theologians and clergy, the imams and mullahs, rising around the world to declare that Sept. 11 was a crime against Islam? Where were the fatwas against Osama bin Laden? The voices of high religious authority have been scandalously still. And what of Muslim religious leaders in America?"

This alleged silence, it is implicitly or explicitly suggested, is in order to hide actual support for terrorism, and is a feature of the extremism and/or simply the lying inherent to Arab culture or built into Islam as a faith, according to Islamophobic discourse. Krauthammer‘s false accusation severed as a model for hundreds of similar tendentious questions over the following years, which remain impervious to all efforts to answer or address them, as my recent TV appearances again demonstrated.

In fact, of course, there had been a considerable outcry of condemnation around the Muslim world and particularly in the United States from the Muslim community, not only of the most recent outrage and 9/11, but of almost all the major terrorist acts in between. Yet once alleged, the question has persisted and never been resolved. The question continues to be routinely posed to Muslim-Americans: “why is your community silent about terrorism?” It has all the qualities of a trap question, in which answering invites one to accept self-defeating premises, a little like a politician being asked when he intends to stop beating his wife.

The answer, of course, is that the Muslim-American community is not silent about terrorism. Many public figures in this community, and all prominent national Muslim and Arab-American organizations, have been at great pains for many years to make this clear. All have continued to denounce terrorism, even to the point of organizing fatawa condemning terrorism in all its forms. Various websites including University of Michigan professor Juan Cole’s blog "Informed Comment” and various other websites (here, here, here and here, for example) have long ago posted lists of condemnations from Muslim religious and other institutions around the world against terrorism, and specifically the 9/11 attacks. Yet all of this has been, in some quarters at least, to little or no avail, since the myth of silence still carries tremendous weight in American political culture and is widely believed.

Many of the more hostile critics of the Muslim community, for example, rejected a fatwa organized and promoted in 2005 by numerous leading American Muslim organizations that condemned terrorism in the name of Islam on the spurious grounds that its rejection of attacks on innocent civilians was a ruse. These rejections generally claim that, “the fatwa never defines ‘innocent lives’ and condemns killing someone “unjustly,’” suggesting that the condemnation was a linguistic game and did not represent any serious effort to reject terrorism on religious grounds. Steven Emerson dismissed it as, “it is a fake fatwa designed merely to deceive the American public into believing that these groups are moderate.” Similarly, Walid Phares, among many others, critiqued a fatwa rejecting terrorism issued in 2008 by the Darool-Uloom Deoband on the grounds that, “Usama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri, and to some extent Hassan Nasrallah, all claim that innocence is relative.” Robert Spencer dismissed the universal condemnation by American Muslim organizations of extremist converts arrested in New York City for planning violent attacks in 2009 as little more than “a tried-and-true tactic.”

Obviously, more needs to be said and done to combat violent tendencies among Muslim extremists by religious authorities, but the refusal to acknowledge worthy efforts in this regard and dismiss positive developments as meaningless and disingenuous suggests a political and emotional investment in the idea that mainstream Muslims do not or even cannot oppose terrorism and violence. That said, I do think more could and needs to be done, especially by religious leaders. But there are very positive signs. The senior-most Saudi Ulema Council of clerics last month adopted a thoroughgoing decision descriptively defining terrorism and criminalizing its financing. Interestingly, its definition of "terrorism" was broad in a manner very reminiscent of the FBI definition, which encompasses everything from 9/11 style acts to vandalism. And in March a highly respected British Imam, Sheikh Tahir ul-Qadr, issued the longest, most detailed and most thoroughgoing fatwa against terrorism and suicide bombing yet written. So the trend is most certainly in the right direction.

What has, however, troubled me for a long time and as I have continuously been complaining since at least 2004 is that while the mainstream Muslim clergy around the world has been quite good at taking a stand against terrorism generally, although not at communicating that to the non-Muslim world, there has been a most unfortunate tendency to try to make an exception for the Palestinian case on the grounds of self-defense and lack of any other options in combating occupation. Obviously, I reject any idea that combating occupation or having limited other options for armed combat can suddenly make illegitimate tactics legitimate. This point of view is, I think, less widespread than it used to be, but making moral exceptions for one’s friends or certain exigent circumstances is, at best, a cynical political gesture and not a moral or religious position.

It’s really very similar to those liberals, neoconservatives and other moralists who will wax eloquent about human rights and democracy in all contexts except the Israeli occupation and will give Israel a pass on whatever they think it needs to do in the occupied territories, or in Lebanon for that matter, in the name of "self-defense." It may be a natural human tendency to give our friends who we perceive to be in mortal peril a carte blanche to violate otherwise strictly universal moral principles, but it’s not intellectually, morally or politically respectable or legitimate. But this rationalization is increasingly less common among Muslims globally, and by now (though this certainly wasn’t true in the past) is very hard to locate among American Muslims here in the United States where I think the point about the illegitimacy and dangers of terrorist activity, including by Palestinians in the occupied territories, has been thoroughly assimilated and understood.

What is truly puzzling is not the “silence” of Muslim-Americans on the subject of terrorism, since there has been no such silence, but the inability or unwillingness of so many of their fellow citizens to hear their voices on this issue. The subtext to this discourse about an imaginary “silence” is the suggestion, implicit or explicit, that Muslim-Americans generally are supportive of certain terrorist groups or ambivalent about the morality of political murder. But when nothing the community organizations and leadership says on the subject registers and the message that Muslim-Americans are not only opposed to terrorism but have the same reactions to it that most Americans do, then “silence” can never be replaced with moral clarity, and nothing could dispel the clouds of suspicion, since the problem is not those who are supposedly mute but those who are deliberately deaf.

It is a common occurrence for Arab and Muslim Americans who engage with the media or other public figures within the community to be confronted with an atrocity, terrorist act or other misdeed by some Muslims somewhere in the world (the victims usually themselves being also Arabs and/or Muslims), and asked why the community in general has not specifically condemned that specific act. This is, of course, a preposterous question. There are approximately 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, one out of every five people (I got an Ibishblog question the other day questioning this statistic, but of course without any research on the part of the ignorant individual who simply expressed doubts because it didn’t fit with her unresearched conceptualization of global demographics).

During the Iraq war, for example, Muslim-Americans have been frequently held to account, at least rhetorically, for crimes committed in Iraq by insurgents or terrorists opposed to the coalition or the new Iraqi governments. However, in reality every day in Iraq brings fresh horrors, and it is extremely unreasonable to expect organizations with a broad remit to react to every atrocity in a war made up mainly of atrocities. The question about why Muslim-Americans did not rush every day to condemn the daily outrages in that war – or other atrocities, especially those taking place in the Islamic world aimed at victims who are themselves Arabs and Muslims – only makes sense if one somehow identifies the community here with the killers and not with the victims, the implication being that the lack of denunciation implies sympathy with the terrorists. Why would Muslim-Americans be presumed to have a link to the Muslim killers because of presumed ethnicity or religious affiliation, but not to the Muslim victims? Condolences would seem more in order and than accusatory questions.

The discourse about denunciations and silence implicitly makes the 3-6 million or so Muslim-Americans (no one has any real clue as to the actual statistic) in some way responsible for every major crime or atrocity committed by one in five people in the entire world – at least until they say they are against it in each and every specific case. To forestall this kind of silly criticism, the community would have to hire a small team of professional denouncers, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, to issue the daily condemnations of everything vile done by anyone of Muslim background anywhere in the world.

Sometimes silence reflects what should and must be taken for granted, not what is secretly believed. It goes without saying — and it is going to have to increasingly go without saying — that the overwhelming majority of Muslim-Americans oppose murder and terrorism in all their forms, and that they have the same values as most other Americans. Perhaps it was inevitable following a national trauma of scale of the 9/11 attacks, perpetrated by fanatics falsely claiming to be acting in the name of Islam, that Muslim-Americans would have to endure a period of undue suspicion, unfair questions and being asked to produce ritualized denunciations of horrors virtually every American opposes. But such a period cannot be open-ended and, more than eight years after the September 11 attacks, such questions and suspicions are no longer understandable. There is no excuse for being deaf to Muslim-American condemnations of terrorism, no justification for broad-based suspicion that Muslim-Americans are secretly supportive of extremism, and no need for any more rituals of denunciation on demand.

A question has been posed to the Ibishblog via the Goldblog. Jeffrey Goldberg linked to some of my recent blog postings on his own blog at the Atlantic, and received the following query from a Goldblog reader:
But could Ibish please explain the two rebuffs? Has he faced up to the two rejected offers? I’d like to know. When the Palestinians do get their state, some of their own will eventually ask why the Barak and Olmert offers were passed up.

I appreciate this question, because it is very high in the list of FAQs presented to pro-Palestinian advocates and critics of the Israeli occupation. The two “rebuffs” in question are the fact that Palestinians did not come to an agreement with Israel at Camp David in the summer of 2000 and in the more recent Abbas-Olmert negotiations. I’ll deal with them one by one, and then in a broader context.

Camp David, is one of the best examples in contemporary international relations of the Roshamon-effect. In other words it’s like that brilliant Kurosawa movie in which all the different characters have completely different perceptions and narratives about exactly the same events. Nothing was in writing, so we’ve no objective corollary at all to know what the Palestinians were, in fact, offered by Israeli negotiators. Indeed, at least three American negotiators who were involved — Dennis Ross, Aaron David Miller and Rob Malley — have all given deeply incompatible accounts of what happened, what went wrong and, especially, what was put before the Palestinians.

As for the Israelis, generally speaking they have insisted that the deal was an amazingly “generous” one, involving figures that range from 94% of the West Bank for a Palestinian state at the low end to Shimon Peres’ incredible claim that Palestinians were offered 100% of everything they ever asked for. Indeed, I remember in the aftermath of the summit watching the percentage of the occupied territories Israeli officials claimed they had offered Palestinians go up by one percentage point a week until we finally reached Peres’ laughable 100%. We were wondering if anyone would ever actually go there, and eventually he did. Of course none of this was ever backed up with any specifics or documents or any other testable evidence. The dissenting Israeli point of view came from Shlomo Ben-Ami, who observed that if he were a Palestinian he would not have accepted whatever it was that was on offer.

As far as I can tell, all the Palestinians involved found the Israeli proposal, as they understood it, unacceptable in multiple ways and so they did not accept it as a final agreement. There is every reason to think that the “generous” offer for various reasons would have amounted to a quasi-state that was a patchwork of non-contiguous territories with extremely limited sovereignty and not having anything like the normal kind of independence enjoyed by almost all member states of the United Nations. Certainly this was the universal Palestinian impression, and obviously that’s a nonstarter from their point of view. Since I wasn’t there and there isn’t any reliable, objective documentary evidence, I can’t really form an independent judgment. But I can say that it strikes me that the Palestinians probably had a very good reason for not embracing the idea in full and instead insisting on continued negotiations.

In spite of the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000, talks did continue with significant progress. The Clinton parameters provided a framework that remains useful to this day as a model for a final status agreement, which demonstrates two things: first that there was significant progress that needed to be made beyond whatever Israel was offering at Camp David, and second that the United States had really useful, interesting ideas that they mistakenly withheld in order to support the Israeli position (Miller has described this as acting as “Israel’s lawyer”). Obviously, had the United States introduced its own ideas at Camp David, we might have been spared a great deal, although there is no way of knowing that with any certainty.

I think it’s also fair to say that one obvious Palestinian failing at Camp David was that they didn’t have any ideas of their own that constituted a systematic, creative response to the Israeli proposal. Those ideas came later, but they were badly needed at the time and had the Palestinians anything more constructive to say other than no, the debacle of Clinton going back on his word and publicly blaming the Palestinians for the failure of the talks might have been avoided. So I’d be the first to agree that there is plenty of blame to go around, and the Palestinians have to take their share, but not for having declined a specific Israeli proposal that obviously needed a great deal more work.

The talks continued at Taba in January 2001, after which most people on both sides said they had never been closer to an agreement. However, they were indefinitely postponed pending the Israeli election and were not resumed following the victory of Gen. Sharon in February. So I think that while there is plenty of blame for failure to go around, it’s hard to conclude on the basis of what is definitively known that the Palestinians made any kind of mistake in not accepting Ehud Barak’s proposal at Camp David and insisting on further negotiations which made further progress.

The Abbas-Olmert negotiations, which were more informal, may have been the most promising of all, and the Palestinian President says they came very close to an agreement, although they were taking place as the Prime Minister was under a growing cloud of suspicion and when his tenure in office was extremely tenuous. Again, not having been involved in the negotiations myself and with no official documents or maps having been released, or in my understanding even provided to the Palestinians by the Israelis (although maps were shown, they were apparently not given to the Palestinian side), it’s very hard for me to make an independent judgment about this. I think what they show is that progress is possible and that negotiations have never reached a dead end when they have been engaged in good faith by both parties. I certainly don’t think they show an unwillingness to negotiate on either side but, to the contrary, that when there is a real commitment to achieving an agreement on both sides negotiations can continuously move the ball forward.

The bottom line is that neither side has yet accepted the other’s proposals for a final status agreement. There have been lots of Palestinian proposals that have been interesting and creative at different times, not to mention the Arab Peace Initiative, and none of them have been accepted by Israel either. Therefore more negotiations in good faith are required. I think there are a lot of myths on the Israeli side about all the supposed “generosity” of various Israeli proposals, and a Palestinian point of view that the fundamental problem is that Israel has never really offered to actually end the occupation at all. As I say, the lack of documentary evidence makes it difficult to evaluate the accuracy of these views, but they are deep-seated opinions.

I think clearly both sides have an obligation to reach out as much as possible to both the leaders and the public on the other side, to make clear exactly what it is they want, how they propose to get there, and why this is in both the Israeli and the Palestinian interest. It’s obvious that most people on both sides want a negotiated agreement but believe that the other side does not. Both sides also have their “evidence” demonstrating this, and the Goldblog reader’s question is a very common Israeli version of that. There is an entire, complex and substantive Palestinian discourse that makes the same case vis-à-vis Israel. I think aggressive public diplomacy from both parties to counter these fears and suspicions is appropriate, but given the political vulnerability of the leaderships on both sides, public diplomacy is usually aimed more at a domestic political audience that really reaching out to hearts and minds on the other side.

I do think it is significant that the PLO’s aims are quite clear and the vision of the future of the mainstream Palestinian nationalists is not particularly murky even if they haven’t done a good job of communicating this, and why it’s a good idea, to the Israeli public. I don’t, however, think it’s clear at all, even to most Israelis, what the Israeli government’s aims are or what its vision for the future might be. They’ve gone to great lengths to construct considerable ambiguity and fog about their intentions and their vision, leaving Palestinians with the strong temptation to conclude that they have absolutely no intention of ending the occupation and that the present Israeli government, or at least some parts of it, views diplomacy as a time-buying measure and a cover for further deepening and entrenching the occupation and ensuring the impossibility of Palestinian independence. I don’t think anything would be more helpful diplomatically, even if it might be very difficult in terms of domestic politics, than for the Israeli government to describe clearly and unequivocally what exactly it wants in a final status agreement. This may cause serious difficulties with the Palestinians, and maybe even with the United States, but I think all parties, the world and, not least, the Israeli public deserves to know what the Israeli vision for the future and intentions are.

An Ibishblog reader asks me the following question:

For as long as I have been reading your articles, you have maintained an almost messianic belief in “negotiated settlements; road maps, etc.. etc..” and in the meantime, Israel has continued to colonize, terrorize, violate and punish. My question is: how long will you go on believing (do you really), advocating, and dreaming that your preferred approach will yield any results that any Palestinian (and most any Arab not on some payroll) can accept? Am at a loss to understand. Do you really believe in this endless charade of “negotiations”?

Now this is actually an interesting question: why do I continue to advocate that Palestinians pursue negotiations in spite of the many reasons for suspecting they probably won’t achieve anything in the immediate term and may even not ever achieve anything in the long-term? Simply, because there is no other way of ending the conflict and ending the occupation. Either we have negotiations that produce a conflict-ending agreement, or the conflict and the occupation will continue. It really is as simple as that. Unless one believes that there is some kind of military solution available to either party (and I think making the case for the Palestinian military solution is not only unrealistic but actually insane, given the asymmetry of military power at work), then the only thing that can work is a negotiated agreement. This is obvious. It’s not a messianic belief. It’s an obvious fact.

But I think it’s important for me to point out that I don’t only support negotiations, but an array of other tactics as well designed to bolster the Palestinian position in negotiations. I’ve recently been writing about the development of three additional tactics in the broader Palestinian strategy for achieving an end to the occupation that complement rather than contradict negotiations: PA state and institution building, nonviolent popular protests against the occupation, and economic measures aimed at the settlements and the occupation including boycotts and preventing Palestinian laborers from working in settlement construction. I think this is commendable and should be supported by everyone, including Israelis who have their own best interests at heart.

But even tactics that I don’t agree with such as broadbrush boycotts that target Israel generally, or tactics that I disagree with passionately like violence, armed struggle and terrorist acts would all, of necessity, have to be conceptualized as in some way strengthening the Palestinian hand in negotiations with Israel, since, given that there is no possibility of an imposed military solution, ultimately an agreement is, in fact, the only way to end the conflict. Even those committed to armed struggle like Hamas must know this if they are in rational in the least. If it’s true that negotiations are the only way out, there is no argument whatsoever for not engaging in them, even if it is very hard (and I think this is true) to imagine significant progress under the present circumstances.

It certainly can’t do any harm to negotiate with the Israelis, even if this particular Israeli cabinet is unlikely to be forthcoming on all that much, though they should be tested on that. But it’s very helpful in developing stronger relations with the United States, the Europeans and others, which are essential to achieving most vital Palestinian national goals and to sustaining and expanding the state building project which is a potential game-changer. Apart from people like the reader feeling emotionally frustrated, an affect I share but do not indulge, at the spectacle of negotiations that are not likely to yield much benefits in the coming few months, I can’t see any harm at all in them and I do see significant benefits other than actually achieving a permanent status agreement in the next few months. In particular, if Palestinian willingness to negotiate strengthens international support and protection for the state and institution building program and solidifies the international impression that Palestinians are sincere and ready for peace and that the principal obstacles come from the Israeli side, this is extremely helpful and useful, and I think that’s obvious. And consider the damage to Palestinian diplomacy if they simply refused to cooperate with talks that the US, Europeans and Arabs are urging them to engage. This would make Israel’s argument that there is no Palestinian partner suddenly sound reasonable and, in turn, provide cover for continuing and deepening the occupation.

The only alternative to understanding the usefulness of negotiations, even when they are unlikely to yield immediate-term breakthroughs, and the dangers of refusing to engage in them, is to either indulge in ridiculous fantasies about military victory or Israel suddenly somehow imploding or disappearing, or to throw up one’s hands and say, “the conflict and the occupation are going to continue for the foreseeable future and there’s nothing we can do about that, so why bother.” I’m not willing to do that, first because I find the reality of the occupation totally unacceptable and even a slim chance to end it is worth pursuing, and also because I have very grave concerns that if the conflict continues, it will further metastasize and morph into a religious conflict led by bearded fanatics on both sides over the will of God and holy places and therefore become much harder to resolve and much more dangerous for Israelis, Palestinians and all of their neighbors, if not the whole world.

I do know people who have, in fact, thrown up their hands and walked away, or who say “negotiations can’t work and neither can anything else so let’s just not bother.” Indeed, it’s a line of thinking with some influential proponents in the Washington foreign policy community. To me, however, this is the height of irresponsibility, and not just for Palestinians, but for Americans too. I think Palestinians should pursue negotiations for the reasons cited above, bolstered by the additional strategies cited above, because I don’t think they can walk away from their own struggle and, in the end, if they are to ever live decent lives, free of occupation and oppression, it’s going to require an agreement with Israel. I think measures that constructively and peacefully challenge the occupation are absolutely crucial, and I see the development of these new Palestinian tactics as an exceptionally important development because they really are confronting the occupation in quite a serious and potentially effective manner without the unbearable costs of quixotic armed struggle or completely counterproductive violence such as we saw during the second intifada.

The bottom line for the reader and everyone who shares this sentiment (and I’ll be the first to admit, you came by it honestly and I experience the same emotions but will not be ruled by them) is: what alternative do you propose? Even people who advocate a single democratic state for all in the region must know that the only means of achieving this outcome has to be a negotiated agreement, and all of their models (South Africa, Northern Ireland, etc.) point to that. Violence and political tactics deployed by the ANC and the IRA were ultimately designed to enhance their leverage during negotiations. Any tactic one can possibly imagine, if rationally deployed, would have to be intended to strengthen one’s hand in some future negotiation. I suppose one might say, “yes, but in this case these are the wrong negotiations.” That’s another story. The reader is attacking the notion of negotiations per se, and I think that is very hard to sustain. One only sensibly refuses to negotiate with those one can safely ignore or plausibly defeat. Neither of those applies in this case, and I think that’s completely obvious. Once one agrees with the principle of negotiations, it’s very difficult to critique the Palestinian decision to engage in them with Israel at this time because of the rather obvious benefits cited above. The only way to sustain this point of view is to go back to a mentality defined by the three nos of the Khartoum Declaration of 1967.

For decades based on this logic, the Arabs and the Palestinians refused to negotiate with Israel and achieved nothing. The reader points out, rightly, that 17 years of negotiations — or rather an era of negotiations since there haven’t been actual negotiations during most of that time — haven’t resulted in an end to the occupation yet. And it may never. But anyone who denounces the idea of negotiations needs to explain very clearly what their alternative is, what they seek and how, exactly, they intend to accomplish it. The PLO has a pretty clear strategy to achieve a very clear goal, and furthermore it has been rather dynamically enhanced by new tactics developed on the ground in the West Bank over the past few months. It’s perfectly reasonable to critique it, but not without proposing an alternative with which we can draw a contrast, both in terms of potential efficacy and probable outcome. We need to hear a clear goal, a coherent strategy and plausibly effective tactics in order to take any alternative seriously. The main debate among Palestinians is between nationalists led by the PLO and Islamists led by Hamas, and I think the contrast between the consequences of their two policies is extremely clear given the conditions in the West Bank and those in Gaza. So, my counter-question to the reader and everyone else who condemns negotiations is: what is your alternative precisely? And it had better be a scenario that doesn’t eventually lead back to the bargaining table, or this isn’t much of a critique.

I’m frequently accused of being an optimist or a Pollyanna, which is, of course, completely wrong. In fact I wrote an Ibishblog posting last year criticizing both optimism and pessimism as politically invalid categories because they dwell on irrational affects rather than likelihoods based on existing forces that produce outcomes. I’m not an optimist at all, and I have frequently said that the most likely scenario is continued conflict and occupation leading to an increasingly bitter, intractable and religious war that will yield no winners. Part of my passion for continuing to work on this issue is a desperate desire to prevent such a disastrous turn of events. But just because I think a negotiated agreement is less likely than an ever-deteriorating conflict doesn’t mean I’m willing to accept that situation. I’m going to do whatever I can to try to help prevent the Israelis and the Palestinians from going down this mutually suicidal path. Everyone should.

As a consequence of this approach, my colleagues and I at ATFP are always looking for what we can work with in any given situation rather than focusing on a disengaged or detached evaluation, or an emotional response. We are goal-oriented, specifically aiming to promote peace based on an end to the occupation, and for that reason we are only interested in that which will help us in promoting that goal. This is not common in Arab-American and pro-Palestinian circles, in which lamentation is the general rule and purposive, strategic politics are not usually understood. It’s therefore quite common for our goal-oriented approach which emphasizes that which is useful to our aims to be misunderstood as some kind of “optimism.” But it’s not optimism at all. It’s affect-free. Instead it simply reflects a single-minded desire to advance a single issue and to always look for the means of doing that under all circumstances and given any development, no matter how challenging it may be. This is the difference between thinking and feeling. Personally, I prefer thinking.

For the past couple of years Professor John J. Mearsheimer has spoken at many Arab and Muslim American events, and in most of them he sensibly urged Arab and Muslim Americans to seek a working coalition with Jewish Americans in favor of a two-state solution. In fact, he has been a strong advocate of a two-state solution. Until yesterday, that is. Speaking at the Palestine Center in Washington, Mearsheimer suddenly reversed himself with astounding claims of prescience bordering on clairvoyance. He flatly declared:
“Israel is not going to allow the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own in Gaza and the West Bank. Regrettably, the two-state solution is now a fantasy. Instead, those territories will be incorporated into a ‘Greater Israel,’ which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa. Nevertheless, a Jewish apartheid state is not politically viable over the long term. In the end, it will become a democratic bi-national state, whose politics will be dominated by its Palestinian citizens.”

As Emperor Joseph II in Peter Shaffer’s delightful fantasy “Amadeus” would have put it, “Well. There it is.”

Unfortunately, his subsequent elucidation yielded little more than an elaboration on this truly impressive parade of certainties, without any particularly illuminating additional insights or assertions. Mearsheimer lists a limited set of four possible scenarios for the future:

1) A two state solution, which he affirms is the best option for both sides but dismisses on the grounds that the Israeli public will never accept it and no Israeli government can agree to it. Moreover, the Israel lobby will prevent any American president from exercising sufficient pressure to force it from the outside. Furthermore, the Palestinians are badly divided.

2) Israeli ethnic cleansing on a greater scale than in 1948 and 1967, but which he thinks is extremely unlikely except under conditions of extreme Palestinian violence. Even then, he is skeptical that Israel would take such steps.

3) The emergence of a fully-fledged apartheid system in a greater Israeli state, complete with a Palestinian semi-autonomous but not independent bantustan, which he thinks is the only possible short and medium-term outcome. However, this openly apartheid system will fail because the world will recoil at such discrimination. Since it would be antithetical to Western values it will alienate the West, and it will make Israel a strategic liability for the United States. Moreover Israel will lose the support of most Jewish Americans, who cannot and will not support an openly apartheid state, and will be alienated by the growing religious orthodoxy of the Jewish Israeli population.

4) A democratic one-state solution, dominated by a Palestinian majority, is therefore the inevitable long-term outcome, because the inevitable mid-term apartheid system will prove unsustainable.

That’s a lot of inevitables for a so-called realist and a professor of political science, is it not?

In my view Mearsheimer misses at least two of the most obvious and plausible scenarios for the medium-term, in a manner that suggests he doesn’t really understand the conflict in a very complex way (actually, that’s kind of obvious). The first is the prospect of continued occupation or, as he would put it, the emergence of a fully-fledged apartheid state, resulting in an ever-escalating series of violent conflicts increasingly characterized by religious fanaticism. Indeed, he discusses the rise of religious fanaticism among Israelis as part of his evidence for why Jewish Americans will abandon Israel in the future, but leaves out the rise of Muslim extremism among Palestinians. In fact, the two go hand-in-hand and have created the most potent and dangerous alternative scenario to peace, but he doesn’t seem to be aware of this powerful dynamic, although he vaguely cautions against violence. At present, the Palestinian debate really is between secularists who want a negotiated two-state peace agreement with Israel, and Islamists who want an Islamic state in either all or part of Palestine. There is a similar debate in Israel, which he acknowledges, but he doesn’t seem to understand the synergy between the two and the outcome it could very well produce if the peaceful alternative is not realized.

It’s possible, I suppose, that for whatever reason Hamas will simply go away or become irrelevant, but it seems most likely to me that if the effort led by the PLO to achieve a negotiated agreement with Israel should fail in the manner he describes, then Islamists led by Hamas will in fact be the primary beneficiaries, along with, of course, the extreme right wing Israeli settlers. The two will then be poised to lead their societies in a mutually suicidal religious war over God’s will and holy places. It may be true that such a scenario leaves liberal and secular Palestinians nowhere else to turn except to a one-state civil rights movement, but it seems to me this ignores the possibility of the mainstream of the Palestinian cause becoming an Islamist movement or becoming dominated by Islamists or being subsumed in a broader regional Islamist discourse and agenda. Anyone who doesn’t see this possibility is not seriously looking at the existing set of social and political forces at play at the present time, and is not presenting an analysis that should be taken particularly seriously. It pains me to say that on so many levels, but it has to be said.

The second scenario that Mearsheimer ignores or has failed to consider is the real Israeli “nuclear” option in this conundrum, which is not, as he mistakenly thinks, widespread ethnic cleansing. I suppose that’s a possibility, but he’s right to be skeptical that it can be resorted to as a practical matter except in conditions of extreme violence. However there is something much less dramatic than that which Israel can do as a game changer in the medium- to long-term that would completely alter the strategic realities he describes, especially the tension between Palestinian demographic pressure on the one hand and Jewish attachment to some key parts of the occupied territories on the other hand. This is, of course, the imposition of unilateral borders, more or less along the lines of the West Bank separation barrier, with or without some other parts of the occupied territories. Israel is, in fact, militarily capable of creating and enforcing such a fait accompli and annexing key parts of the West Bank, not including most population centers, in addition to municipal Jerusalem (by its own definition of the term) which has already been subject to de facto annexation, and presenting the Palestinians, the Arab states and the world with a situation in which a sizable majority of the occupied territories are no longer under direct Israeli occupation and which Israel formally renounces any claims over and in which it has no troops or settlers.

The reason this is a kind of “nuclear option” that Israel would only resort to as a last-ditch effort is that it will be very difficult to enforce, would place Israel’s peace treaties with Egypt, and especially Jordan, in serious question, and consign Israel to many further decades, if not centuries, of warfare and enmity with the region and the broader Islamic world. It also begs the question of how the Israelis would deal with the Palestinian citizens of Israel and the territories it unilaterally annexes, but historically minorities of that size are, in fact, generally manageable, and the Israelis already experienced a similar problem in the aftermath of the 1948 war. Obviously such a “nuclear option” scenario carries, in the long run, similar risks to permanent occupation resulting in religious warfare, but it’s more attenuated and much more amenable to Western support and international understanding than ethnic cleansing and maybe even formalized apartheid and far more imaginable than ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians. In the long run, it might also prove a foolhardy, suicidal and self-defeating gesture, but there is certainly a space between the absolute minimum right-wing Israelis can accept as an outcome and the kind of ethnic cleansing of the entire occupied territories Mearsheimer envisages. I don’t know how he missed it, but obviously it’s a measure that falls right in between continued occupation turning into apartheid and massive ethnic cleansing.

I am very sorry to say that the social, economic, political and military forces at play are much more likely to produce the two scenarios suggested above than Mearsheimer’s somewhat fanciful and irrationally dogmatic prognostication that Israel will never accept a Palestinian state, and has no option other than apartheid which will inevitably lead to a Palestinian-dominated unified state. This scenario is not implausible, but it’s certainly more improbable than the two I mention above, which don’t factor into his analysis at all. They don’t seem to have occurred to him.

Mearsheimer himself says that the emergent single state he envisages will not be democratic for the foreseeable future, but seems to think that this will not give rise to violent opposition, and can and will be challenged by Palestinians with a “South Africa-style approach,” by which he seems to mean nonviolence aimed at global public opinion. I don’t know what history of the ANC he’s been reading, but the ANC did, in fact, rely on a carefully coordinated mixture of violence, including many dramatic acts of urban terrorism (not to mention necklacing), political outreach and propaganda to make its case to the ruling white minority that what it was offering was the best possible deal they could get. I’m delighted by the rise of Palestinian nonviolent protests in the West Bank, but it’s crucially important to realize that they’re taking place under Palestinian political conditions generally dominated by the PA and PLO, and consistent with their other peaceful strategies aimed at independence, including diplomacy and negotiations, state and institution building and boycotts and other economic measures aimed at the occupation and the settlements but not Israel itself. In other words, the logic of the nonviolent protests compliments the logic of the present PLO strategy perfectly, which is what has given them their broad strategic force and created significant anxiety among Israelis. If they were just spontaneous efforts by local villagers to respond to the separation barrier or some other abusive occupation practice without any national policy corollary, they wouldn’t be nearly as significant.

It’s possible that these nonviolent, peaceful approaches could make the transition away from the present PLO approach of seeking a negotiated agreement with Israel based on ending the occupation and towards some other approach based on eliminating Israel and replacing it with a Palestinian-dominated single state as Mearsheimer anticipates. But that is to take them out of a context in which they are consistent with the ethos and the intentions of the current national leadership and imagine an alternative national leadership which does not presently exist that fosters and marshals similar nonviolent and peaceful forms of resistance to discrimination and inequality, rather than occupation. Again, the specter of Islamism and armed struggle looms large, since it is, at present, the principal alternative to the PLO/PA approach within which nonviolent protests are taking root and being linked to a broad national strategy. Any analysis that doesn’t factor the Islamist political and cultural trend into its set of variables is fatally flawed. Mearsheimer does acknowledge the possibility of a violent Palestinian reaction to continued occupation, but warns against it, suggesting that this is the only thing that might give Israel cover for another, much larger, round of ethnic cleansing. But given his scenario of certainty and inevitability, it’s clear he doesn’t really think that Palestinians are likely or even plausibly going to turn again to violence and armed resistance. Perhaps that’s why in his analysis of plausible scenarios for the future, Hamas and the other Islamist movements play almost no part. Mearsheimer’s analysis is missing too many obvious elements, and seems to be constructed for an intended effect rather than a sound analytical conclusion (I will return to that observation at the conclusion).

Mearsheimer says that Palestinians would be better off with a two state solution, although given his conclusion it’s not clear why, but he claims that since they have no say in their future, they have no choice but to embrace a one-state agenda. However, he advises they should:
a) recognize this is a war of ideas;
b) adopt a “South Africa” policy of seeking to convert world public opinion;
c) use the Internet to communicate with the world;
d) build a stable of articulate spokespersons like Mustafa Barghouti (of all people), and seek political allies, especially Jewish allies;
e) emphasize they do not seek revenge against the Jews;
f) avoid any violence because it might give Israel the excuse for ethnic cleansing, and because any violent intifada will disrupt the effort to win over world public opinion.

This is not exactly what one could call an imaginative set of suggestions as it seems to correspond precisely to the imagination and much of the activities of the academic/online one-state constituency that Mearsheimer has now suddenly joined. Here, as usual, we are presented with a completely fake version of the ANC strategy reborn as some kind of international grassroots, boycott, public opinion and nonviolent strategy as the model for the Palestinians. Then there is the centrality of the internet, which no one can really doubt, but which is sure to appeal to online activists whose virtual work exists only online and nowhere else. Next come the “articulate spokespersons” and their “Jewish allies,” a familiar vision of amber waves of Anna Baltzer sitting next to purple mountains of Mustapha Barghouti, making the case to the fruited plains of Jon Stewart audiences across the land. As for avoiding threats of generalized revenge and violence, only the clinically stupid or the criminally insane fail to understand the importance of that, and even Hamas, while it continues to hypocritically preach violence and armed struggle, has, for the meanwhile, turned away from active armed resistance and has suppressed it by others in Gaza. Everybody who is in the least rational gets this by now, but only for now. In the context of the collapse of all hopes of an end to the occupation and the imposition of formalized, permanent apartheid, can there be any doubt that violence is very likely to be a major feature of the Palestinian response? It’s theoretically possible but practically extremely unlikely that their response will be entirely informed by Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Indeed, if they follow the ANC path, it will be nothing of the kind.

Mearsheimer, as I have demonstrated, is oddly and unjustifiably categorical in his implicit assertion that he can clearly see exactly what will happen in the future, without virtually any doubt. All I can say is that the Michel de Nostredame Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Clairvoyance at the University of Chicago has a much better crystal ball than I do. But there are so many obvious and crucial missing elements in his analysis that it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that he basically doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Mearsheimer has spent the past few years mainly focused on elaborating how much and why he dislikes the pro-Israel lobby and the extent to which it has a baneful effect on American politics and policy. Frankly, I find it hard to read this speech as anything other than a continuation of that agenda, and I think the crucial sentence in the whole lecture is, “What is truly remarkable about this situation is that the Israel lobby is effectively helping Israel commit national suicide.” Now, I would certainly agree that anyone who is actively counseling or enabling Israel or the Palestinians to avoid peace and the painful, necessary compromises that will be required to achieve it is helping either or both of them to commit national suicide. But I detect something a little more in this remark, and it strikes me that this is the navel of the speech, so to speak, its probable starting point, the pointed jab he really wanted to make and around which he has constructed this entire, extremely shaky, argument.

Viewed in this light, Mearsheimer’s talk, while purporting to be largely aimed at a Palestinian and pro-Palestinian audience, is probably really aimed more at the American Jewish pro-Israel constituency with which he has been feuding. If I’m right about this, and I think I am, then his speech is much more Abu Alaa’ than Abunimah, in other words more like the way nationalist leaders in the West Bank have deployed the one state agenda as a threat to Israel rather than the earnest, passionate single-state devotion of its Arab-American advocates. His insistence that a two-state agreement has always been and remains by far the best option but is being taken off the table by Israel’s policies further suggests this important distinction, since many one-state advocates loath the idea of an agreement to end the occupation with every fiber of their being and consider it a capitulation to racism and colonialism. I suppose it’s possible that in a matter of a few weeks Mearsheimer genuinely had a sudden conversion to the religious-faith version of the one state agenda in which it is inevitable and unavoidable. But frankly I’m skeptical, and reading his talk in context, carefully, and between the lines suggests to me that it was probably primarily designed to further annoy, alarm, infuriate and frustrate Mearsheimer’s antagonists in the Jewish pro-Israel community.

Insofar as they are aimed at Palestinians, his conclusions are absolutely pernicious. They play into their most traditional and damaging fantasy: the idea that Palestinian numbers and presence on the land will, sooner or later, negate the Zionist project and deliver power into Palestinian hands in the whole of historical Palestine. This was a deep-seated belief since at least the 20s, and in every phase of Palestinian political life since then, and it remains a potent article of faith among Palestinians even today. This misapprehension, proven wrong time and again in practice, has been a key element in the steady accumulation of defeats, setbacks and miscalculations that have delivered the Palestinian national project to its present woeful state. I’m not sure I can imagine, short of a jihadist rant, a worse or more damaging message to a Palestinian audience than Mearsheimer’s conclusion:
“In sum, there are great dangers ahead for the Palestinians, who will continue to suffer terribly at the hands of the Israelis for some years to come. But it does look like the Palestinians will eventually get their own state, mainly because Israel seems bent on self-destruction.”

What is the take away from that indefensible assertion? Of course it’s that Palestinians don’t really have to do anything, except avoid the kind of violence that might justify massive ethnic cleansing by Israel, and simply wait for the Israeli project to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. This is the key refrain of the siren song of the one-state agenda, the chorus of certainty between each and every verse. It takes a perfectly reasonable observation — that because of the occupation Israel is charging headlong down the path towards self-destruction — which is undoubtedly true, but attaches to that accurate assessment the weird corollary that this somehow means Palestinian victory. As I keep saying, again and again, it is entirely possible for either or, quite possibly, both sides to lose everything in this conflict. Nothing about it is a zero sum. Just as both Israelis and Palestinians require a peace agreement to secure a reasonable future, both of them are likely to face wretched futures as far as the imagination can justifiably be stretched in almost any scenario likely to be produced by a lack of peace (leaving aside, of course, science fiction-like fantasies that have no relation to the political and other forces that actually produce outcomes).

What Mearsheimer fails to see is that while it’s true that extremists in the pro-Israel lobby are assisting Israel in its journey towards oblivion by counseling or enabling permanent occupation, he is performing the same Kevorkian-style tender mercy for the Palestinians by counseling and enabling the abandonment of efforts to end the occupation. Telling the Palestinians that they are doomed for a certain, probably long, term to endure formalized apartheid and there isn’t really anything they can do to avoid that, but that in the long run they basically don’t have to do much of anything for their national project to triumph since Israel will inevitably self-destruct is about as unhelpful, unrealistic and disempowering as anything I can imagine. It’s been my long-standing suspicion that while Mearsheimer clearly doesn’t like the pro-Israel lobby, he doesn’t seem to really understand, or even care that much about the well-being of, the Palestinian people. That Mearsheimer is using them and their cause as a foil in his ongoing feud with the pro-Israel lobby, which he has been at odds with for so long he is starting to resemble, all but confirms this.

The Belgian parliament is considering a widespread ban on the wearing of burqas that cover the entire body and/or niqabs that cover the entire face in public spaces, preparing to be the first European country to enact such a ban. This follows a similar debate in France that has not yet led to a widespread law, although a woman was recently arrested for driving while fully veiled. In France, it is estimated that perhaps 700 women actually cover their faces in public, at least half of them European converts, while in Belgium the number is estimated at about 300-400 out of about 300,000 Belgian Muslims. In other words, the Europeans are busy banning something that virtually nobody does, and if I were a Belgian I’d appalled that my parliament was wasting time with such a socially irrelevant triviality. However, the growth of large, permanent Muslim minorities in Western societies in recent decades and the trend towards greater social conservatism among Muslims generally mean that this question is probably worth considering in theory.

Frankly, I find myself torn.

One instinctive reaction is to rally to the defense of a small, beleaguered minority in the name of freedom of religion and expression. There are a number of very valid points here. If people really believe, as a minority of the world’s Muslims do, that it is religiously mandated for women to wear a full face covering when in public, then impeding this could well be seen as a restriction of religious freedom. It could also be seen as a restriction of freedom of speech, since this is obviously as much of a cultural as a religious phenomenon (actually, it’s more cultural than religious, because very few Islamic authorities mandate the practice as required, unlike covering hair). And, it’s perfectly reasonable to argue, because of this element of expression and the gesture of defiance against an oppressive majority that would be begged by any such ban, it might actually prompt more women to start covering their faces rather than less. Finally, there is the clear element of cultural chauvinism at work. One could argue that what is going on here is that tiny handful of religious minority women are behaving in what in Europe is perhaps an eccentric but almost certainly socially harmless practice, but that it is so unfamiliar and challenging to European sensibilities that it is being suppressed in an irrational manner. One could further argue that in this sense, the burqa serves as a synecdoche for intolerance of Muslim immigrants generally and a dogmatic demand that they change their cultural practices to adapt to Western expectations rather than being allowed space to practice even their most personal choices such as standards of modesty.

There is, however, a second instinctive reaction, which is to recoil at the idea that women are in a sense walling themselves off from others in societies that do not expect women to spend most of their time behind closed doors, with male relatives or with other women. All the pseudo-feminist arguments about agency aside, it’s impossible for me not to see the burqa and niqab as expressions of a cultural sensibility that is fundamentally oppressive towards women and that cannot but restrict and impede their social engagement. Such reservations do not at all apply to the hijab which merely covers hair, and is pretty well the equivalent in terms of modesty to the choices made by women who wear shorts or miniskirts and those that prefer something at least knee-length, if not ankle-length. But in reality the face is so central to interpersonal communication that a faceless figure, especially if one does not have a history with that individual, can all too easily become a cipher or a blank screen upon which all kinds of ideas can be projected in a manner that is not helpful to either party. There is a reason why Freud insisted his patients lie on a couch in front of and facing away from his chair — the analyst ultimately had to become fully disembodied, detached from his image and persona, in order to become a perfect mirror for the analysand’s own self-analysis. That’s great for psychoanalytic therapy (for what it’s worth), but not for interpersonal communication in a modern society.

Moreover, this standard of “modesty” is associated with social practices that are repressive generally, especially towards women, and have at their core the idea that women really shouldn’t be seen, insofar as possible, except by male relatives or other women for completely irrational fear of all kinds of social and sexual mischief, and other symptoms of male hysteria. In other words, women who fully cover their faces yet seek fully engaged, normal lives in most modern societies are asking to be accommodated in social roles that their own choice of dress strongly implies are inappropriate. And, regarding what I’m calling the male hysteria behind this function of a rather extreme form of patriarchy, one can only speculate that the ultimate anxiety at work is the fear that instead of the presumed uncontrollable abundance of hyper-sexuality behind the veil, there really lies a disturbing and unmanageable lacuna. It’s tempting to think of the burqa as a kind of gigantic adult, yet infantile, fort-da game of peekaboo, regressively mediating male anxieties of social and sexual presence and absence. More prosaically one might simply observe that whatever is conjured up by the imagination will almost certainly be more exciting than almost any version of mundane reality, and, since people know this, the veil inevitably both provokes and manages male jouissance and anxiety. Be that as it may, there’s a strong element of cognitive dissonance in a fully veiled woman whose dress conveys the cultural sensibilities of purdah seeking full engagement with a society that operates in an extremely different and in many ways contradictory manner, whether in the Islamic world or the West.

The question then becomes whether or not one wants government to intervene in such a dysfunctional situation by imposing fines or some such discouragement. Here obviously is the great problem. Manner of dress ought, in so far as possible, to be determined by the individual, since social pluralism by definition means providing the greatest possible range of choices for people, within rational, necessary limits. If a woman wants to create barriers to effective interpersonal communication and social engagement for herself, assuming there isn’t any familial or social coercion at work, shouldn’t that be up to her? And who else is to judge what is and is not coercive? As I noted above, when you’re talking about a few hundred people in a country of many millions of people, it’s ridiculous for a government to waste its time on such question as a practical matter. But in theory, there are, I think, potential arguments for certain limits on dress at its most extreme stages.

With the hijab, it’s an easy matter: obviously it’s got to be a matter of choice because ultimately no one has a legitimate stake in whether or not somebody else covers their hair. It’s an arbitrary standard of modesty that falls well within almost any social construct and isn’t a barrier to any reasonable social function, interaction, right or responsibility unless people wish to be bigoted about it in either direction, holding the presence or absence of a scarf for or against an individual woman in an unjustifiable and irrational manner. But I think in the case of a burqa that covers the entire body except the eyes and, possibly, the hands, we find ourselves at an extreme, in some ways analogous to somebody who is completely uncovered, that is to say naked. All societies prohibit widespread public nudity, because there are things, minimally, that almost everyone feels we really don’t want to see to in public. By the same token, it might well be possible to argue that there are things, minimally, that we can legitimately insist on seeing in many public spaces, to whit the face, which is the primary means by which we identify and interact with each other in person.

The reasons for insisting on seeing the face are, in the end, the same as and the inverse of the reasons for covering the face: we do not want people to be anonymous, we want to know who they are. This is not only for reasons of cultural bias or effective interpersonal communications. It is, I think, a natural, instinctive human desire, beyond cultural norms, to want to react to a face that is reacting to our own, not a piece of cloth with a disembodied voice behind it. Covering it as a rule and a matter of social convention seems too close to obliterating the other’s social identity — and of course that was the whole point of the veil in the first place: for women not to have much of a social identity beyond what was permissible, in the guise of being spared the indignity and immodesty of the unwarranted male gaze.

There is, of course, also a potential security argument to be made, and that is being made, regarding public safety, and it’s not ridiculous. At this point it’s largely hypothetical in the West, as I don’t know of any cases of criminals of whatever variety using the burqa to evade the authorities, but it has certainly happened in Pakistan and elsewhere in those parts of the Muslim world where such dress is widely practiced. For a great and somewhat disturbing satirical take on this issue see the Texas Chainsaw Massacre-genre Pakistani horror film “Hell’s Ground” (2007, AKA “Zibahkhana,” which you can buy or watch on demand at Amazon.com) made by my dear friend Omar Ali Khan, which features a crazed killer in a bloodsoaked burqa as its “leatherface” super-villain. No surprise that it is Pakistan that produced this hyper-dystopian take on the burqa as a social text, and made it the centerpiece of what is far and away the country’s most gruesome horror film. But I think the thus-far fanciful public safety arguments, in the West at least, are ultimately subordinate to arguments about the proper role of government and its relations to fringe cultural and religious minorities (I mean the burqa-wearing fringe of the European Muslim minority).

So, how to balance these twin sets of legitimate concerns, protecting the rights of minorities, promoting the equal status of women, and fostering healthy social interactions among the citizenry without completely giving in to a nanny state mentality? First, as I keep saying, I don’t think it makes any sense for European states in which a tiny handful of people dress like this with no clear public harm to be actually enacting laws prohibiting it. As long as this is a fringe and marginal practice, and there aren’t any demonstrable ill effects (it’s use by criminals to evade detection, etc.) there probably isn’t any real reason for governments to bother wrestling with the question of whether to impose fines because of it. On the other hand, if the practice became very widespread there might begin to be a more compelling argument based on broader social concerns, the rights and status of women and other serious issues. However, those would have to be balanced against protection of the freedoms of religion and expression.

If the issue is ever widely forced across the West, and I certainly hope it won’t be, and especially if this happens in the context of legitimate security concerns, it might be necessary to parse between different forms of public space in which this kind of dress is deemed improper (most obviously, behind the wheel) and others in which it would be permitted. Ideally, this practice will remain marginal and therefore symbolic in both directions (i.e., both the practice and its prohibition) and, indeed, fade over time as Muslim immigrants assimilate into Western cultures creating their own versions of Islam as a social text, that then also informs converts in a manner not derivative of the social mores of parts of Quetta or whatnot.

And in the end, I think that this is the issue and the concern: it’s got to be up to Western Muslim communities, and not Western governments, to really ensure that the burqa and the niqab remain, as they are, highly unusual if not virtually unknown in Western societies. Insofar as parts of Muslim communities feel it is absolutely essential and religiously required, any bans will simply compound the problem by forcing women to stay home rather than go outdoors without covering their faces. The conversation has to be within Western Muslim communities, and indeed increasingly Muslim communities around the world, to interrogate why and how this region-specific, and sometimes class-specific, cultural practice became identified as a religious imperative, to untangle that process and demystify the concept, liberating everyone from what is plainly a grotesque and unacceptable misreading of Islamic doctrine.

The argument about the hijab is interesting, but ultimately academic because its use doesn’t or at least shouldn’t restrict the ability of Western Muslim communities, and especially women, to thrive in their own societies. The burqa and niqab do, or at least they would if they were not so rare. The consensus among Western Muslims against wearing them is very strong, and needs to be strengthened. It’s already virtually unanimous in most places, and that needs to be maintained and, indeed, expanded. More suggestively, it represents a potential important starting place for Western Muslims, who have thus far generally, on religious matters at least, been subsumed in a derivative discourse shaped in the traditional Islamic world, to begin a critical dialogue that challenges some received wisdom from some of their homelands, and shape their own sensibilities that can reverse the influence and start affecting the way “Islamic modesty” is perceived in some parts of the Muslim world that desperately need to rethink the concept. But such a salutary process is more likely to be successful if it doesn’t seem to be mandated by the government of Belgium.