After my recent posting about anti-Semitism in the Merchant of Venice and the Jew of Malta, I received a very kind invitation from Seth Duerr founder and director of the York Shakespeare Company which, I was surprised to learn, was staging rotating productions of the two plays at the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan. I couldn’t resist. Last weekend I went to New York, saw both productions and had an extremely enjoyable and interesting dinner with Mr. Duerr. He strikes me as a most remarkable young man, and one of those rare individuals whose capacity seems to match their ambition; it’s much more typical to meet those with capacity but limited ambition, or those with huge ambitions but limited capacity. Mr. Duerr directed but, due to complicated New York City union regulations, was unable to perform in these plays.

I’m used to discussing Shakespeare and other Renaissance literature with academics rather than performers and directors, and I have to say I found Mr. Duerr’s command of and insights into the Shakespeare canon to be impressive and interestingly different from the understandings achieved by those who tend to mainly read the texts on paper or electronically. One of the more interesting things he told me is that he doesn’t derive any pleasure from reading Shakespeare, which I find remarkable, but needs to locate these texts in terms of a staged performance in order to engage with them properly. One of the reasons, I think, that I found his approach to the works unusual is that he is looking at them not as a reader/critic, or even so much as an actor, but rather as a director, concentrating on staging and theatrical storytelling that can communicate meanings from a stage to seats in the stalls. This is, of course, a restoration of the closest proximity to the conditions of the original production and initial reception and use of the texts themselves, since they were written by a manager/director of a theater, and were initially read by those involved in theatrical productions as scripts for performances rather than poems on paper. Engaging with Shakespeare as a director, or even an actor, places one in the oldest and most unbroken chain of conversation with the works themselves, far older and in many ways richer than anything academic and literary criticism can offer. And it necessitates knowing the plays literally inside out.

Regarding the productions of the Merchant of Venice and the Jew of Malta at the Manhattan JCC, the most straightforward evaluation would be to say that driving from Washington to New York early in the morning, watching one play, having dinner, watching the second play, and then driving back to Washington arriving in the middle of the night was well worth the trip. Rightly or wrongly, I’m not a fan of New York City and it takes a great deal to get me up there, and even more to make me consider that the visit was worthwhile. In this case, there’s no question. Allowing for the fact that the productions enjoyed virtually no budget and because of the aforesaid regulations could only be cast with nonunion performers, they were remarkably engaging, entertaining and stimulating.

The obvious argument at the heart of staging both plays in a rotating fashion at the JCC of Manhattan is that neither play is meaningfully, or simply and simplistically, anti-Semitic. The Jew of Malta, which has, as I explained the other day, an overwhelming and, I think, undeserved reputation as viciously anti-Semitic, especially in contrast to the Merchant of Venice, was staged in a very straightforward manner. There was no effort to recuperate the character of Barabas, because, as I wrote, a sympathetic portrayal of this character is quite impossible. However, the key is getting the audience to go past the dreadful and apparently anti-Semitic character of Barabas with which they are assaulted from the outset to patiently see how the equal or worse villainy of all the other characters (except, perhaps, his daughter) changes the context and therefore the meaning of what would otherwise be simply a racist caricature against Jews.

The Jew of Malta is something like a two part sentence in which Marlowe’s first clause says, “isn’t it amazing how horribly bad the Jews are,” only to be followed after the comma with a second clause saying, “except, of course, that everyone else is worse.” The second part of the sentence, or in this case what unfolds in the action of the play about the other characters, completely changes the context and the meaning of what is initially apparent. My imaginary analogy sentence functions a little bit like the famous dictum quoted by Winston Churchill about democracy being the worst possible system of government, except for all the others. What begins as an apparent denunciation in its full context proves to be something of a recuperation (not to suggest that Marlowe was trying to praise Jews as Churchill was trying to praise democracy, but rather that Marlowe effectively kills the notion that his stereotypically “bad” Jew is any worse — or better — than the Christians or Muslims surrounding him). On this basis I argued that the Jew of Malta should not be seen as an anti-Semitic text, and Duerr?s straightforward and uncut production — though it unfortunately albeit understandably skips the famous Machiavel prologue — bears out this case quite clearly.

The parallel production of the Merchant of Venice is also uncut, and it’s clear which play Duerr engages with more thoroughly. Duerr and I don’t agree, I think, ultimately about the question of whether or not the Merchant of Venice can be legitimately seen as containing genuinely anti-Semitic elements or not. My argument, as I explained last week, is based on the broader cultural context of the time, in which I think the Merchant, especially the trial scene, constituted a theatrical staging of an assertion of superiority of what are supposedly Christian ethics and culture versus what are allegedly Jewish ones. I think Duerr and many others take issue with this by seeing Shylock more in the context of the drama of the play itself, as a wronged man belonging to a wronged people who came by his vengeful rage honestly, so to speak, and as a survivor who is always prepared to move on to the next bitter phase of a bitter life. His staging and direction certainly reflects this reading powerfully, but I don’t think it does anything to compel me to reevaluate my own historicized assessment.

As with Barabas, Duerr presents Shylock straight, so to speak, directly as suggested by the full, uncut text of the Merchant. He doesn’t try to reframe or reconstruct the Merchant in order to attenuate Shylock’s rage, or in any other way exculpate him more than is already present in Shakespeare’s script. He also emphasizes the ?outsider? status of the Jews and others in both of his productions. In both plays most of the Jews have extravagant Yiddish accents (except for Barabas and his daughter Abigail) and the men wear skullcaps but, unlike the Christians, not ties. As for the other others, so to speak, like the Turkish slave Ithamore or the Prince of Aragon, Duerr ?others? them to the hilt with the most extravagant accents and preposterous costumes. His production ultimately, I think, supports both of our readings of the Merchant, since both are eminently justifiable from the unvarnished text.

What is more interesting and significant about this production of the Merchant is that Duerr bucks the prevailing trend of seeing the fifth act of the play as a disappointing and unworthy dénouement to the climactic and shattering trial scene, and therefore cutting it up and largely out. It has long been argued that the fifth act is an artless tack-on to an otherwise brilliant and breakthrough achievement by Shakespeare, clumsily resolving the outstanding issues and achieving an unsatisfactory set of couplings; that he was bound by the conventions of comedy to provide a ?happy ending? to what is, at its core, the Tragedy of Shylock. It has also long been generally agreed that the two stories in the Merchant — the tale of the bond and the tale of the three casks — are not equally important to either the narrative framework or the dramatic and emotional economy of the play. What Duerr understands is that, as so often happens, conventional wisdom has it backwards: the story of Shylock and the pound of flesh is ultimately of secondary importance in the overall schema of the Merchant when compared with the story of Portia?s marriage. By presenting the Merchant uncut and staging the fifth act in a manner that clearly demonstrates the unresolved tension between males and females in all three of the major couplings and the ongoing presence of Antonio as a destabilizing factor between Portia and Bassanio, he effectively demonstrates that the much-maligned “clumsy” happy ending is in fact deliberately structured to undermine itself, and promise as much unhappiness as happiness, as much faithlessness as faithfulness.

The play ends with a distinctly unconvincing and sexually charged promise on behalf of the males in the three couples to, ?fear no other thing, So sore as keeping safe [their wife?s] ring.? However, as this production clearly asks, to what extent can we credit the notion that the men have learned their lesson and will now suddenly keep true to promises in spite of the fact that the play is a litany of broken vows and commitments, and that, in spite of its profoundly homoerotic atmosphere, they will now focus their emotional as well as sexual affections on their wives and not their friends?

I don’t think anyone can seriously question the homoerotic text and subtext in the Merchant, but it certainly can be staged in a manner that foregrounds, contains or ignores this factor. Duerr, I think rightly, confronts the character of Antonio’s love straightforwardly — his affections for Bassanio go far beyond the idealized version of Renaissance male friendship they are usually understood to represent, but his overblown sense of and attachment to received versions of ethics, honor and especially religious devotion bar him from either acting on or probably even fully recognizing their nature. In Duerr?s spare production, Antonio’s crucifixes grow ever larger, culminating in a giant, ostentatious silver necklace worn at the end of the trial scene, a kind of religious erection. Both poles of this impossible binary combine to inform Antonio’s vicious, and seen in this context hysterical, anti-Semitic abuse of Shylock (which, when confronted with, he promises to repeat indefinitely): his defensive religious sentiments give him a ready-made target for his unmanageable frustrations. The link throughout the play between sexual frustration and racism, also clearly expressed in Portia?s court in early scenes, comes through masterfully in this production.

A word or two about Duerr?s semi-professional cast are warranted. Though there are plainly moments that fall short, and the entire cast of the Merchant seemed to let the dialogue get away from them a little bit after the intermission, overall the performances are impressively engaging and very sound. Paul Rubin provides an entertaining, comic Barabas who revels in his own malfeasance and rages against everyone else’s. Stephen Olender as Launcelot Gobbo and Graciany Miranda as the Prince of Aragon (in a shirt that might have been donated by an aging Carmen Miranda impersonator) ham it up marvelously, although Jed Charles? Prince of Morocco seems more Caribbean than North, or even sub-Saharan, African in a somewhat jarring way. But for me, the standout was Luis de Amechazurra, who was an extremely convincing, effective and consistent Shylock. He was also directly involved in two moments that demonstrate his own, and Duerr?s, sensitive interaction with the details of the texts.

Amechazurra has the small role of 1st Jew in Marlowe’s play, and when, as Barabas is a raging against the injustices that have befallen him, he asks him to consider the plight of Job, he is greeted by a long and perfectly hilarious silence and stare from Rubin. On a more serious note, Amechazurra?s Shylock, raging against his daughter’s theft and betrayal exclaims, ?The curse never fell upon our nation till now,? and then suddenly halts in midsentence and stutteringly backtracks, “I? I never felt it till now.? The artfulness here is that Shylock realizes in midsentence but he is about to commit an atrocious blasphemy, catches himself in the act, and corrects it in a manner that is religiously defensible. It’s more typical to see the passage “The curse never fell upon our nation till now; I never felt it till now,” as a complete thought consistent in itself, the second point following logically upon and illustrating the first. The way Duerr has directed and Amechazurra performs the passage is sensitive to a much richer interpretation in which the second passage following the semi-colon is a quick and decisive correction to the rash and dangerous first passage. It suggests that Shylock is not only religiously sensitive to his faith (though it doesn’t make him fanatical), but also reinforces his sensitivity to precision in language (which could be overtly staged as part of the Christian condemnation of Jewish “literalism” and “dogmatism,” but in this case is not) and his status as a careful survivor surrounded by dangers of all kinds from which he has no choice but to protect himself. This small, easily overlooked, moment for me summed up what Duerr was, I think, trying to communicate about Shylock and anti-Semitism in the Merchant.

UPDATE:
Seth Duerr writes the following to clarify his views on anti-Semitism in the Merchant of Venice:

“I would say that it could be legitimately seen as containing genuinely anti-Semitic elements. I believe it contains a pile of them. However, I feel that they are lines that come out of the Christian mouths. I’m not so convinced about the actions (pound of flesh, etc.) or the assertion of superiority of Christian ethics and culture. Quite frankly, I that were so,
you’d side with Antonio, Gratiano, Bassanio, Portia, etc. in the trial, and while saving Antonio’s life is necessary, that is all that need occur. The degradation they continue to impose upon Shylock is sickening and I don’t believe we’re meant to side with it or to find Christian ethics/culture as superior. They do, but we need not. Shakespeare leaves this option possible (mistakenly equating Antonio with Christ, etc.) for those who cannot be convinced of the hypocrisy of the Christians in the court and want to see themselves as holy, merciful, et al. but of course leaves the loophole of sympathizing with Shylock. If anyone feels the slightest sympathy for Shylock after the Christians have asserted their ‘superiority,’ then that moral high-ground can’t mean much. After all, Christ supposedly laid down his life for our sins, Antonio lays down his life to impress a spendthrift boy to whom he is powerfully attracted.”

I don’t disagree with any of that.

Iranian internal politics appear to have arrived at a crucial turning point that has been inevitable since the election fraud and protests this summer. At the time, I wrote that the regime had given the population a straightforward choice: accept our repression or enter into a revolutionary movement with uncertain consequences. It’s a high-stakes gamble, but thus far it seems to have worked. The problem, as I wrote at the time, is that the regime forced a revolutionary situation in what was otherwise essentially a rights movement (it’s likely that most of the protesters were outraged not so much at the system in theory but at the fact that the system was duplicitous: they were supposed to have the right to choose between approved candidates but in reality did not; they were supposed to have the right to freely assemble and speak but in reality did not; etc.). What the regime did was to double down on its authority and refuse any compromise with the protesters and both the internal and external opposition, ruling out a recount or a new election or any reasonable means of addressing the fraud or recognizing the fairly limited rights Iranians are supposed to enjoy under the odd vilayat e-faqih system that supposedly blends theocracy with constitutional republicanism. The "Islamic" part of the "Islamic Republic" is intact through ongoing clerical rule, but the republican, and implicitly constitutionalist, part is in absolute tatters.

It’s been pretty clear for some time that the Iranian government is not capable of reforming itself internally and that the reform movement must either fail or turn into a revolutionary movement seeking regime change. It’s very natural that Iranians do not relish such a choice. It’s unlikely that there much of an inclination to go through another tumultuous revolt a few decades after the seismic events of the "Islamic revolution." And, after all, that’s how they got into this situation in the first place. Were serious, far-reaching reform possible, I’m sure most Iranians would prefer to take that route. But it’s not. Since that became clear very early on after the election, the question has therefore been when would new centers of political gravity outside of the "official," semi-approved opposition led by people within or associated with the system begin to form themselves and articulate an agenda that looks past reform to a more radical solution that can really change things.

It would appear that this, one hesitates to say finally because these things were always going to take a good deal of time and probably still will, is beginning to happen. Iranians seeking to restore or reclaim their rights, whether they view the government as betraying its principles or living up to them all too well, will simply have to look beyond the likes of Moussavi, Karroubi and Rafsanjani if their movement is going to get anywhere. There is no indication that any of these men are interested in a revolution or revolt against the system as such, but that is what will be required. Their campaign of internal reform, met with complete rejection and brute force by the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad clique, was never going to succeed, and there is no reason to think that it could in the future either. The government itself chose, deliberately and strategically, to create a revolutionary situation where there were no revolutionaries to act upon it. The question has been if and when revolutionary groups with any significant following and momentum would begin to form themselves and press the issue in a very different way and with very different goals than the official opposition has thus far been willing to.

It would appear this is happening, and it was almost bound to. Some groups were going to decide that they were not going to take this lying down, or be satisfied with a reformist agenda that is and almost certainly will be going nowhere fast. Apparently, this sentiment, and the split between internal opposition and those openly opposed to the system as such, is beginning to develop. The question now, therefore, is whether or not these groups will build a coherent political agenda capable of eventually challenging the power of the regime. It’s still totally unclear whether Iranians are ready for another uprising, but the government has given them a stark choice: it’s us, or the abyss.

Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and their allies in the Revolutionary Guards, are obviously counting on fear of the unknown, their own authority and the fact that they have genuine constituencies, and brute force, to dissuade the public from choosing confrontation over submission. Thus far, unfortunately their strategy has worked quite well. There is no way of knowing whether or not in the foreseeable future the Iranian opposition will form revolutionary groups and agendas that can take advantage of what is inherently a revolutionary situation and begin to build a mass constituency for regime change from within Iranian society. But if it’s ever going to happen, the decisive split that appears to be developing between the internal, reformist opposition to the regime and the external, revolutionary opposition will be one of the crucial turning points. This seems to be happening now.

Elizabethan England produced two great plays involving Jewish protagonists, and for most of the past hundred years or so it has been generally believed that one of these plays is essentially defensible although highly problematic while the other is simply and crudely anti-Semitic. The Merchant of Venice remains controversial, and with good reason, but it is generally defended and is and can be performed in the English-speaking world without much protest. The Jew of Malta, Marlowe’s earlier masterpiece, on the other hand is, in fact, not controversial: it is generally regarded as crudely anti-Semitic and therefore almost unperformable. There are occasional public readings of the play, and there have been one or two productions in London and New York, but its reputation as an anti-Semitic rant has rendered it pretty well outside the scope of general theatrical performance and even undergraduate university courses.

I think the general opinion has it precisely backwards: the Merchant of Venice is, in fact, an anti-Semitic text, albeit attenuated in many important ways and indeed defensible, whereas the Jew of Malta is, I think, not an anti-Semitic text at all. This is going to require some explaining, but it’s an important point especially to someone like me who spends a good deal of time thinking about the problems of defamation such as Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

To begin with the Merchant of Venice, for most of the history of the reception of the play, Shylock has been seen as fundamentally an unsympathetic character if not a villain. He is also often seen as a caricature of a grasping, vicious and resentful Jew. The debate is not about whether or not Shylock is bad, but really is about whether Shylock is bad because he is a bad Jew or bad because he is simply a Jew. The play establishes quite clearly that he and his community are badly treated in Venice and subject to vicious discrimination, so it could be argued that he came by his rage honestly. It is also argued that at least two other Jewish characters in the play, Tubal and Shylock’s own daughter Jessica, are not cast in a bad light, suggesting that Shylock’s malice is personal and particular rather than communal or sectarian. However, Tubal’s role is exceedingly small and Jessica converts to Christianity and renounces Judaism while stealing Shylock’s money, so this case is rather weak.

A stronger argument lies in Shylock’s famous defenses of his positions. One of Shakespeare’s greatest qualities is that all his characters have their turn to speak and almost everyone explains themselves (except, of course, Iago, who offers multiple unconvincing explanations and ultimately becomes an impossible cipher — more on this in the near future). Shylock therefore has every opportunity to express his undoubtedly well-founded grievances, give his famous speech about the equal humanity of Jews with Christians, and justify his quest for vengeance on the grounds that Christian revenge is typical and that therefore Jewish revenge cannot be faulted.

This means, of course, that the play can be performed in a way that emphasizes Shylock’s humanity, justified grievances and the rationale for his behavior. And, nowadays, it is almost always performed that way. However, I think there are some fundamental qualities to the play that make it inescapably anti-Semitic as a text, which is not to say it shouldn’t be performed, read or enjoyed, but that we should not deify Shakespeare to the point that we fail to see the incorporation of genuine negative stereotypes and religious, ethnic and cultural bigotry in one of his most famous plays.

First of all, the underlying logic of the play, and especially the question of the bond and the pound of flesh, appears to be rooted in the contrast between what are supposedly rigid, inflexible, dogmatic and draconian Jewish ethics versus Christian mercy and forgiveness. The citizenry of Venice and its political leadership all repeatedly implore Shylock to show forgiveness and be merciful, implicitly as a Christian would, even though the law would appear to allow him to extract a bloody and fatal repayment of his loan. Shylock’s insistence on the letter of the law, on inflexible and legalistic justice, and on violent revenge as a form of justice are rooted in medieval and Renaissance Christian concepts of Judaism as a legalistic religion that emphasizes unjust forms of “justice” according to an outmoded and indefensible Talmudic law in contrast to the supposed Christian emphasis on mercy and forgiveness. For the Jew in the Merchant of Venice to be depicted as unmerciful, inflexible and literalistic in his legalism is, in fact, deeply rooted in Christian religious polemics against Jewish beliefs and practices. It is the old, flawed covenant that Christ repealed continuing to unjustifiably insist on its continued relevance even though it has been superseded by a superior religious and moral sensibility that supposedly replaces an emphasis on justice with an emphasis on mercy.

Of course, the Christians of Venice are so superior to Shylock that in the end his effort to exploit legal literalism is his comeuppance since his bond called for a pound of flesh but not a drop of blood. In other words, when their efforts to appeal to Christian mercy fall on deaf Jewish ears, their own legal literalism and dexterity can outmatch the Jewish one. The horrifying ritual humiliation of Shylock in the trial scene is not simply the debasement of a bad individual, it is a theatrical performance of Christian religious antagonism against not only Jews but Judaism as it was stereotypically perceived during most of the past millennium. The message is: the Jews, who wrongly seek to live by the letter of the old law ignoring the new covenant of mercy instituted by Christ, will have their comeuppance through the very letter of the law; that even their own most cherished values will undo them in the face of Christian virtue and determination.

Of course, many performances have demonstrated that it is possible to downplay this aspect of the Merchant to the point that many people fail to see it or that it is not reflected in a given production. Indeed, Shylock has been sympathetically performed since Edmund Kean’s legendary performance in the early 19th century. However, in the text as it exists I fear it is unmistakable. Shakespeare accords Shylock his full humanity and makes his personal distaste for racism quite apparent. But, he also participates enthusiastically in the assertion and representation of the superiority of Christian values and culture over Jewish ones, and I think it is impossible to fail to recognize this clearly in the Merchant. Therefore, while it is certainly a great work of art and an important humanist document that includes a great deal of antiracist sentiment, it seems impossible to me not to conclude that the Merchant of Venice does in fact also reflect anti-Semitism based on religious bigotry.

The Jew of Malta has acquired a perfectly dreadful reputation for anti-Semitism during the same period of time in which enormous efforts have been expended to recuperate the Merchant of Venice from the same charge. But I think the general opinion has it exactly backwards: Marlowe’s play is fundamentally not anti-Semitic, whereas Shakespeare’s unfortunately is. The Jew of Malta is generally seen as anti-Semitic because even more than Shylock, Barabas is a stereotype of the wealthy, grasping, unscrupulous, avaricious Jew. He also despises Christians and is introduced as a follower of Machiavelli, the synonym of amoral ruthlessness in Elizabethan England. He is also responsible for and enthusiastic about numerous murders, especially when committed against Christians. It has been argued that the abuses by various authorities against Barabas turn him into the anti-Semitic stereotype as the play unfolds, but I find this unconvincing. From the outset, Barabas is a thoroughly villainous character with no redeeming features at all. Because of this, he is often contrasted with Shylock who has many redeeming features and whose rage is much more carefully explored with typical Shakespearean subtlety and depth.

I think the reputation of the Jew of Malta as an anti-Semitic play rests on the absolutely immoral and stereotypically evil character of Barabas and the contrast with the Merchant of Venice and its more nuanced portrayal of Shylock who can be and now usually is portrayed sympathetically. No such sympathetic performance of Barabas is conceivable. However, the key to the Jew of Malta is that none of the other characters are any better — indeed, all of them prove at least as bad if not worse than Barabas himself. Ithamore, a Turkish Muslim slave purchased by Barabas, proves more vicious, murderous and immoral than his master, although also much less intelligent. The continuously invading Turks have a master plan to turn the entire Maltese population into galley slaves. As for the Christians in the play, I would argue that at every stage they outdo both the Jews and the Muslims in avarice, hypocrisy, violence and sheer unmitigated badness. Monks and nuns are depicted as engaging in unrelenting orgies of sexual depravity. Two friars behave in the most outrageous manner in order to try to entice Barabas into joining their orders, thereby gaining his wealth. The behavior of Malta’s Christian governor is certainly the most unprincipled of any of the characters, sparing no opportunity for the exercise of theft, murder and self-aggrandizement, especially at the expense of the Jews and Turks. When Barabas requires Christian mercy, though he has been continuously upbraided throughout the play for not showing any himself, he receives none, from either the Christians or the Turks.

In truth, none of the ethnic and religious groups depicted in Marlowe’s play behave any better than the others. All profess superior moral and religious values yet all display the same debased hypocrisy, violence, rage and greed. Marlowe appears at first to be launching into a familiar and despicable anti-Semitic screed, but by the end of the poem there is no doubt that what he is expressing is not so much anti-Semitism as cynicism and indeed misanthropy. Shakespeare’s play amounts to a defense of Christian values and culture against Jewish ones and, as I’ve argued, in fact has a distinctly anti-Semitic element although it is also a humanist and antiracist text. Marlowe’s play is simply cynical, misanthropic and deeply antireligious. He holds all cultures, civilizations and religious traditions in equal contempt and in that sense, I think it is perfectly impossible to describe the Jew of Malta as anti-Semitic. It’s anti-everything.

As I have been arguing with regard to Islamophobia, a generalized attack on religions and cultures — if not even on humanity itself — whether in the form of an analysis or a satire in my view should not be regarded as an instance of bigotry. Shakespeare’s play does, in fact, contain an assertion of Christian superiority at least in terms of ethics and values over those of the Jews. The best argument that can be made on behalf of Shylock is that he is a bad Jew rather than that he is bad because he is Jewish. But I think ultimately this case fails because the indictment of Shylock is such a perfect replication of the traditional Christian indictment of Judaism. Interestingly, the religion now indicted most frequently in the Christian world for excessive legalism, literalism, dogmatism, intolerance, lack of mercy and forgiveness, and irrational inflexibility is not Judaism but Islam. The most common Christian complaint about both Judaism and Islam is that they are religions of law that emphasize justice whereas Christianity is supposedly a religion of higher moral ethics that emphasizes mercy and forgiveness. It would be an understatement to say that history does not bear out any such claim as a practical consequence of these theological distinctions as Marlowe appears to have understood all too well.

One final observation on the contrapuntal reading of the two plays is that it absolutely crushes any notion that Marlowe actually wrote Shakespeare’s plays. This ridiculous idea, which actually has some currency (as does the equally ludicrous candidacy of the Earl of Oxford), amazingly enough has some supporters, and not all of them are fringe idiots. However, it strikes me as perfectly impossible that the person who wrote the Merchant is the same individual capable of writing the Jew. No question styles change over time, and early Shakespeare bears scant resemblance to mid and later Shakespeare in some ways, but personalities don’t change. Fundamental worldviews don’t change. The author of the Merchant, and all of Shakespeare’s plays, is plainly an idealist. He was an early humanist, a man in love with love, taken to task by those who thought only God should be truly loved in the medieval fashion. There is almost no aspect of human baseness, corruption and foulness that is not reflected in Shakespeare’s characters, so he’s no Pollyanna, but he is still an idealist at heart, and I don’t think this fails to come through in any of his plays, including the Merchant. This author loves humanity, for all its myriad faults, like his greatest tragic hero Othello, “not wisely but too well.”

Marlowe, on the other hand, is an arch-cynic, one of the great cynics of all time. He doesn’t seem to have believed in much of anything except the value of art, his own extraordinary talents (had Shakespeare died on the same day Marlowe did we would remember Marlowe as far greater an artist), having a good time, and the fundamental corruption of human existence. This sensibility — that everyone is worse than the next person — defines entirely the ethos and dramatic economy of the Jew of Malta. In the Merchant, at least some of Shakespeare’s characters are trying to be good, and the contrast I outlined above between his vision of superior Christian ethics versus supposedly inflexible and draconian Jewish ethics again points to some hope in virtue and “the quality of mercy.” In Marlowe’s play, the concept of mercy, the concept of human goodness, is a joke. Bottom line: these are two completely different authors with completely different sensibilities, completely different worldviews and completely different personalities. If it isn’t obvious from all the more direct and clear-cut facts that Shakespeare wrote his own plays, at least a comparison between these two masterpieces demonstrates there is no possibility they were penned by the same hand.

UPDATE:
Shortly after this posting went live, I was contacted by Seth Duerr who informs me that he is currently directing rotating repertory performances of both of these plays at the JCC of Manhattan, a perfect location. For more information see:

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This is a brilliant idea, and I shall be bitterly disappointed if I’m not able to make it before these performances close.

Pres. Obama probably had no choice at this stage of his presidency and under the present circumstances but to accede to the demands of his military commanders and commit tens of thousands of additional American troops to the Afghan war. It took him months longer to make the decision than it probably should have, and that’s because I think it is both strategically and politically almost impossible to decide what the wisest course of action would be. In the end, therefore, he decided to both maintain the logic of his presidential campaign in which he distinguished between stupid, unnecessary wars (Iraq) and unavoidable, essential wars (Afghanistan), and to avoid a public fight with the military. Moreover, the decision not to increase troop levels would have amounted to a decision to begin to withdraw from the country under the present circumstances, which, with a resurgent Taliban not only threatening Kabul but also rising in Pakistan as well, would have been strategically difficult to justify. But by putting an 18 month limit on the surge and implicitly promising to begin a generalized withdrawal in approximately 2 years, he has also tried to reassure those who feel the war is pointless, lost or fundamentally unwinnable.

As with the healthcare debate, neither the left nor the right could be satisfied by anything that is politically plausible, so Obama has again decided to split both sides against the middle. In the immediate term, it probably avoids the most significant political damage he would have suffered in yet another brutal battle with an increasingly incensed Republican minority and significant and powerful segments of his own cabinet and some leading Democrats. Whether it proves politically or strategically wise in the long run, seems almost impossible to accurately predict at this stage.

One thing is certain: “nation-building” and attempting to rule in Afghanistan is a fool’s errand. It is one of the greatest clichés involving international relations that Afghanistan is virtually ungovernable from within (this actually is probably not true, and there is quite a bit of historical precedent against such an assertion) and completely ungovernable from without (this, on the other hand, would certainly seem to be the case). At the very least, it can be said that Afghans have a habit of making it prohibitively costly for any outside power that tries to impose its direct rule on the country in general, and even local authorities seen as exerting too much heavy-handed control over regions that are disparate and fiercely independent. Therefore, insofar as Obama’s vision of the Afghan war involves nation-building on a grand scale, or long-term direct or proxy American rule of Afghanistan, it’s almost certainly bound to fail, and probably at considerable financial, human and strategic cost.

However, although his critics would accuse him of envisaging precisely such a scenario, the president has in fact left open the possibility of a very different path that is not inconsistent with this troop surge and the conditions he laid down in his speech last night. The president and his supporters can credibly argue that it is simply too dangerous for the United States under the present circumstances to leave the Afghan (or rather as it has become the Afghan/Pakistan) theater completely and that therefore a new level of intensification of efforts involving not only troops but additional efforts is required. He placed the emphasis on training the Afghan military, but there are very real questions as to the extent that a military based out of Kabul could rule all of that country directly and effectively after what it has gone through over the past three decades, especially if ethnic tensions persist. A great deal of what the President said probably can be dismissed as window dressing (complaints about corruption, etc.) on what is to all appearances a very dismal Afghan government. But his warnings about the dangers of the resurgence of Al Qaeda linked to the Taliban are extremely well-founded, and on that basis alone trying to do more in Afghanistan before leaving probably makes sense as opposed to simply drawing down and walking away (as we did twice in the recent past, both times to disastrous consequences).

Immediately after 9/11 most Americans agreed on the necessity of removing the Taliban government from power in Afghanistan and doing everything possible to make sure that Al Qaeda would no longer find safe haven there. To say that the mission has been bungled would be an understatement I think. The most dramatic miscalculation, obviously (and it was obvious at the time as well) was turning attention away from Afghanistan and, inexplicably, towards Iraq, which not only allowed the situation in Afghanistan (and ultimately Pakistan) to deteriorate disastrously, but also breathed new life into what was a moribund Al Qaeda movement. The fact that the Iraqis themselves in the end decided collectively and virtually unanimously that Al Qaeda had to go was more a product of the extremists’ own lunacy and barbarity than any strategic success on the American part (of course, paying the former insurgents of the so-called “awakening” certainly helped accomplish this goal, although it also helps set the stage for a much more dramatic potential Iraqi civil war in the future – but that is another matter.)

The Afghan war has also been bungled not only by relative neglect, and the embracing of an incredibly corrupt and incompetent Kabul government, but also a failure to appreciate both what is possible and impossible in that country. The fact that the conflict is driven at least as much by ethnic tensions and parochial political interests than it is by ideology seems to have escaped American planning until now. The same problem applies in Pakistan. What you’re looking at is the convergence of ethnic civil conflict and tensions and parochial power interests with ideological fanaticism and transnational terrorism. It’s a combustible mix, and I can understand why Obama wouldn’t want to leave things the way they unacceptably are.

The problem is, historical experience and practical logic suggest that there is only one effective solution to this combustible mixture, and it’s not the creation of a well functioning, harmonious, integrated and reliably pro-western Afghan state. Even if such a goal were achievable by outsiders under the present circumstances, which I highly doubt, it would almost certainly not be worth the cost, and the American public would undoubtedly decline to pay it in blood and treasure. Even more limited long-term counterinsurgency is incredibly costly, bloody and time-consuming, and I doubt the American public has the will or the wallet to countenance the decades of counterinsurgency designed to suppress the Taliban.

What could possibly work, however, is to decouple the two sides of this equation that make it intolerable to the outside world. In other words, accept that the ethnic divisions and even conflicts in Afghanistan (and possibly even northern Pakistan) are simply not a vital strategic interest to the United States, and that local parochial and regional proxy interests are best left to their own devices as long as they genuinely remain local and not the tools of those wishing to overthrow national governments or engage in transnational terrorism.

The traditional arrangement by both central governments and colonial powers in places like southern Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan has been simple: you over there, doing what you want, us over here with you leaving us alone. This kind of understanding is, conceivably, recuperable in both of those places in the foreseeable future. For the moment, the problem is that there are too many ideological fanatics interwoven into the various movements, especially both the Afghan and Pakistan versions of the Taliban, who are unwilling to accept the idea that they may do as they wish in their own areas as long as they do not try to destabilize the central governments, expand the territory under their control in an unreasonable manner, or, most importantly, collude with transnational terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. If there is to be a “success” for the United States in Afghanistan and for Islamabad in its northern provinces, it’s going to have to be based on distinguishing between those willing to accept the old arrangement of radical autonomy in their own areas, possibly enhanced with financial incentives and other goodies, versus those whose designs extend towards the Afghan and Pakistani states generally and worse towards the broader world.

This decoupling, difficult though it might be, is not impossible by any means in my view and is going to have to be at the heart of American, Afghan government and Pakistani strategies in the next couple of years if they are to have any hope of success. The worst case scenario has been playing itself out in recent years: ideological fanaticism of an unacceptable variety, that can and must be contained if not obliterated, has managed to fuse itself with ethnic and parochial grievances that can be neither contained nor obliterated but which traditionally have been and can again be accommodated. Whatever Obama was telling the American public last night, whatever his generals are telling him, and whatever Richard Holbrook is telling everybody who will listen to him, in the back of their minds they had better understand this is the only realistic way forward.

I believe it is entirely possible to read this strategy into Obama’s speech last night, which emphasized denying Al Qaeda safe haven and thwarting Taliban ability to overthrow the Afghan and Pakistani governments. But I would hasten to add this can only be achieved by the decoupling I described, as the ethnic, local and parochial elements defining the Afghan civil war (and the incipient civil war in Pakistan as well) are not, in fact, going to go away. Neither will the persistent efforts of all regional powers to use proxies to project their own interests into Afghanistan (it is this imperative that prompted Pakistan to counterintuitively continue to support the Taliban in Afghanistan as its proxy there, while feeling deeply threatened by any Taliban activity inside Pakistan itself, ending up producing a nascent civil conflict threatening Islamabad).

All of this ethnic, parochial, local and regional infighting in Afghanistan is going to go forward, no matter what, and trying to stop it is pointless. But it could go forward without the extreme ideology and transnational terrorism that are the source of genuine, serious international concern. Any efforts at troop surge, counterinsurgency, nation-building, winning hearts and minds or whatever else you want to call it that are not ultimately aimed at affecting this decoupling and making a deal with those who are willing to accept the old formula of you over there and us over here, against those who are not willing to accept this arrangement, will be worse than a waste of time.

I believe there is a potential for a measure of what one might call “success,” as I have defined it, if everybody is clear about what is necessary and achievable, as opposed to what is unnecessary, unachievable, prohibitively costly, counterproductive and possibly even disastrous. The elements of it were reflected in the President’s speech last night, but so were many other less worthy ideas that I can only hope are window dressing for a sober, limited and focused campaign to restore the old arrangement of you over there and us over here. That, and only that, could actually work.

Hussein Agha and Robert Malley have produced another in a long series of articles for the New York Review of Books on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and this one is essentially a follow-up to a very controversial New York Times op-ed they published this summer which many people took to be an endorsement of a one-state agenda. Malley in particular spent a great deal of effort trying to clarify that this was not, in fact, what they were saying at all, and that they continue to believe, along with almost all other serious observers, that the only possible peaceful arrangement would be a two-state negotiated agreement. In the New York Review of Books, they are careful to point out that a one-state agenda is "politically fanciful," since "it fails the elemental test of any proposed solution, which is to fulfill both sides’ basic needs." They also dismiss the notion that the status quo is tenable and manageable, although it is the kind of one-state arrangement, but they agree that it cannot possibly be maintained in any kind of sustainable manner.

In the New York Times, they were arguing that the essential problem with the negotiating process as it has existed until now has been that it dealt with 1967 issues — borders, Jerusalem and ending the occupation — to the exclusion of the core issues of the problem, which they link to the war in 1948. In their new article, according to Agha and Malley, the central questions defining the conflict and precluding a resolution of it are the Israeli refusal to deal with the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 and the Palestinian refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish right to national statehood in Palestine:
It promises to close a conflict that began in 1948, perhaps earlier, yet virtually everything it worries about sprang from the 1967 war. Ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is essential and the conflict will persist until this is addressed. But its roots are far deeper: for Israelis, Palestinian denial of the Jewish state’s legitimacy; for Palestinians, Israel’s responsibility for their large-scale dispossession and dispersal that came with the state’s birth.

Like the other great critic of all existing ideas, Aaron David Miller, whose critiques are, if anything, even more biting and incisive, Agha and Malley are quite brilliant in anatomizing the malignancies that have rendered the "peace process" moribund and incapable of producing a solution. However, like Miller (and, I would add, almost everybody else), Agha and Malley fail to propose any serious alternative. To me this means that while their criticisms are interesting and occasionally brilliant, they’re also of no value at least in terms of policy. They don’t suggest any practical means for overcoming the problems they’ve identified. And, they don’t really propose any alternative method for correcting what is supposedly lacking. What are we to do with this, one asks. Answer came there none.

As they did in the New York Times, they now repeat the allegation that the peace process as it has been structured since Madrid has tried to deal with 1967 issues while avoiding the 1948 issues that actually define the conflict. I’m not sure this is entirely correct. True enough, the land for peace formula built into Security Council Resolution 242 which has defined every aspect of the peace process as it has developed over the past 20 years deals directly with 1967, framing the problem essentially as one of foreign military occupation, Arab hostility to and rejection of Israel, and the lack of statehood for Palestinians who live under Israeli rule without many basic human and no national rights. But I don’t think that that means that this process evades or elides issues springing from 1948 at all.

It’s true enough that Israel is not going to accept the mass return of millions of Palestinian refugees, and serious Palestinian negotiators have understood this from the beginning of the process. But I think it’s also true that no Palestinians are going to sign an agreement that allows Israel to avoid any sense of responsibility for the dispossession of the refugees. Every serious proposal I have heard linked to the peace process has involved some acknowledgment of Israeli responsibility, compensation for refugees, resettlement in Palestine or even in small numbers in Israel itself, and the creation of a state that can serve as a refuge, haven, advocate and representative of the refugees. Obviously, a two-state agreement is not resolve all the problems of the refugees, but it is also not going to ignore the refugees or fail to provide them with major benefits that they currently do not enjoy. I simply do not agree that the question of the refugees is somehow missing from the structure of negotiations built around 242. The various Oslo agreements, the Roadmap of the Quartet, and the terms of reference outlined by Pres. Barack Obama at his recent speech before the UN General Assembly all include the refugees as a core permanent status issue. To me it seems hard to imagine a mechanism for bringing the issue forward in a more proactive way, unless one is suggesting that Palestinians insist on the full implementation of the right of return as a fundamental condition for any agreement. Under such circumstances, we would never have an agreement and the occupation and the conflict would continue indefinitely.

I also think Agha and Malley are wrong in their assessment that the extant peace process doesn’t involve Palestinian recognition of Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state. Obviously, Netanyahu’s latest bugaboo about Palestinians recognizing Israel’s Jewish character is a complete red herring. Israel, like all states, will and does define itself, and while most Jewish Israelis agree that Israel is a "Jewish state," there is very little consensus about what that means. Some people see it in religious terms, others as an ethnocracy involving the rule of a Jewish demographic majority, some see it in macro historical terms as the resurrection of some kind of ancient Hebraic kingdom, others as a "normal" ethno-national state along European lines, some as simply a state embodying their view of "Jewish values," and there are even those ultra-Orthodox who reject the entire project as a sin against the will of God pending the arrival of the Messiah. All of this is of direct concern only to the Palestinian minority in Israel which has every right to participate in helping to shape the definition of their own country.

As for the Palestinians generally in the occupied territories and living in exile as refugees or expatriates, this issue of the "Jewish character" of Israel is almost entirely beside the point. A two-state agreement means Palestinian recognition of Israel with the implicit understanding that Israel will define itself, just as Palestine will, and that both parties recognition of each other is not dependent on any agreement about the nature of each other’s states. A two-state agreement means precisely that in practice: Palestinian recognition of the reality, and hence the de facto legitimacy, of a Jewish Israeli state, however that is defined by its government and citizenry. As with the issue of the refugees, I don’t know of any way to bring this issue forward more decisively in the negotiating process without creating a situation in which the difficult negotiations are rendered utterly impossible. Palestinians are not going to become Zionists, any more than the Israelis are going to allow a mass return of millions of refugees to reverse the consequence of the 1948 war which was the establishment of a state with a substantial Jewish majority in a large part of Palestine.

Saying that these core issues need to be addressed fails to recognize first that they are being addressed through the process that exists (when it works, that is), or it least the process as it is structured to work, and second that any mechanism for re-emphasizing these essentially emotional issues at the expense of practical concerns such as the borders of a Palestinian state, the future of Jerusalem, the status of refugees, and both sides’ security requirements is likely to make a negotiated agreement less rather than more likely. Agha and Malley say that the process as it has been structured so far comes close to constituting something like a confidence trick, precisely because it supposedly avoids the core historical issues as they describe them.

They do not accept that a two state agreement would entail Palestinian recognition of a legitimate state of Israel that is free to define itself as "Jewish" whatever its citizenry believes that means. They do not acknowledge any of the obvious benefits short of the implementation of the right of return that such an agreement would, in fact, provide for the Palestinian refugees, most drastically the potential rescue (and I use that word advisedly) of the refugees in Lebanon who live under unconscionable conditions that have in the past and could once again degenerate into a matter of life and death. I simply think it’s false that 60 years of struggle on the part of the refugees would be, as they claim, "in vain" in the event of a two-state agreement, even though it’s almost certainly true that the ethnic cleansing in 1948 cannot as a practical matter be reversed.

Agha and Malley are, however, probably right when they describe the current negotiating structure and positions as a straitjacket in which both sides are locked into irreconcilable positions. From this they conclude:
As currently defined and negotiated, a conflict-ending settlement is practically unachievable; even if signed it will not be implemented and even if implemented it will not be sustained. Against this background, the idea of a long-term interim arrangement acquires some logic.

The problem is that any such arrangement will in fact constitute a continuation of the occupation. Israelis might be willing to go along with such an approach, but for Palestinians it would undoubtedly suggest an interim that would almost certainly turn into a permanent situation in which their human and national rights would remain unrealized for the foreseeable future, as the authors themselves acknowledge. It seems extremely difficult to imagine a long-term interim arrangement not creating the backdrop for another explosion of violence in the foreseeable future

They also consider the "Jordanian" option, but they do not, I feel, fully appreciate the absolutism with which the Jordanian government would, under almost any imaginable circumstances, oppose any formal ties to the West Bank as a matter of almost existential national security. Any form of this idea fails their absolutely correct dictum laid down at the outset of their article that "the elemental test of any proposed solution… is to fulfill both sides’ basic needs." Bringing Jordan into the picture in this manner would most certainly fail to meet its basic needs, whatever attraction it may have for Israel and possibly even the Palestinians

What Agha and Malley are really arguing for is some method of bringing the core grievances — Palestinian refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish Israeli state and Israel’s refusal to acknowledge and take responsibility for the dispossession of the Palestinian refugees — to the forefront of negotiations. They don’t actually describe how this would be done or what it would precisely accomplish, but they do suggest that establishing Palestinian formal acceptance of a Jewish Israeli state (which I would argue has already been accomplished in 1988 politically if not emotionally) and Israeli formal acceptance of the tragedy that befell the Palestinians in 1948 would then set the basis for a return to the negotiations as they are now about security, borders, refugees and Jerusalem. I fail to see the potential benefits from such an approach. Not only would it bring to the forefront the most difficult emotional issues, these rhetorical gestures are unlikely to accomplish anything.

Palestinian acceptance of Israel, formally through the PLO, has been on the table for 20 years. It doesn’t seem to have changed anything in the Israeli psyche. Similarly, I very much doubt that an Israeli acknowledgment of at least partial responsibility for the tragedy of the refugees would really be an equation changing development either. The occupation would still be in place, refugees would not be returning, nothing practical would change, and I find it very questionable that some kind of transformative emotional catharsis would be the result. They argue that such an approach would be "fresh," and that’s certainly true, but that’s not much of an argument in its favor. Both of these issues are, in fact, already on the table. Rearranging things to bring them to the fore and to bank on securing reciprocal rhetorical gestures acknowledging each other’s pain and fears would be not only very difficult to achieve if everything else is still in place unchanged, there isn’t any reason really to suspect that it would then allow all these other issues to be more easily resolved. And, they do not consider the consequences of the potential and possibly bitter failure of a round of negotiations focusing on these two emotional, rhetorical issues and what that would mean for any prospect of securing an agreement on substantive matters.

Agha and Malley reasonably complain that the Obama administration is following the same path previous administrations have in pursuit of an agreement. There has certainly been a new level of energy and commitment, but it’s also true that no fresh ideas are on the table. And I don’t think they’ve really provided any either. But there is one new approach recently developed that is genuinely fresh, and potentially very effective in changing the equation and the strategic conditions between Israel and the Palestinians.

Agha and Malley are, I think, wrong in seeing the PA government state-building plan as an example of a long-term interim arrangement, lumping it in with a number of implausible ideas that are supposed to be a substitute for diplomacy designed to produce a permanent status agreement. In fact, the PA State building plan is not an interim arrangement at all but a unilateral, proactive agenda for developing the administrative, bureaucratic, institutional and economic framework for an independent Palestinian state in preparation for independence. This is a completely different approach than anything the Palestinians tried in the past, and although left to its own devices Israel would undoubtedly block any such moves, this interference can be greatly attenuated by Western and especially American political protection as well as technical and financial aid to the project.

It is essentially calling everyone’s bluff: you say you want a Palestinian state, negotiations are stalemated, therefore we will begin peacefully, constructively building the institutions of our future state in spite of the occupation. This is consistent with Palestinian, Arab, American, international and even Israeli stated policies about what the Palestinians should be doing. But they cannot accomplish this on their own, both because they need aid and technical assistance and because they need political protection from Israeli interference. All Americans interested in real, potentially transformative progress should be sparing no effort in rhetorically, politically and practically assiting it. It’s the only game-changer in sight and it’s extremely serious.

But it strikes me that anyone looking for a fresh approach and a new option for salvaging the moribund peace process, saving the prospect of a two state agreement, creating improvements on the ground that encourage hope rather than despair, and ultimately transforming the strategic context in which Israel and the Palestinians negotiate should take this state-building agenda very seriously. It is complementary and parallel to diplomacy and negotiations and provides an alternative path for forward progress and positive change in the face of diplomatic gridlock. The one or two lines that Agha and Malley devote to the plan and their erroneous identification of it as part of a group of interim arrangements I think shows a considerable lack of imagination on the part of two extremely intelligent people who are trying to think imaginatively about how to find a way forward in a seemingly foreclosed space. Agha and Malley seem to have concluded that practical measures are less important than emotional breakthroughs. Personally, I can’t see the justification for this approach.

I find the relative indifference of so many of the most intelligent American commentators on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to the PA government state building plan puzzling and slightly disturbing. If it’s true, as almost every sensible commentator seems to agree, that ultimately a Palestinian state is a sine qua non for Middle East peace, for goodness sake let us begin to create it in spite of the occupation and whether the Israelis like it or not.

The Egyptian state-run newspaper Al-Ahram, particularly its English-language weekly edition, seems to be on a determined campaign to corner the market on the most arrant nonsense printed in English in the Middle East. Most of its worst rubbish, significantly, is written by Westerners rather than Arabs or Muslims, and I have complained before that apparently in the minds of its editors this somehow makes these outrageous, pernicious articles more defensible and less objectionable. It does not. There is something very strange going on with that newspaper, as anyone who reads it on a regular basis will have readily recognized, and it’s extremely dangerous and disturbing.

The latest offering comes from someone called Stephen Lendman, whoever that is, who somehow convinced himself that it would be useful to claim that:

Post 9/11, America has declared war on Islam with the FBI in the lead at home. It notoriously targets the vulnerable, entraps them with paid informants, inflates bogus charges, spreads them maliciously through the media, then intimidates juries to convict and sentence innocent men and some women to long prison terms. Justice is nearly always denied. At times wilful killings are committed.

To bolster this preposterous allegation, Lendman cites the cases of Luqman Ameen Abdullah (aka Christopher Thomas) and Jamil Al-Amin (aka H. Rap Brown), both members of the so-called "Ummah," which the government describes as, "a group of mostly African-American converts to Islam, which seeks to establish a separate Sharia-law-governed state within the United States." This may or may not be an entirely accurate characterization of the rather strange religious sub-community in question, but it certainly indicates that we are not dealing here with anything remotely connected to the mainstream American Muslim community.

Abdullah was killed in a shootout with FBI agents on October 28, 2009 under circumstances that certainly need further investigation and clarification. Al-Amin was convicted of murdering a police officer, although he has many supporters who protest his innocence. There is no need whatsoever to go into the details of these cases or the merits of the claims on either side. The point is that these rather strident, alienated converts to Islam are anything but typical of the mainstream American Muslim community, and their relationship with the police does not in any way reflect the generalized attitude of the government or the FBI towards Muslim Americans. The article even approvingly quotes one of their supporters as stating, " The FBI is not only tricky and devious…. they are extremely dangerous thugs and murderers."

To take these two highly unusual and related cases and extrapolate from them that, as the Al-Ahram sub-headline emphasizes, "Post 9/11, America has declared war on Islam, as a disturbing recent case in Michigan shows," can only be described as an outrageous lie. The United States has NOT declared war on Islam post-9/11, least of all here at home in the United States. Of course there are significant challenges facing the American Muslim community, and I’ve written about them extensively in numerous reports, essays, speeches and book chapters. I doubt there’s any significant aspect of the problems facing the Arab and Muslim American communities of which I am not aware, which I have not commented on, and on which I have been inactive.

There are serious civil rights issues, however the government, particularly the civil rights division of the Justice Department and the FBI, have been quite conscientious about prosecuting hate crimes and discrimination against Muslim Americans by private parties. The deeper concern, of course, is questions of civil liberties. As I’ve written many times post-9/11 discrimination in immigration and immigration law enforcement has been a serious problem that we need to address. And, of course, Islamophobia in our popular culture and political discourse is a grievous ongoing challenge and I take a back seat to nobody in confronting it with as much energy as I can muster. However to establish and agree that there are very significant problems and challenges, as well as opportunities, facing Muslim Americans does not change the undeniable fact that the United States remains an excellent country for Muslims to live in. The problems are serious, but manageable and correctable. The opportunities, on the other hand, are unparalleled, and the privileges in many ways unmatched.

It is a common exaggeration — to which I always object — to describe the Arab and Muslim Americans as being "under siege." I have a good sense of what it would feel like to live in a community that is genuinely under siege, and if that ever happens, we’re all going to know it without a prompter. Hyperbole gets us nowhere and only makes the problem worse by confusing the issues, creating ill-advised tactics and ineffective strategies. But if it is an unhelpful exaggeration to describe Muslim Americans as being "under siege," saying that the United States has "declared war on Islam" can only be described as a damned, odious lie. Whatever the merits of the two cases in question, there is simply no argument to be made that the United States has "declared war on Islam" in any sense whatsoever.

I know nothing and care less about Mr. Lendman, but there is a real question to be asked about what the editors at Egypt’s state-run newspaper are hoping to achieve by printing this kind of outrageous rubbish. The two cases could easily have been critiqued without leaping to this sort of grand indictment of the United States as a country that is completely unjustified and utterly false. They must know that the only effect of this kind of rhetoric is to inflame readers in Egypt, the Arab world and internationally and to stoke the smoldering coals of alienation, anger and indeed hatred. What, after all, is the difference between citing incidents like this and claiming "America has declared war on Islam" versus citing violent incidents such as 9/11 or the Fort Hood tragedy and claiming, as so many hate-filled bigots do, "Islam has declared war on America?"

Obviously people who say things like "Islam has declared war in America" are malevolent deceivers attempting to spread fear and hatred and play on chauvinism and paranoia in order to promote conflict and exacerbate tensions. These are the believers in a "clash of civilizations," those who think they are either is or should be a generalized conflict between the Muslims of the world and the West led by the United States. But is it in any way possible to argue that Al-Ahram is not doing precisely the same thing in reverse by printing this kind of hate-speech against an entire country? What do they imagine the effect on their readers will be? And how could they possibly accept the notion that two incidents spread out over quite a long period of time involving a very small group of fringe and alienated converts somehow demonstrates that "America has declared war on Islam?"

This is shameful, and it’s also a pattern. It’s a pattern here in the United States in the right wing media (and sometimes on the left too), and all of us, myself included complain about it all the time, and we are right to do so. But it’s a pattern that’s growing in the Arab media as well, and as I said before the English language Arabic papers are hiding behind authors with Western names in order to try to get away with it. The editors of Al-Ahram must be asked: how dare you? How dare you print such nonsense? How dare you deliberately try to inflame fear, hatred and alienation? How dare you be so irresponsible?

And there is a further question for whoever it is in the Egyptian government who oversees the activities of this newspaper: what on earth do you think you’re trying to do? This systematic undermining of your own government policies through your own newspaper — and not only in this instance vis-à-vis relations with the United States, but with reportage from Palestine and Lebanon by "journalists" whose thinly-veiled perspectives not only contradict but condemn your own policies, and regular commentaries from former politicians and others who similarly and passionately make the case against everything you have decided is in your strategic interest — how can you possibly explain it?

Perhaps the thinking is that publishing a newspaper that stridently and often angrily contradicts your entire foreign policy on a regular basis can help offset any calls for a genuinely free press. If so, this is a poisonous policy. Perhaps the thinking is that it is useful to keep people riled up and angry, so that you can appear to be nobly and courageously persisting with your foreign and security policies in spite of the fact that they are unpopular (in large part because your own media in effect denounces them, and you never even try to explain them honestly to your public) and thereby get more credit with the international community, the West and the other Arab states. Perhaps the left hand simply doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, although I find that hard to believe even in the case of an Arab bureaucracy. Whatever the explanation, there is madness going on at Al-Ahram in almost every issue. Pure, unadulterated madness.

I recently complained rather bitterly, and with plenty of justification, about the Shakespeare Theater Company’s embarrassing, terrible performance of Ben Jonson’s classic The Alchemist. This negative evaluation was only intensified by the contrasting modernized performance of Much Ado About Nothing approaching the end of its run at the Folger Elizabethan theater (without question the most charming stage in our nation’s capital). While the Shakespeare Theater Company got just about everything wrong in its modernization of The Alchemist — effectively ruining Jonson’s masterpiece for cheap laughs and extravagant, irrational and often inexplicable costumes — the production at the Folger is a textbook example of how to get it right in modernizing and adapting the context in which Elizabethan theater can be effectively revivified with a contemporary feel without damaging in any way the integrity of the original and, indeed not only adding but recovering lost meanings to the play.

Timothy Douglas’ inspired decision to reset the action of the play from Messina to an unspecified Caribbean milieu quite literally puts the Carnival in the carnivalesque of one of Shakespeare’s most freewheeling, giddy comedies. The main atmosphere of the setting is Afro-Caribbean, but the multiracial cast calls to mind more the cosmopolitan immigrant neighborhoods of large US cities then the West Indies themselves (though they, too, are multi-racial societies of course). Not only does the Carnival atmosphere work perfectly with the script, the reggae and hip-hop influenced soundtrack is also surprisingly effective and the recasting of the singer Balthasar as a DJ is positively inspired. It may have been a fairly simple exercise, but it was a pretty brilliant gesture to perform his famous song from Act II, Scene III as a reggae/hip-hop rap:

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never:
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.

[You’ll simply have to imagine the backing chorus of three ladies chanting, "Hey nonny, nonny, Hey nonny, nonny, Haaayeeeeeeeee" in the contemporary hip-hop/soul manner, but trust me, it completed the effect hilariously and doing nothing less than justice to the original.]

The cast deserves enormous praise, particularly Doug Brown’s impeccable, dignified Leonato, Rachel Leslie’s delightful and deliciously feisty Red Stripe-swilling Beatrice, and Roxi Victorian’s well-calibrated vulnerability as Hero. But the show-stealer clearly is Alex Perez as Constable Dogberry, one of the more challenging of Shakespeare’s clowns to perform effectively. Dogberry is a standard Shakespeare character, a low-born, officious and exceptionally foolish officer given to a stream of non sequiturs and malapropisms (think Elbow in Measure For Measure, and his immortal denunciation of "a notorious benefactor.") But Dogberry’s lines in and of themselves cannot carry the day as with some similar characters in some other Shakespeare plays. This character requires a performance of comic panache, and sufficient bravado and physical absurdism to fill out the relative weakness of some of his dialogue. When performed well, Dogberry is an immensely memorable character, but is otherwise forgettable at best. Perez, strutting, dancing around, gesticulating wildly and continuously resorting to his expandable metal pointer as an impotent symbol of empty authority, carries it off beautifully.

I began by referring to the recovery of meaning, and one of the most important aspects of recasting Much Ado in a Caribbean setting with many of the characters employing West Indian accents (to a greater or lesser degree), and even introducing some elements of demotic West Indian English (referring to "she" when standard forms of English would employ the word "her," for example) recaptures a crucial pun central to the title and the fundamental conceit of the play itself. The "nothing" in Much Ado has multiple meanings, some of which are obvious, but others less so.

It most obviously refers to the fact that Hero’s alleged infidelity is untrue, and that therefore the narrowly averted tragedy was based, literally, on nothing. Second, it refers to the comedy’s own triviality, an announcement at the start that what we are going to enjoy is a light soufflé of enjoyment rather than anything heavy and ponderous. Third, and this is perhaps less obvious now than it was during the Renaissance, nothing in this instance is also plainly a reference to "no thing," which is in both Elizabethan and Freudian terms, a reference to the vagina as signified by absence (the whole play, of course, is about romance and coupling).

A fourth, and largely lost — but in this production I think marvelously recovered — meaning, of the "nothing" in the title comes from the homonym that existed in many parts of England during Shakespeare’s time between the words "nothing" and "noting." In a sense, the play is much ado about noting, since it is a comedy of misrecognition, misapprehension and false impressions. The Caribbean setting and the West Indian accents restore this homonym: i.e., in much West Indian English, "there’s nothing going on over there," would be phonetically indistinguishable from "there is noting going on over there." The new setting therefore restores a sense that what we are watching is much ado about noting, a comedy about the interplay between recognition and misrecognition, apprehension and misapprehension.

Finally, this recovery of the original homonym adds a fifth dimension to the play on words built into the title of Much Ado, that noting also refers to music and musical notes, which play such a strong role in the play (especially in this production). When Don Pedro, tried of wooing Hero on Claudio’s behalf demands a song as a form of relief, Balthasar at first demures:

Don Pedro: Now, pray thee, come;
Or, if thou wilt hold longer argument,
Do it in notes.

Balthasar: Note this before my notes;
There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting.

Don Pedro: Why, these are very crotchets that he speaks;
Note, notes, forsooth, and nothing

It is at this point that Balthasar launches into his legendary, "Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more" performance ["Hey nonny, nonny, Hey nonny, nonny, Haaayeeeeeeeee"].

Don Pedro has it: "Note, notes, forsooth, and nothing," are the puns at the heart of the conceit in Much Ado and already announced in its title: perception, misapprehension, music, sexuality, and the lightness of a carnivalesque in place of an incipient tragedy. Everyone involved in the Shakespeare Theater Company’s lamentable massacre of The Alchemist should get their sorry behinds over to the Folger before the final performance of Much Ado this Sunday and learn how it’s done.

The essential character of Islamophobia is not a new phenomenon at all, but is actually re-inscription of many traditional forms of prejudice and fear attached to minority and immigrant groups in the history of many countries, including the United States. In our own history, American Islamophobia is virtually a verbatim cultural reenactment of the historical anti-Semitism of the first half of the 20th century. It is, of course, hardly a new idea that anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are intimately linked in western culture; Edward Said called anti-Semitism the “secret sharer” (invoking his beloved Conrad) of western orientalist prejudices. But the details of the way in which the heavily politicized post 9/11 Islamophobia has evolved into a strikingly and disturbingly precise re-enactment of the equally politicized anti-Semitism in the United States between the two world wars has yet to be widely recognized, let alone properly analyzed.

In the present moment, Islamophobic discourse is based on the explicit or implicit allegation that immigrant Muslim communities represent an alien and hostile political movement, in this case the so-called ?jihadist? international terrorist front led by terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda. In other words, the idea is not just that Muslims are alien, other and ?bad,? but that, as an immigrant group, they are a stealthy vanguard of a hostile political and alien cultural movement that seeks to destroy American society and civilization.

It is often forgotten now that much of the worst anti-Semitism in the United States in the first half of the 20th century drew on paranoid fantasies about Jews and Jewish immigrants as a supposed subversive ?fifth column? of Marxist revolutionaries and Bolsheviks dedicated to plotting and carrying out the violent overthrow of American capitalist and Christian society. The notorious forgery and plagiarism ?The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,? which defined most anti-Semitism in the 20th century, originated as a czarist and ?White Russian? calumny designed to blame revolutionary political forces and developments in Russia and other parts of Europe on a supposed ?Jewish conspiracy.? Anti-Semitic discourse of the period was replete with endless allegations about communism as some sort of ?Jewish plot,? and the link between various ?red scares? and anti-Semitic discrimination and defamation was explicit and extremely influential. The fact that in contemporary American culture Muslims are seen as synonymous with Arabs who are, like the Jews, a Semitic people, adds further depth to this uncanny and disturbing parallel.

Certainly the essential themes and tropes of contemporary American Islamophobic discourse as it has developed post-9/11 has more than a striking resemblance to the traditional forms of anti-Semitic defamation that characterized the periods between the First and Second world wars in the United States. The anti-Semitic literature of the period relied mainly on the following essential defamatory allegations, which thankfully in recent decades have been pushed to the margins of American society but can still be found on fringe, extremist websites:

* Jews believe themselves to be superior to all others and are bent on world domination.

* Jewish beliefs and values are inimical to those of Western civilization and the two are locked in a global battle to the death.

* Jews are religiously authorized to lie to, cheat, steal from and murder non-Jews whenever possible.

* Jewish immigration to the United States is a weapon of this war and a mortal peril.

* Jews have already conquered or seized control of large parts of Europe (through socialism, communism or control of financial markets) and the United States is the main redoubt of western civilization and values.

* Jews employ a division of labor between the wealthy few who finance subversion and conflict and the radicals who carry the battle into the streets, and that these two apparently contradictory classes in fact work hand-in-glove.

* ?Good Jews? should be grateful to the anti-Semites whose ?exposés? would help them ?clean house? in the Jewish community.

These are exactly and precisely the charges leveled at American Muslims in contemporary Islamophobic discourse in the United States, as most recently demonstrated in aftermath of the Fort Hood tragedy. And, unlike anti-Semitic rhetoric of this kind, analogous Islamophobic ideas are much closer to and sometimes even found in the mainstream of contemporary American discourse, just as these anti-Semitic ideas were once considered, if not fully respectable, at least commonplace and unremarkable. It is also entirely clear that the purpose and the intention of these calumnies was not to convert or engage in a serious theological dialogue with Jews, but rather to stigmatize and scapegoat Jewish communities and individuals in the United States. Their intention and inevitable effect was aimed at attacking human beings and not religious precepts, doctrines or practices.

The elements of American anti-Semitism listed above are virtually identical in every respect to the principal tropes, themes and claims of contemporary American Islamophobia. Just as the target of anti-Semitism was not Judaism but Jews, the target of Islamophobia is not Islam, but Muslims themselves. These two themes should guide the further study of this newest form of bigotry in the United States: first that Islamophobia is not an attack against Islam but an attack against Muslims and their civil and human rights; and second that Islamophobia is a virtually verbatim reenactment of the anti-Semitism in the United States in the first few decades of the 20th century.

As we consider the substance and the effect of contemporary American Islamophobia, we could not be better guided than by keeping in mind the main themes of traditional American anti-Semitism listed above. Both the anti-Semitism of the ?red scare? era and the Islamophobia of the present moment were based on a perceived subversive threat ? left-wing revolutionary and Islamist plots respectively ? that were attributed to entire ethnic and religious immigrant communities.

In the 1920s and 30s, anti-Semites typically defended their bigotry, and distinguished it from traditional folkloric and religious Western Christian anti-Semitism, by citing the supposed threat of subversion by ?Jewish revolutionists, ?anarchists,? and ?Bolsheviks,? just as today Islamophobes cite the threat of “jihadists” and ?radical Islamists.? In neither case was the danger fictional, but in both cases threats of political subversion were attributed to entire identity communities in an irrational manner reflecting much deeper prejudices and hatreds. Then and now, discrimination and bigotry has been rationalized on the grounds that either most people in these communities were somehow implicated in or supportive of the subversive threat, that subversives were hiding in or being sheltered in these immigrant communities, or that it is simply impossible to tell the difference between dangerous subversives and well-meaning citizens from these ethnic and religious communities, and that therefore discriminatory attitudes and practices are necessary, sensible and justified.

It will be objected, no doubt, by the purveyors of contemporary American Islamophobia that while there indeed may be some superficial parallels between the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the 1920s and 30s and the present anti-Muslim discourse, in fact the perceived Jewish link to leftist subversion of that era was a paranoid fantasy while the threat from radical Muslims is all too real. However, it is crucial to recognize is that in the period between the First and Second World Wars, to have suggested to the anti-Semites of the era, and even to conventional wisdom, that the Communist movement was not a real and clear and present danger to American society and its system of government would have been generally regarded as an absurdity. This threat was perceived as every bit as real and menacing, indeed probably more so, as the violent and subversive threat posed by Muslim extremists is today.

The idea that Communism, anarchism and Bolshevism were in any serious sense ?Jewish,? or that Jews in general were the epicenter and mainspring of a subversive Marxist plot against Western civilization, Christianity and capitalism, was a paranoid illusion, although many left-wing and radical leaders of the day were, in fact, Jewish. The threat from a violent and extremist fringe of Muslims is all too real today, just as there were, in fact, numerous violent and radical Jewish revolutionists in the first half of the 20th Century. However, it is no more reasonable or accurate to conflate terrorists with Muslims and Islam in general now than it would have to describe Communism as some sort of ?Jewish conspiracy? then.

It is a sad irony that some of the most enthusiastic and vicious purveyors of these familiar, almost clichéd, anti-Semitic slanders that have now been transferred onto Muslims are themselves Jewish, just as it is a sad irony that some of the worst forms of European anti-Semitism have found a new and historically improbable home in parts of Arab and Muslim discourse. This tragic development is, for the most part, an appalling byproduct of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the sympathies that people in both communities share with the respective parties in the Middle East, and the false but widespread sense of a zero-sum relationship between the two. An additional irony is that by smearing Muslims as inherently and irredeemably anti-Jewish, contemporary American Islamophobia has the effect of transferring onto the Muslims, and especially the Arabs, what are in fact Western traditions of anti-Semitism that lack historical corollaries in the Islamic world, and thereby effects an implicit transfer of guilt for this tragic history, including the Holocaust in Europe during the Second World War, away from Western Christian societies and onto Arab and Muslim ones.

On the other hand, it is certainly true that just as Islamophobia finds some of its most passionate promoters in the American Jewish community, so too is some of the worst anti-Semitism in the United States to be found emanating from or aimed primarily at Muslim-Americans. The fact that in both communities these are distinctly minority attitudes and that this ironic, tragic and frustrating situation is primarily an unfortunate side effect of passions arising out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not mitigate the urgent need for the responsible majorities among both American Jews and Muslims to take a more proactive role in combating these reciprocal and closely related prejudices.

A regular Ibishblog readers asks me to, “Please cite a single benefit which the Palestinians have enjoyed due to the US’ chimerical support for the principle of Palestinian independence. If the US’ toothless and duplicitous ‘support’ is one the main cards the hapless Palestinians hold, they’d better find another game to play-this one is obviously rigged. What in the world are you smoking in that shisha of yours?”

I’m sure this reader speaks for many, many Arabs and Palestinians in being skeptical that the slow but steady and, when viewed in terms of the past two decades, striking development of US support for the most fundamental Palestinian national positions, and the evolution of US-Palestinian diplomatic relations generally, is a useful thing. However, I would argue that this is a shortsighted and emotional reaction based on frustration (sentiments I, of course, share), rather than a strategic analysis that has any merit. To seriously assess the nature and the value of the US-Palestinian relationship, we need to consider first the fundamental political realities with which the Palestinian national movement has to contend, and second the alternatives to cultivating the strongest possible ties with the United States.

The fundamental political realities that define the context of Palestinian efforts to end the occupation and establish their own sovereign, independent state are the essential Middle Eastern regional and global international circumstances. The first point that needs to be faced is that in the Middle East at the moment and for the past several decades, the main regional power is, in fact, the United States. There is currently a growing challenge from Iran as a rising potential rival regional hegemon, but at present and for the foreseeable future, for better or worse, the United States is the most potent actor in the Middle Eastern region. It’s also the most significant country in the world, and with all due respect to the Chinese president, as yet it has no equal on the global stage.

There is no doubt that US power is declining in relative terms from a peak at the end of the Cold War, but rising potential global rivals such as China, India, Russia, Brazil and possibly the European Union are still developing their international presence and all of them remained largely mercantile powers devoted to trade with limited interest or ability in real power projection through military and diplomatic coercion, especially at the global level. Moreover, none of these powers either can or seem to desire to play the central role of third party in resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The “Quartet” essentially reflects international support for US efforts. Therefore, while the international power of the United States is often exaggerated both here at home and in many countries around the world, and its ability to enforce its will is of course highly constrained (as demonstrated most recently in Iraq), from a diplomatic perspective there is no substitute for American support as a practical matter if the occupation is in fact to be ended.

It could be argued that for the Palestinians, the Arab states constitute a first line of crucial diplomatic and political support, but that commitment has never been seriously called into question. Obviously there are many complaints Palestinians have about some of the policies of some, or perhaps even in some cases all, of the Arab governments, but the generalized Arab commitment to the Palestinian cause is really beyond question. Therefore, even if it could be argued that Arab diplomatic support is the most important for the Palestinians, since it is virtually guaranteed, the real question is the relationship with the United States.

Obviously, the American special relationship with and commitment to Israel, which is not at the moment subject to any serious political challenge within the American system, makes the US an even more crucial player from the Palestinian point of view. Palestinians can only achieve their ultimate objectives through an agreement with the Israelis, and it is really only the United States that Israel trusts to broker such an agreement. Therefore, if there is to be any such thing as Palestinian diplomacy or a Palestinian diplomatic strategy, the centrality of the relationship with the United States is obvious. It’s plainly the case that both because Israel enjoys such a powerful set of domestic political interests that advocate on its behalf in the United States and because Israel is a sovereign state with its own policies, the American ability to influence Israeli decision-making is significant but ultimately limited. The ongoing flap about Israeli settlement activity, Jerusalem and other issues significantly dividing US and Israeli policies is the most recent demonstration of this limitation.

One of the most common mistakes to be found in analyses of international relations is the notion that because the United States has no global rival, it can therefore be considered omnipotent. The least that can be said is that its power is greatly exaggerated in many people’s minds. In some conspiracy theories around the world, including among some Arabs, almost anything that takes place is considered to be a reflection of the American will. This is, of course, ridiculous. So is the idea that if the United States really wanted an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, it could simply force all the parties to agree to its agenda and the whole thing would be resolved in short order. Again, this is a misreading of both what is possible given the domestic political considerations in the United States and the reality that American power over both allies and rivals, while unmatched by any other state, is nonetheless seriously constrained by rather obvious limitations.

What I’m arguing here is that while the United States is indispensable as a broker to Palestinian-Israeli agreement on just about anything constructive, it is unreasonable and wrong to think of American policies as a panacea. Not only has this been demonstrated by the recent inability of the Obama administration to shift Israeli policies it does not agree with, the fact that the most fundamental Israeli-Palestinian agreement to date, the Oslo statement of principles, was largely negotiated through a back channel which bypassed the Americans (this could be taken as an indication that the US is not really needed, or, as I would argue, that its absence was a part of the real failings of Oslo from the outset). However, implementing these agreements, correcting the drastic flaws in everything that emerged from the Oslo process, and taking the diplomatic process further almost certainly requires an American role as a third-party. Moreover, I don’t think there is a real substitute for American financial and technical support and political protection for the PA State building plan and, indeed, many efforts to develop Palestinian society, economy and infrastructure.

One should consider the alternatives:

* Were the Palestinians better off diplomatically 20 years ago when there was absolutely no contact whatsoever between the United States and the PLO?

* Were they better off before the United States established a formal and increasingly respectful relationship with the Palestinian leadership?

* Were they better off before the United States adopted ending the occupation as a foreign policy goal under Bush and a national security priority under Obama?

* Would they be better off without the UN Security Council resolutions calling for Palestinian statehood?

* Would they be better off without the new Palestinian security forces that have brought a new measure of law and order to Palestinian cities like Jenin and Nablus and formed the basis for significant economic improvement?

* More importantly, would they be better off if the United States withdrew its support for the goal of ending the occupation?

* Would they be better off if the United States closed the PLO mission in Washington and ceased all contacts with the Palestinian leadership?

* Would they be better off if the United States abandoned any interest in the Palestinian cause and issue and simply left the Palestinians and, perhaps, the other Arab to deal with Israel completely on their own?

* Would it really make any sense for the Palestinians to allow Hamas to replace the PLO as the primary political and diplomatic arm of the Palestinian people and throw in their lot with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood parties that are both (and separately) challenging not only the American role in the Middle East but the regional order itself and almost all of the Arab states as well?

* Could the Palestinians even consider proceeding without any international support from the US, the Arab states, the UN and everyone else?

* Is there any possibility for Palestinian self-sufficiency given the reality of the occupation and the present state of Palestinian society?

Obviously, the reader and plenty of other frustrated people might rashly and precipitously be tempted to answer in the affirmative across the board. But I don’t think any serious person, upon the calm reflection, can answer yes to almost any and certainly not to most of these questions.

The other consideration is whether or not there is a non-diplomatic option for advancing the Palestinian cause and, most importantly, securing an end to the occupation. In my view, the state-building plan is just such a practical, complimentary and effective extra-diplomatic option, but it too requires American support and protection from Israeli interference in order to succeed. Boycotts and the like can be useful, especially when targeted against the occupation and used in harmony with the PLO’s national strategy, as can other grassroots efforts, but I very much doubt that civil society protests can secure the Palestinian national aims. They can cause pain and raise awareness, and could even have a small contribution to the overall political context, but I cannot imagine that they can fundamentally transform the strategic situation as the state-building option could. As for violence, it has proven its inefficacy and counter-productive qualities definitively and beyond serious dispute. Armed struggle is no answer for either side, and for all of the magnificent, heroic efforts at non-violent resistance against Israel’s giant wall in the West Bank there does not seem to be a serious chance that a widespread campaign of non-violent resistance would characterize a third intifada, as I have explained in detain in recent articles and Ibishblog postings.

Therefore while there are many useful tactics the Palestinians might employ to advance their cause, the strategic goal must be ending the occupation and all of these tactics need to bolster and support that overriding imperative. Since the only way this can in reality be accomplished is ultimately through diplomacy supported by state-building efforts, grassroots actions both in Palestine and internationally, and other measures, all roads ultimately lead back to the need for the best possible relationship with the United States.

Of course the ultimate objection raised by the reader is that for all of the increasing American sympathy for and support of the goal of ending the occupation and securing other crucial Palestinian national interests, the situation has, in many ways, continued to deteriorate and has certainly not been resolved. Fair enough. But this same charge can be made against any and all of the extant realities, strategies and approaches to securing Palestinian human and national rights that have been employed since 1948 (and indeed before), since none of them have produced the anticipated and required results. Obviously the relationship with the United States that has been steadily and in some ways dramatically improving over the past two decades needs a lot more work both to realize its broader potential and to undergird ending the occupation and establishing a Palestinian state. But it is quite difficult to imagine the Palestinians achieving their aims in the face of American antipathy or even ambivalence.

Therefore, what I’m suggesting really is a nuanced understanding that recognizes the indispensability of American engagement and support for the Palestinian national project while recognizing both the limitations of American power and what is possible given the domestic political circumstances in the United States. I’m asking people to accept that this reality is subtle, complex and includes apparent paradoxes such as the twin facts that while American power is highly limited, it is also absolutely indispensable.

The question has been asked of the Ibishblog by numerous readers whether or not I think that the PLO should follow through on their ideas and actually make a formal declaration of independent statehood. Damn good question.

Obviously, this is a highly fraught topic, filled with both opportunities and dangers for the Palestinians. First, even as a threat it is clearly a double-edged sword. It reminds Israel and the international community that Palestinians have agency and that their whole national agenda is an effort to realize an international consensus, and that Palestinian statehood is in the general interest and should become a reality. It would be pursuant to a small mountain of Security Council resolutions and other international instruments of legality. The threat in a sense calls the bluff of all other parties, saying, in effect: "we’ve tried everything we can think of for almost 20 years and gotten no where. If you really believe what you say, and support our independent statehood, support us now in this. If not, maybe like Israel you never really wanted it at all." It also demonstrates that Palestinians could, potentially, act diplomatically without regard to Israel’s concerns and demands.

The question, of course, is: to what effect? The cost-benefit ratio seems extremely tight, making it a bold, indeed risky move. The argument, of course, is that Palestinians have no choices left other than moves that are both bold and risky. And, as a very well argued commentary in today’s edition of the Arab News points out, "If both Israel and Hamas condemn the proposal of a UN declaration of independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, as they have, it suggests it must be the right idea." I’m not sure I can imagine a better argument for anything then an Israeli-Hamas consensus that it’s a bad idea.

Even as a threat, the move involves serious drawbacks. It has already been met with counter-threats from Israel to annex parts of the occupied West Bank, which as a practical matter might be more easily accomplished than Palestinian independence. It also more or less runs counter to the national strategy of the PLO since the late 1980s, which has been to seek an negotiated agreement based on the understanding that major changes between Israel and the Palestinians require mutual agreement and cannot really be accomplished by unilateralism on one side or the other.

The biggest problem is that in the end, there is still no serious prospect of ending the occupation and the conflict except through a negotiated agreement, no matter how remote that seems at this point. Therefore even the threat, while it does serve to concentrate minds, also hardens positions and undermines the basic strategy. But Palestinian frustration, the ongoing stalemate in talks, and the generalized sense that something drastic has to be done to change the strategic environment have apparently led to serious consideration of what can only be seen as a drastic measure.

As for acting on the threat in some formal manner, whether unilaterally or through the UN, the stakes would clearly be even higher. There are obvious appeals to the idea, making it extremely tempting. But the potential costs are very grave indeed. First, a unilateral declaration that, like earlier efforts of this kind, would, at this stage, be little more than an empty rhetorical gesture, ignored by Israel, the US and other powers. It could prove to not only be pointless, but also serve as a demonstration of Palestinian weakness and desperation. True enough that the UN General Assembly has the power to recognize and admit new members, one of the few meaningful powers not assigned to the Security Council, but as a practical matter, without the prearranged approval of the United States, even a formal gesture in the General Assembly would probably fail to yield significant results.

Moreover, if the threat alone carries strategic risks as well as benefits, acting on the threat is even more potentially dangerous. Were it done in defiance of rather than in cooperation with the United States, such an act might risk US support for the principle of Palestinian independence, which is one of the main cards the Palestinians currently hold. To cast it aside in gesture that proves wholly ineffective would be a dreadful mistake. It is not really within the power of the Palestinians to "call the bluff" of the United States, so to speak, in such a dramatic manner, if the Americans are dead set against it.

It would, therefore, require tacit and prearranged coordination with and approval of, or at least no ardent objections from, the United States for such a step to prove more productive than damaging. At this stage, that seems highly unlikely, with not only Washington, but also the EU and others warning against any such action. There are reports that there is an unpublished annex to the PA state and institution building program proposed by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad that suggests a potential declaration of statehood at the end of the two-year development and administrative project. This makes infinitely more sense than any such steps now, since if the PA plan is actually carried out, the framework of the state will be in place and declaring its existence, as Fayyad himself put it, would become essentially a "formality."

But many Palestinians obviously feel they cannot wait, and with good reason. In the face of stonewalling and continued settlement activity (most recently this unbelievably irresponsible announcement of 900 new settler housing units in Gilo), bellicose rhetoric and other provocations from Netanyahu, and complete dissatisfaction with Obama administration’s inability to shift the Israeli position, the sense that something dramatic is required is now almost universal. Hence the flurry of trail balloons about Abbas not running again, resigning, dissolving the PA, shifting to a single-state strategy, and now this talk about declaring statehood. Because it all reflects obvious desperation and a very limited set of options, none of it is very convincing except as an indication of despair.

But there might be a way of approaching this idea that has a little more substance and creativity, and its clear that at least some thought is being given to it in Ramallah at present. It’s important to consider that going to the UN need not involve a unilateral declaration of statehood or even seeking the recognition of a Palestinian state as a de facto or fully realized entity. It strikes me that there ought to be, even if this is unusual, or conceivably unprecedented, a means of filing something that amounts to a claim of sovereignty in the occupied territories. It’s important to remember that other than East Jerusalem, only the PLO has a formal claim of sovereignty on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel has never made any such claim, Egyptian and Jordanian claims have been formally renounced years ago, and no other party has any legitimate or extant sovereignty claim.

Under the terms of Security Council resolution 242, Israel must withdraw from the occupied territories, and there is no other entity other than a Palestinian state which claims the right to assume sovereignty and responsibility. Without a concept of Palestinian sovereignty, the land for peace formula outlined in 242 makes no sense. The international recognition for the need for a Palestinian state has been implicit since the Madrid conference in the early 1990s, and has been made explicit by a number of UN Security Council resolutions passed over the past five years. However, formal recognition of Palestinian sovereignty in the occupied territories in all of these circumstances is implicit and conditional on an agreement with Israel.

However, Israel’s founding was legally based on the UN partition plan of 1947, and therefore it could be argued that Israeli sovereignty was recognized in parts of Palestine by the UN before the creation of the state of Israel or its admission to the UN as a member state. This same partition plan, it could also readily be argued, is as much the birth certificate of Palestine as it is of Israel. However, given the passage of time and transformation of circumstances, as well as the emergence of the PLO as the governmental representative entity of the Palestinian people, a reiteration of Palestinian sovereign rights specifically linked to the occupied territories would reconcile the logic of in 1947 partition plan with that of the 1967 land for peace formula in a manner that is harmonious and consistent with the needs and desires of the international community. Moreover, any claim of sovereignty of this kind can be linked to the Arab Peace Initiative, providing added diplomatic gravitas, and framing the gesture in terms of the broader drive for peace in the Middle East generally.

Of course, Israel has implicitly claimed sovereignty in occupied East Jerusalem by extending its civil law to the territory it defines as municipal Jerusalem, which includes East Jerusalem. However, this action was explicitly rejected in 1980 by more than one UN Security Council resolution (voted for by the US, I might add) which not only rejected Israel’s efforts to effectively annex east Jerusalem but also explicitly called for Israeli withdrawal from the city (it’s the only part of the occupied territories that has been specifically designated by the Security Council as an area Israel must withdraw from). Therefore, given that there are no other extant sovereign claims on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Israel’s claim of sovereignty in East Jerusalem has been explicitly rejected on more than one occasion by the Security Council, it strikes me that a mechanism for filing a formal claim of sovereignty by the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people would have considerable merit.

I should be very blunt about this: I’m not an international lawyer, and I’m now talking about something quite technical and complex that is beyond my professional competency. I would be the first to admit I’m a little out of my depth in postulating that there is a potential to develop a mechanism that functions as a formal claim of sovereignty on behalf of the Palestinians that can be recognized by the UN but that deliberately falls short of another declaration of statehood that will be recognized mainly by developing countries and have little if any practical effect. It seems to me that the international community, and even the United States, under the right circumstances would have a very strong interest in backing any such claim of sovereignty in order to rescue the possibility of a two state agreement in light of Israel’s efforts to stonewall on its roadmap obligations vis-à-vis settlements, and its apparent refusal to agree to meaningful terms of reference for permanent status negotiations (persistently trying to take Jerusalem off the table, for example). Obviously, supporting any such move, even tacitly would be politically costly for the Obama administration with a number of important domestic constituencies, but with patience and coordination such an eventuality is, I think, definitely not outside the realm of possibility.

At any rate it’s pretty clear something drastic has to be done by somebody to shake up the present situation, which is not only an untenable stalemate, but in the long run is simply a recipe for another eruption of violence. The unbelievably reckless and irresponsible attitude of the Israeli government on settlements, Jerusalem and permanent status terms of reference have left all other parties with very few options within the existing framework. Obviously something has got to give, and I think it’s either going to be some action such as bolstering Palestinian statehood through a of recognition of sovereign rights or major action to support the PA State and institution building plan (which I think is even more important), or it may be impossible to prevent the complete breakdown of the entire system of relations between Israel and the Palestinians and another outburst of intense violence which will be to the enormous detriment of all parties.