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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Ibishblog reader asks me the following question:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frankly, I find myself torn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When the Obama administration decided to get tough with PM Netanyahu and his cabinet colleagues over settlements in Jerusalem and generalized noncooperation with American national security interests vis-à-vis peace in the Middle East, the big challenge always was holding Congress. The President has a majority in both houses, and therefore control by his supporters of key committees, in addition to strong support from the Jewish community generally which is almost entirely Democratic. However, as I’ve been recently explaining, the Israeli strategy, I think from the beginning, has been to play Congress off against the White House and deal with a divided, rather than a united American government. As long as Obama can hold Congress on his side, and not Netanyahu’s, he’s essentially in the drivers seat. However, if Congress begins to seriously challenge him, it becomes much more difficult and politically risky and costly to confront Israel over settlements in Jerusalem and other issues. A couple of weeks ago, the President laid down the marker by saying that the lack of peace costs the United States significantly in “blood and treasure.” In other words, this is in the national interest, indeed, he called it “a vital national interest,” of the United States and not simply a bilateral, let alone domestic political, matter.

Outrage from Israel and its most dedicated supporters outside of the government started, really, during the first Netanyahu visit to Washington in the spring of 2009. He and his entourage were apparently not particularly surprised at the toughness coming from the White House, especially on settlements and the relationship between Iran policy and Israel/Palestine policy. However, they were apparently flabbergasted and appalled that typically reliable Jewish members of Congress backed up the President and were not sympathetic to the arguments they were forwarding. They went back to Israel hurt and confused, at least as much as politicians can be. During the present confrontation which began with the Biden visit that was supposed to be a lovefest and a healing of wounds but that was sabotaged by the Ramat Shlomo fiasco, the President’s greatest source of authority and leverage has been that Congress, including key Jewish members, has thus far stuck with him. It’s completely unimportant what Republicans like Eric Cantor or marginal figures like Shelley Berkley have to say. The question is, what do the key Jewish members, and indeed other members, of the foreign policy elite in both houses have to say? So far, for the most part, they’ve been very supportive of Obama.

However, in the past week some cracks in the ice have begun to appear. The letter signed by some 300 congressmen and a similar one signed by about 75 senators was pretty irrelevant, because it consisted mainly of boilerplate about the importance of US-Israel relations and did not criticize the administration directly. It was a no-brainer for most of these politicians, and no challenge to the administration in practice. However, for many weeks, Jewish advocates and others have been piling on the pressure towards members of Congress, especially Jewish ones, that siding with Obama in this instance represents some kind of betrayal of Israel or some such gobbledygook.

My suspicion is that, as I’ve written several times in the past, on a number of occasions the Jewish pro-Israel lobby (there are, of course, others) has overreached during this confrontation, most obviously the ADL’s attack on Gen. Petraeus. And, there have been other incidents like the AIPAC Congressional letters cited above, and letters to the President from World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder, angry articles by advocates such as Ed Koch, Alan Dershowitz and Shmuley Boteach, and an obnoxious ad signed by Elie Wiesel attacking the idea of negotiations on the status of Jerusalem. Wiesel’s ridiculous text emphasized Jewish rights in Jerusalem but dismissed any idea of a Muslim connection to the city, and preposterously claimed that Muslims can settle anywhere in Jerusalem, making it impossible for any informed person to take it seriously.

All of this pressure has begun to take its toll on certain legislators, and the first significant casualty was always likely to be Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY, significantly), and so it proved. At the same time that it was being reported that Jewish American leaders were publicly criticizing but privately supporting the administration (in a reverse of the usual public praise versus private criticism), Schumer was letting it be known that if this spat over settlements in Jerusalem dragged on, he was prepared to begin to side with Netanyahu and Israel rather than Obama and the United States. So it wasn’t much of a surprise when he finally came out of the closet on the “Nachum Segal Show” (you can’t make this stuff up) to vow that Jewish members of Congress “will be meeting with the President next week or the week after, and we are saying that this has to stop.” He added that, “There is a battle going on inside the administration, one side agrees with us, one side doesn?t, and we?re pushing hard to make sure the right side wins and if not we?ll have to take it to the next step.” No doubt that’s true, but for chutzpah this is pretty ripe. He added, for good measure, “Palestinians don?t really believe in a state of Israel, they, unlike a majority of Israelis, who have come to the conclusion that they can live with a 2-state solution to be determined by the parties, the majority of Palestinians are still very reluctant, and they need to be pushed to get there.” As if, of course, there was any real basis for believing the present Israeli government is not “very reluctant” on a two-state solution.

Obviously, if it’s just Schumer, this is highly containable, but, as I say, it’s the first really significant crack in the ice, and who knows who these other “Jewish members of Congress” are who will also meet with the President on this issue and what they will say. Reacting to all of this, the administration led by figures such as Sec. Clinton, NSA Jones and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel have been on something of a charm offensive over the past week or so designed to try to explain to the mainstream Jewish American community that the Obama approach is, in fact, in not only the American national interest — a case made bluntly and clearly by Pres. Obama himself, as well as Sec. Clinton, Sec. Gates, Adm. Mullen and Gen. Petraeus, among others — but also in the Israeli interest as well. If Schumer is right, and undoubtedly he is, that there is a “battle” going on inside the administration, the side that argues that the lack of peace (not, of course, Israeli policy in general) is antithetical to US strategic concerns has already won, and there’s no going back on this. It’s a consensus, and if mainstream Jewish American organizations and Jewish American members of Congress and Senators like Schumer don’t like it, they’re really just going to have to get used to it. The charm offensive thus far is working. Apart from Schumer and some individual or marginal figures in the House, there has been no major series of defections from the legislators who are Netanyahu’s only hope of beating back the President of the United States.

So, the charm offensive is wise and strategically sound. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post last week said, somewhat incoherently, that while Pres. Obama had the right policies on Middle East peace he has been unable to communicate this to the Israeli public and therefore was on the brink of some kind of “blunder.” Roger Cohen of the New York Times (almost certainly no relation) argued that Israelis, and by implication their Jewish-American supporters, operate mainly from an irrational set of existential fears that do not take into consideration Israel’s actual strategic prowess. In other words, Israelis and their American friends, especially among Jewish Democrats, are one of the main beneficiaries of the Obama approach but many of them don’t realize this. And, both publicly and privately administration officials are trying to explain that their policies keep uppermost in mind the need to deal with Iran in a serious and effective manner, which is the most urgent concern of the Israeli government and also the mainstream American Jewish community. The message is: this is about Iran, whether you get that or not.

Thus far most strategically positioned Jewish Democratic members of Congress have stuck with Obama and Biden rather than defecting to Netanyahu and Shas Interior Minister Eli Yishai. This is because they are genuinely loyal Americans loathe to side with another government over their own and also because they are loyal Democrats whose political future is strongly tied with the strength of the administration and, especially, the President. The charm offensive is required to solidify these impulses, since they’ve been under fairly heavy attack both on and off the record from those who would want these Jewish Democrats and others to actually side with the Prime Minister of Israel rather than the President of the United States.

Over the past couple weeks I’ve written many times that the name of the game for Pres. Obama is holding Congress, and if the charm offensive towards the Jewish community helps him to continue to do that, it can only be a good thing. There is, after all, no change in policy here, only an effort to explain it to a skeptical and alarmed constituency that is politically and strategically important. It therefore shouldn’t alarm supporters of the President’s policies, but rather encourage them.

And, there are real reasons for suspecting that Pres. Obama’s pressure on the Israeli leadership is starting to pay off. On Friday, there was a swath of interesting reports that suggested that the Israeli leadership is really feeling the pressure. The leaders of both Yisrael Beitenu (Lieberman’s party) and Shas (Yishai’s party), the twin centers of ultra right-wing gravity in the present cabinet and Israeli society in general issued statements suggesting that they would not be categorically opposed to an unannounced settlement freeze in occupied East Jerusalem. Akiva Eldar and several other Israeli journalists wrote about the potential for a “gentleman’s agreement,” which is another term for the older idea of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” in which Israel would not announce any settlement freeze in Jerusalem but would also refrain from any significant building, especially in Arab areas. Pres. Abbas has said several times that such an unannounced but effective freeze would be sufficient for a return to negotiations. And clearly the White House would be satisfied with such an arrangement as well. In addition, PM Netanyahu on Friday said that he was open to the idea of a Palestinian state with “temporary borders,” obviously a nonstarter from the Palestinian point of view but new language from him, and, more significantly, that the long-term future of Arab areas of Jerusalem were ?a question that will arise in the final-status arrangements.? This obviously is a far cry from the “undivided, eternal capital of the Jewish people” or any other version of the usual, impossible, boilerplate.

None of this significant movement is imaginable outside of the context of the present US-Israel confrontation, and Obama’s policies generally. It could all be posturing for American consumption, but more likely it reflects a real discomfort in the Israeli government with the present standoff, especially as they have yet to be able to seriously muster significant congressional support against the White House, and therefore signifies potential real changes in Israeli policy. So, while there is pushback going on in Washington, there are actually serious signs of progress on the broader diplomatic front. That’s why the administration’s charm offensive pushback against the angry pro-Israel pushback is so important. And, it helps to explain why people like Schumer are starting to break with the administration and the extent to which the rest need to hold firm. This is about results, and there is every reason to think they’re actually starting to be produced.

There is a second, perhaps more significant pushback beginning to develop, and it’s a serious and coordinated assault on the reputations of Pres. Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad aimed at an American audience, including many powerful people, that frankly doesn’t know very much about them. Again, it’s all about results that are starting to be produced. In particular, the policies and approach of PM Fayyad have been deeply alarming to many Israelis and their supporters on two grounds: first, his approach actually threatens to end the occupation and establish a Palestinian state, to which some of these individuals are deeply opposed; and second, even some those who theoretically are not categorically opposed to the idea of a Palestinian state are greatly disconcerted to find Palestinians taking the initiative and creating their own “facts on the ground” that narrow the range of Israeli options and force issues they would prefer to see left up to diplomacy and the caprices of Israeli domestic politics.

The most dramatic gesture in this direction has been the announcement yesterday that the so-called “Palestinian Media Watch” run by an extremist settler called Itamar Marcus, is planning to run widely placed ads all over the American media accusing Abbas and Fayyad of “glorifying terrorists” and therefore, by implication, of being terrorists as well. This dovetails with increasing concerns coming from the Israeli military and right-wing about not only Palestinian state building, but more specifically the wave of Palestinian nonviolent protests that are being increasingly encouraged and, indeed, lead by the Palestinian national leadership including the President and especially the Prime Minister. I’ll have a lot more to say about this slanderous and preposterous attack in the near future, especially as it continues to develop. Stay tuned on both counts.

The other day I wrote on the Ibishblog that Richard II is my favorite of the early Shakespeare plays, and that I thought it was the one about which he was most careful and into which he put most work. I feel the need to explain this in a little bit more detail in a posting that no longer pays any attention to the Shakespeare Theater Company’s misguided adaptation that has now closed. First of all, I see more care, and indeed carefulness, in Richard II than in not only the early comedies, but also the four history plays that preceded it: Henry VI, Parts One, Two and Three, and Richard III. It seems that this first tetralogy proved so popular that Shakespeare went back and did another quartet of histories that are a prequel to the first, beginning with Richard II and culminating in Henry V, which of course sets up the earlier produced Henry VI-Richard III cycle. Most of these eight histories rely on Rafael Holinshed’s Chronicles as their main source, although some clearly also tapped into some accounts. However, Richard II is unique in that it seems to be derived from at least eight separate historical accounts, including Chronicles, a really extraordinary number, and also in literary terms plainly from Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (and in at least one famous line Doctor Faustus as well), and possibly even the anonymous play Thomas of Woodstock.

The reason Shakespeare evidently researched, and indeed wrote, Richard II with such care and attention to detail is, of course, that he was playing with fire, and he knew it. Richard II is, after all, about the deposing and murder of a monarch, very heavy stuff for a Renaissance audience. It was even more delicate because of some superficial similarities between Richard and Elizabeth, particularly that they were both childless and frequently criticized for the alleged misbehavior of favorites and sycophants. Later on in her reign, Elizabeth reportedly bitterly complained about the number of public performances of Richard II and reportedly declared, “I am Richard, know ye not that?” The most troubling of these public performances was, of course, the one commissioned by supporters of the Earl of Essex the evening before his ill-fated rebellion. Shakespeare’s company was interrogated in the investigation into the plot, and they told the authorities that they had complained that the play was “so old and so long out of use that they should have a small company at it” but that since they were promised 40 shillings above their usual take, they did it for the money. Possibly. At any rate, Essex’s followers obviously felt a production of the play would be an important gesture setting up their planned deposition of Elizabeth, so the play’s ideas were not only dangerous in theory, they were dangerous in practice as well.

And, indeed, Richard II is hardly the only political Shakespeare play (most of them have at least some element of politics), but it is the one that seems to involve ideas closest to what we now call political theory. It was written after a century of political speculation in England in which the concept of the divine right of kings had been slowly chipped away at by new ideas that began to incorporate more of a sense of the responsibilities of monarchs as well as their prerogatives, and had begun to suggest that political rights were contingent on concomitant responsibilities. Since at least the Magna Carta, the English monarchy had been first among equals in a super stratum of aristocrats that ruled the country. But, the idea that there was an element of meritocracy or minimal competency and responsibilities that might trump divine right and coronation, was slow to enter into theoretical conceptualizations of government. And, of course, generalized conceptions of political responsibility as an essential component of political legitimacy go far beyond simply respecting the recognized, specific and limited rights of peers and commons. Leaving people alone within clearly defined and limited spheres is one thing, but expectations of good governance are something entirely different. By the time Shakespeare composed Richard II in about 1595, such notions had been gaining ground for a number of decades. Early understandings of constitutionalism and limited monarchy were becoming more widespread, articulated in formulations such as Henry de Bracton’s influential dictum that the king serves “under God and under the law because the law maketh a king,” and Sir John Fortesque’s formulation that, “the king exists for the sake of the kingdom, and not the kingdom for the sake of the king.”

In Richard II, Shakespeare dramatizes the tension between what are essentially medieval notions of divine right and political legitimacy versus emerging Renaissance conceptualizations of political responsibilities and merit in the persons of Richard and Bolingbroke. He lays out the case clearly for both perspectives, but scrupulously doesn’t take sides, so that it has been entirely possible for commentators over the centuries to read either perspective into the play. Indeed, Shakespeare makes it more difficult to adopt one position or the other absolutely by focusing the first half of the play, before the deposition scene, largely on abuses and mismanagement by Richard (Bolingbroke’s case), and the second half, following the deposition, rebuilding sympathy for Richard, his position and his predicament, and calling attention to the sacrilege of his deposition (Richard’s case). And this budding sense of constitutionalism is reflected in the Bolingbroke co-conspirators’ concern that Richard confess to a bill of particulars against his rule so that “the commons will be satisfied,” suggesting that there are red lines which a monarch may not cross without inviting deposition, and also that Parliament must be satisfied for the resignation and transfer of power to a new king to be sustainable, in spite of the plausible claim of succession forwarded by Bolingbroke.

Bolingbroke’s Machiavellian effectiveness and skills are contrasted with Richard’s grand regal theatricality. Richard is, at heart, a drama queen. He revels as much in his abjection when he is deposed and imprisoned as he ever did in his Royal Majesty on the throne. One of the most remarkable, and for many commentators troubling, aspects of Richard II is the seemingly bizarre conduct of the title character when confronted with the Lancastrian rebellion. He swings wildly back and forth between despair and defeatism, a new experience by which he seems to be truly enthralled, and vainglorious assertions of his divine right and protection by God. His despair speeches are justly famous, most notably “for God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground, and tell sad stories of the death of kings,” etc. The crux of Richard’s rule is precisely this theatricality, this incessant role-playing. Bolingbroke knows it, which is one of the reasons he is able to move against him so effectively.

Richard doesn’t rule exactly as much as, literally, act like a king. Even after his dramatic and crushing defeat, when he has come to effectively surrender, his uncle York remarks of him, “Yet looks he like a king: behold, his eye, as bright as is the eagle’s, lightens forth controlling majesty.” Apparently, he always did. When Richard, wallowing in abjection during the deposition scene, becomes hysterical when Northumberland attempts to force him to read out loud the bill of particulars of his misrule to “satisfy the commons,” Richard demands a mirror which he then histrionically smashes, declaring “A brittle glory shineth in this face: As brittle as the glory is the face; For there it is, crack’d in a hundred shivers. Mark, silent king, the moral of this sport, How soon my sorrow hath destroy’d my face.” Bolingbroke, however, has his number, icily countering, “The shadow of your sorrow hath destroyed, The shadow of your face.” Precisely so. Richard’s rule has been a shadow of a rule, whereas Bolingbroke’s Machiavellian insurgency, quite possibly planned from the beginning and the challenge against Mowbray that may have been designed as an opening salvo leading precisely to this seizure of power, is all too real.

This tension between political effectiveness on the one hand versus legitimacy on the other hand, as well as the artifice and theatricality of monarchy is played out very clearly in the language throughout Richard II. It is the only of Shakespeare’s plays that is almost entirely in very precise pentameter and much of it, especially in the court scenes, involving not blank verse but rhyming couplets. Normally Shakespeare is very judicious in his application of couplets, reserving them for moments of special emphasis or the conclusion of a thought, an interaction or a narrative development. In Richard II, Shakespeare uses a wild proliferation of rhyming couplets as well as a strict adherence to pentameter in order to achieve the effect of formality and faux grandeur in Richard’s court. Foregrounding the artifice of language, much less naturalistic than Shakespeare’s already stilted and extremely idiosyncratic phrasings and constructs, helps dramatize the histrionic artifice behind Richard’s entire hold on power. It’s all a show.

Bolingbroke’s grasp of that allows him to use the actual mechanics of power — appealing to public opinion and flattering the common folk, playing on the anxieties of his fellow nobles, making the specific case of mismanagement against Richard and his cronies thereby raising the question of political responsibilities balancing political legitimacy and divine rights, marshaling and deploying quickly military allies at a moment of the enemy’s exposure (Richard’s trip to Ireland), constructing a plausible claim of succession so as not to disrupt the established order of monarchy, etc. — to unseat Richard with relatively little effort. It’s also impossibly rapid. Richard II is one of many Shakespeare plays in which there are multiple time registers in simultaneous and impossible operation, and in which the audience is manipulated into assuming that significant amount of time has passed when in fact according to the literal chronology of events, or at least one of them, a ludicrously short amount of time has actually gone by. In this case it would appear that mere days pass by between Bolingbroke’s banishment and his deposition of Richard.

We note, of course, that while the formality of the rhymed couplets in the early scenes underscores a presumed common understanding of authority and legitimacy in Richard’s court (soon to be tested by the rebellion), the specific content of many of the couplets, especially those of Bolingbroke and Mowbray, are discordant or combative in their content. So, behind the careful formal harmony of the language lurks significant disharmony of meaning, in the same way that in the first scene both Bolingbroke and Mowbray can be read as threatening Richard in different ways behind formal professions of obeisance. It’s noteworthy that John of Gaunt’s condemnation of Richard’s rule, which sets the stage and makes the case for the rebellion, is entirely in blank verse without any rhyming at all, suggesting that formality which calls for strict deference and obedience is no longer directing his words. Once the action has moved away from Richard’s court into the contest for power driven by the Bolingbroke rebellion, the insistence on rhyming couplets, but not on pentameter, abates in the text. There are still some, of course, particularly from Richard himself, or in the normal Shakespearean manner to complete a thought or foreground some aspect of the narrative for dramatic emphasis. But couplets do not go with either the discord of civil conflict or Bolingbroke’s Machiavellian and goal-oriented political style. Even Richard increasingly abandons rhyming as the conflict careens towards its rapid and decisive resolution.

However, once Bolingbroke assumes the throne, just like the argument over who killed Gloucester, the rhyming couplets suddenly stage a dramatic return, although their structure is significantly different this time. In effect, what the language is telling us is that Bolingbroke understands the need for theatricality and artifice in a royal court, the formality that incessant rhymed couplets within the pentameter convey. But, he doesn’t quite know how to use them the way Richard did, and his couplets appear self-defeating. By the end of the play, he appears entirely trapped in them. It’s the first instance in which we have a sense of the limitations of his political skills. Bolingbroke is, in effect, unconvincingly mimicking Richard, a natural and accomplished actor on the stage of the court. He, as Richard says, “knows well how to get,” but at the earliest stages of his new reign, because of the language, we begin to wonder if he knows well how to use. In fact, it falls to his son, the future Henry V, to really take the power that has been usurped and put it to maximum effect before all those gains are then squandered during the disastrous reign of his own son, Henry VI.

Richard’s addiction to artifice and playacting extends itself into his greatest abjection scene, the rather complicated speech he gives in his jail cell in Pomfret, alone, impoverished, friendless and in mortal peril. And in this in amazing self-indulgent exercise in relishing abjection, Richard now owns, rather brilliantly, blank verse as Bolingbroke and his court struggle to resume the formality of couplets that characterized Richard’s court. Behind that gigantic and impressive façade of theatricality lies a hollow shell of a man. In the deposition scene, when Bolingbroke asks him, ?Are you contented to resign the crown?? Richard replies, ?Ay, no; no, ay.? This, of course, when spoken, is a homonym for as ?I know no I.? He is not only a man divided against himself, as he says ?if I turn mine eyes upon myself, I find myself a traitor with the rest; For I have given here my soul’s consent, To undeck the pompous body of a king,? he also doesn?t know who he is: “I have no name, no title, No, not that name was given me at the font? And know not now what name to call myself!” This is not so much a loss of identity as the uncovering of a great absence within Richard that was always there, as he calls himself a ?king of snow? who is melting away ?in water drops? as he weeps for his lost throne. It was not only the crown that was hollow, but also the man who wore it. Alone in his prison cell before his murder, Richard imagines a multiplicity of people born of his own imagination, ?Thus play I in one person many people, And none contented: sometimes am I king; Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar, And so I am: then crushing penury, Persuades me I was better when a king; Then am I king’d again: and by and by, Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke, And straight am nothing.? All in his own imagination, both monarch and prisoner are roles to be played, acts of will on his own solipsistic, even narcissistic not to say monomaniacal, part. At his core, beyond these roles, is nothing.

In all of this I see the enormous care Shakespeare took in constructing Richard II, sticking entirely to pentameter and carefully using the frequency and nature of couplets or blank verse to reflect different political situations, attitudes and skill sets. As I already noted, Shakespeare refuses to take sides in this clash between a crisis of governance versus a crisis of legitimation. Richard correctly predicts that Northumberland will not long stick with Bolingbroke after he is crowned Henry IV, and so it proves. Indeed, Northumberland’s party led by Hotspur subsequently invokes the overthrow and murder of Richard as Exhibit A against Henry in their failed attempt to depose him. As first John of Gaunt and then the Bishop of Carlisle, among others, predict, Richard’s unacceptable mismanagement and then illegitimate deposition by Bolingbroke will kick off a long series of wars, and Shakespeare seems to see in these twin crises of governance and legitimation a kind of original sin which the English state needed to work through via the bloodshed of the ensuing civil conflict between the houses of York and Lancaster.

The one lesson Shakespeare seems to have taken to heart from his reading of this period of English history is the advice he attributes by Henry IV to his son, the future Henry V, that foreign wars are the key to English tranquility, happiness and political effectiveness. On his deathbed he confesses, ?God knows, my son, By what by-paths and indirect crook’d ways, I met this crown,” and, that, ?I had many living to upbraid, My gain of it by their assistances; Which daily grew to quarrel and to bloodshed, Wounding supposed peace. All these bold fears, Thou seest with peril I have answered; For all my reign hath been but as a scene, Acting that argument.? ?Therefore, my Harry,? he advises, ?Be it thy course to busy giddy minds, With foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out, May waste the memory of the former days.? This harkens back to his uncle York’s declaration of Richard’s grandfather, Edward, that “when he frown’d, it was against the French, And not against his friends; his noble hand, Did will what he did spend and spent not that, Which his triumphant father’s hand had won; His hands were guilty of no kindred blood, But bloody with the enemies of his kin.” In other words, the English are now embroiled in civil conflicts based on conflicting narratives and if ?giddy minds? are allowed to dwell on those narratives, civil conflict will erupt again immediately (as it does after the conquest of France and the death of Henry V). Even Henry IV?s effort to smooth things over by pardoning opponents like Aumerle and Carlisle does not resolve anything. The answer is foreign wars, especially against France. They provide an alternative focus for aggression, a change of subject from internal conflicts and a ready path to legitimation through patriotism and appeals to national glory. If Shakespeare?s depiction of Henry V?s triumphant rule is anything to go by, it seems he thought this excellent political advice and sound judgment indeed.

A couple weeks ago I had the privilege of being invited to chair a panel at a major conference on secularism and the future of Iran at Lake Forest College in Illinois. In February, as regular readers of the Ibishblog will recall, I spoke at a conference on Iran and the Arab world at Rutgers University organized by Prof. Golbarg Bashi and her outstanding students, and I found it to be a most inspiring and uplifting event. The Lake Forest College conference, organized by Prof. Ahmed Sadri who I have known and admired for many years, was a completely different but also extraordinary event. The Rutgers conference was raw, passionate, intense and deeply emotional. All of those qualities may have been present at some level at Lake Forest, but Sadri’s conference was much more cerebral, much more academic and much more focused, and its speakers were a veritable who’s who of Iranian intellectuals in the United States. Maybe the only obvious major missing figure was the brilliant Said Arjomand, who gave the most outstanding talk at the Rutgers conference.

After the Rutgers event, I blogged that I found the affair not only inspiring, but in a marked contrast to the kind of atmosphere I’m used to encountering on the Arab academic left in the United States. The Lake Forest College conference only brought home these increasingly striking distinctions. Because it was a conference on secularism and the future of Iran, and focused very strongly on the green movement and its challenge to the Iranian ruling clique, the Lake Forest affair focused very heavily on a single, unavoidable topic: the fault line running through the Iranian opposition between secular and religious orientations. Most speakers strongly critiqued the binary between secularism and devotion, holding that such distinctions are arbitrary and false, and extraneous to the question of civil liberties and political rights now at stake in Iran. However, at least one powerful voice, Mehrzad Boroujerdi, continuously reasserted the validity of secularism as a philosophical concept and the centrality of its principles as a political value.

In this conference, as usual, the term “secularism” was overdetermined and ambiguous, referring to many things and nothing at the same time. Many speakers attempted to define secularism’s meaning, or different meanings that have been applied to the term. For me, as with Boroujerdi I think, at its bottom line secularism really refers to the neutrality of the state on religious matters, not with imposing iconoclasm or anti-clericalism on a willing or unwilling society. However, in the Iranian and broader Middle Eastern context, secularism has unfortunately come to mean varying degrees of repudiation of religion at various levels, as brilliantly dissected by Prof. Sadri himself.

The reason the conference focused so strongly on this question is that one of the greatest vulnerabilities of the green movement, and the Iranian opposition in general, is that its most significant division is precisely between those who yearn for less religion in public life and who are essentially secular, whether they define themselves in those terms or not, and devout oppositionists who are opposed to either the present ruling clique and/or the system of villayat e-faqih or the constitution of the Islamic Republic. Indeed, it’s extremely significant that much of the clerical establishment feels sidelined by the new pasdaran and basij-dominated ruling elite and has been at the forefront of oppositional politics since the election fraud last summer because they feel that a system many of them do not object to in theory has in practice been hijacked by thugs and hoodlums. To these disgruntled reformist clerics add a great many other devout but enraged protesters who either do not object to the system but to what it has become or who may object to some aspects of the system but nonetheless can in no way be described as secularists. However, obviously, many of the protesters and much of the opposition is motivated by rejection of the Khomeinite system and a drive towards a return to genuine secularism and the abandonment of divine politics in Iran.

None of this is straightforward, of course, and there are always shades of gray and gradations perhaps as complex as each single individual with their particular mix of ideas, prejudices, orientations and sentiments. My own view, which I did not hesitate to express on a number of occasions both on and off the stage, is that whether you want to call it secularism or not, the neutrality of the state on religious matters in societies that are heterogeneous in religious opinion (as all are) is a sine qua non for social pluralism, which in turn is a sine qua non for having a decent society that respects people’s basic civil liberties and rights. At the same time, obviously Middle Eastern societies including Iran are not going to be inclined to adopt the American approach by mimicking the First Amendment and its broadly interpreted establishment clause. Arabs, Iranians, Turks and Israelis, among others, are going to have to find their own ways of achieving social pluralism and religious tolerance. And obviously it’s crucial not to have the green movement split along the religious/secular fault line.

The sharpest disagreement of the event was between AbdolKarim Soroush, Iran’s preeminent living philosopher and intellectual, and Prof. Hamid Dabashi of Columbia University. Soroush’s talk was a breathtaking virtuoso performance that had all the appearance of being a sudden extemporaneous diversion from his announced topic, and I think that’s exactly what it was. It’s the kind of feat that could only be accomplished by someone in almost total command of a vast array of material in Muslim intellectual history. On the other hand, while its erudition was spectacular, some of its claims and assumptions seemed somewhat dubious, and Dabashi was quick to pounce. In effect, Soroush was arguing that much of traditional Islamic thought, including all of Muslim philosophy, has to be regarded as “secular,” because it is “worldly” rather than strictly speaking theological. This struck me as an incredibly broad reading and application of the concept of secularism, far beyond what is normally attributed to the term and probably beyond what is theoretically defensible. Soroush has long advocated the narrowest application of the concept and the realm of authority of a “religious” social register and an exceedingly broad application of what properly belongs to a “secular” social register in Iran and other Muslim countries. This orientation seems to have evolved recently into this exceedingly broad application of the political category of “secular” to any concept or practice that is anything other than, strictly speaking, theological, or to anything that has any “worldly” facets or applications. It might be, in fact, a politically useful way of framing the issue, but nonetheless it’s difficult to accept on face value. Dabashi openly scoffed that next Soroush would be arguing that the Prophet Mohammed was himself a “secularist.” Hyperbole, no doubt, but the critique struck rather powerfully.

Listening to this conversation from an Arab point of view brings home clearly that the Iranians have managed to bring their society to the point where a serious discussion about how an aspirational, but very real, oppositional political trend, centered around a reformist, civil liberties movement, can stay united by bridging the divide between secular and religious tendencies. More to the point, by example it illustrates how far the Arabs have to go to get to that stage. Obviously, we don’t have anything like the green movement in the Arab world, or any serious opposition movement that demands serious reforms for the better in the name of people’s rights. The secular-religious divide in the Arab world unfortunately doesn’t have to be carefully navigated in this context because this kind of aspirational politics either doesn’t exist or is socially extremely marginal. Indeed, secular politics generally are on the decline and the defensive across the board. Unlike in the Shiite world, among Sunni Arabs there is little tradition of clerics as political leaders, and where there are religiously-oriented political structures (all of the main opposition movements in the Arab world are, essentially, Islamist) they are invariably reactionary rather than reformist, and obviously not in the least bit interested in ensuring people’s civil or other rights. They attack the undemocratic regimes from their religious right, but clearly without believing in any of the essential components of a pluralistic or even democratic society. Sunni Arab religious leadership therefore tends to be either hopelessly quietist or alarmingly radical and therefore even more threatening than governments that, on their own, have little to recommend them.

As I noted above, a very significant segment of the Iranian clergy is disenchanted with the way the “Islamic Republic” has turned out, and feel sidelined by the new ruling clique. Ayatollahs Sane’i, Bayat-Zanjani and Dastgheib obviously speak for a great many in Qom in their bitter critiques of government repression, and implicit condemnation of concentration of power in the hands of the security services and the supreme leader as an individual. So the participation of not only clerics but extremely devout Iranians is a crucial element of the green movement, indeed in many ways it’s the green part. Mousavi, Karroubi and the other reformist politicians appeal to “a return to the constitution” and represent those Iranians who want to fix rather than change the system altogether. None of these people can be described, I think, as “secular” unless by the kind of definition Soroush was proposing. But there are obviously lots of other people involved in what is a very disparate movement with no clear leadership or clear agenda, other than the promotion of civil liberties, would have to be defined in those terms, and who want no part of any “return” to the 1989 amended constitution of the Islamic Republic.

These are real problems, to be sure, that the green movement and any effective oppositional politics in Iran will have to navigate and negotiate, but from an Arab point of view they are problems I would really like to have. One can only imagine with envy a time when the Arab world has to seriously confront reconciling religious and secular tendencies within the same broad-based, uplifting and aspirational rights movement that is confronting dictatorship with dignity and sincerity. The closest thing we see to this in the Arab world today is the budding nonviolent protest movement in the occupied West Bank, but that is confronting Israeli occupation, and not Arab tyranny. I was delighted and honored to participate in the Lake Forest conference on secularism and the future of Iran, but in truth it was yet another stark reminder of how very far the Arab world really has to go to get anywhere remotely near where it needs to be.

Recent efforts by student activists and others to convince the University of California Berkeley to divest from two companies with strong ties to Israel and its defense establishment is the first really powerful test of the “BDS” movement in the United States. The bottom line is this: if you can’t get divestment through UC Berkeley, you’re done. UC Berkeley is the epicenter of not only liberalism, but even radicalism, in American academia and indeed American social life in general. Frankly, I’m surprised it’s proving so difficult.

After a long campaign, pro-sanctions activists managed to get the student government to vote for such a resolution, but the student president vetoed it, and the struggle then became to get a supermajority required to overcome that veto. The first attempt to do this failed, but has been tabled until next week. It may or may not succeed, and at any rate it would only be a recommendation to the university without any force. So even if it passes in the end, it hardly constitutes an act of actual divestment.

But I think UC Berkeley is an interesting test in the opposite way that BDS proponents suggest: I don’t think it would be a tremendous and astonishing achievement to get UC Berkeley to go along with this idea. In fact, really it should not be difficult for such ideas to spread throughout the Bay Area. And I think that’s probably the limit, more or less, of its potential area of effectiveness in the United States, with some other, much smaller, pockets of extreme liberalism excepted. So the real test is not whether it can succeed at UC Berkeley against all expectations, but rather whether it will fail there against those same expectations, or at least my own well-informed understanding of what those expectations ought to be.

Spin is a wondrous thing, and I’ve rarely seen more spin in my life than has been engaged in by BDS proponents who have been trying to create the impression that there is a major movement in this direction in the United States and that is “succeeding” and, even more preposterously, “having results.” One day, I suppose it’s possible that such a thing may come to pass, but it’s very difficult if not impossible under present circumstances to imagine many major American institutions, even academic institutions, divesting or adopting any kind of generalized boycott against Israel. I think people who imagine this happening really don’t have a clear sense of the degree to which Israeli institutions are intertwined and enmeshed with American institutions, most specifically military and intelligence, but also corporate, nongovernmental, civil society and academic ones as well. The pushback from pro-Israel activists will be enormous and, I think in most cases, likely successful. I just don’t think there’s an appetite for this in most elements of American society. I’d be perfectly open to being proven wrong, but I think the UC Berkeley case illustrates my point extremely well. BDS activists are spinning the thus far unsuccessful UC Berkeley effort (at issuing a recommendation, mind you) as a “great achievement,” but I really don’t think any serious person can buy that line. They may have a success next week, and then some more in the Bay Area and a few other places, but I really think that will be all she wrote even in a best case scenario.

The problem, ultimately, with the BDS approach as on display at UC Berkeley, and in contrast to other boycott efforts that wisely target elements of the occupation such as the settlements, as opposed to Israel itself, is that it doesn’t advance any articulable or achievable political goal. No doubt that behind such efforts for the most part lurk one-state sentiments that, however noble they might be, don’t actually correspond to anything plausibly achievable. Since working towards ending the occupation is the only sensible course of action under the present circumstances, and the only seriously achievable goal that would advance both the Palestinian national interest and the cause of peace, activism should be measured by the degree to which it helps to promote that goal. If another goal is intended, I think people need to be very clear about what it is, and how they hope to get there, and I really don’t think anyone can really imagine that boycotts are going to be the primary tool in resolving this national conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Anyone who does think that is hopelessly, touchingly naïve. The very most generous thing one might say is that this is a movement waiting for a leadership to emerge deus ex machina that could translate its momentum, if any, into actual political results vis-à-vis Israel. If the goal is ending the occupation, then the problem with BDS is that instead of distinguishing between the occupation and Israel itself, and separating the interests of the majority of Israelis from the settlers and other proponents of maintaining the occupation at all costs, it conflates them and creates an atmosphere which encourages Israelis in general to circle the wagons against outside pressure rather than understand that ending the occupation is in their own interests.

The Berkeley resolution doesn’t, in fact, talk about occupation, but rather about war crimes, mainly with reference to the war in Gaza. So, perhaps, its proponents might argue that it is simply a principled stand against companies connected to an entity (the Israeli military) that has committed war crimes, and not to any broader political agenda or achievable goal. I think that’s probably disingenuous. If it is true, then it means this is not only a largely empty gesture, but a pointless one as well, literally, since the war is over and the political agenda has moved on in every direction. I think it’s clear from most BDS rhetoric that BDS proponents do see boycotts and divestment as part of an overall political agenda, but usually the intended outcome is left very murky — indeed, it’s noteworthy that the Berkeley effort has had support from prominent people who completely disagree about what the appropriate overall political agenda (two states, one state, etc.) has to be. This reflects a serious degree of confusion. Clarity is required and political goals dictate strategy, which then defines tactics. In this case, the goal is amorphous, even contradictory, so the strategy is unclear and the tactics, such as this action at UC Berkeley, seem unconnected to any coordinated effort that has a focused, organized goal. It’s extremely unlikely that such wild, uncoordinated efforts could ultimately produce any kind of intended effect. Indeed, it’s more likely to have unintended effects.

There are other kinds of boycotts and divestment, which I wholeheartedly support, and which make eminent political sense because they fit perfectly into a broad strategy that is being coordinated by a national leadership. Sanctions targeted at the occupation, the settlements, the wall in the West Bank, etc. and that scrupulously call attention to the distinction between Israel and the one hand and the occupation on the other hand and that separate the two and pull their interests apart are useful both in terms of political symbolism and, potentially, as practical pressure on certain vulnerabilities regarding that aspect of Israeli behavior that most needs changing. Such sanctions and divestment are consistent with the PA strategy that combines diplomacy with state and institution building, nonviolent protests and economic measures aimed at the occupation, and that has a clear intended outcome: ending the occupation. This strategy seeks to continue the process of dividing Israelis between those who support maintaining occupation at all costs and those who understand distinction between Israel as such and the occupation and the settlers.

Of course, there are plenty of people who support the broad kind of BDS that tends to unite rather than divide Israelis and which has no clear strategic aim, and who in fact are opposed to ending the occupation and prefer instead the one-state agenda aimed at the elimination of Israel and the creation of a single, democratic state in its place. For them, the fact that measures like the proposed Berkeley resolution target Israel generally is a positive thing. They’ve no interest in dividing Israeli society, only in confronting it. They’ve no interest in ending the occupation, since they don’t recognize the occupation, or at least have adopted logic that doesn’t allow for one to meaningfully speak in terms of an occupation, only discrimination in a single, at present undemocratic, state. Many of them also continue to talk about settlements, although that also doesn’t make any sense either given their logic, although they could talk about discriminatory Jewish-only towns or something like that. It never ceases to fascinate me that one-state rhetoric continues to be so deeply mired in two-state logic (occupation, settlements, etc.), categories that make no sense once a single state agenda has been adopted.

My point here is that there are sanctions and there are sanctions. Some have a clear goal and a positive effect, and others, and I’m afraid the UC Berkeley effort falls into this category, have unstated and entirely unclear goals, differently understood by different supporters, and would likely have counterproductive effects, if any. In a sense, this whole subject is rather moot, because I am completely convinced that there will not be any widespread boycotting and divesting of Israel and companies that do business in Israel in the United States generally, and that even if there were, that would not be anywhere near enough to get the Israelis to consider things like dissolving their own state. But if the Berkeley effort fails, and continues to fail, it will mean that BDS aimed at Israel in general and not the occupation, can’t take root even in the most fertile soil in the entire country. At that point, well-meaning activists really need to think of something else.