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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Ibishblog reader writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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