Among the most dangerous aspects of the political culture surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on both sides are glib assertions of inevitable victory and the uninterrogated assumptions that inevitably lie behind them. It’s an obvious point, but was brought home to me with some force yesterday when a friend pointed out the following passage from a particularly foolish Arab-American blog:

“I have been critical of Haykal’s monologues on Aljazeera but he made a good point the other day. He said that if you despair, you just need to look at the map. To see the size of Israel and the size of the Arab world. The map explains why Israel’s years are numbered.”

One expects this kind of gobbledygook from the blogger in question, and it’s not particularly surprising to hear it from Mohamed Hassanein Haykal, or Al-Jazeera for that matter, either. What’s important is that Haykal was repeating the single most commonplace and damaging collective delusion the Arabs have been laboring under for the past 70-80 years, at least: the idea that because Israel is relatively small in territory and population, and the Arab world large in both, the outcome of a historic conflict is predestined and inevitable. After more than 60 years of dealing with the Israeli state, it’s unfortunately still possible for commentators and almost anybody else to make this allegation in front of an Arab audience with a straight face and get applause and approbation rather than dismissal and mockery. The persistence of this irrational and almost theological certainty is an overdetermined symptom, reflecting trauma, wounded pride and dignity, hubris and undoubtedly many more causes. But I think it’s important not to let this kind of baseless claim go unchallenged. Among other extremely dangerous consequences of such an attitude are reckless errors in judgment based on groundless assertions and, even worse, a sense that little or nothing really needs to be done about the present crisis, the occupation, the conflict, etc. because the long-term outcome is preordained by an ineluctable logic deriving from unchallengeable geographic and demographic statistics.

First of all, let’s look at the historical record of what was always, from the outset, a dubious proposition at best — that demographics are destiny and that the size of the Arab population by definition guarantees the failure of Zionism. During the mandatory period, Palestinians and other Arabs were confident that the Israeli state could not be established because Palestinians constituted the overwhelming majority in Palestine. After the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948, most were confident the collective Arab intervention in the war would reverse the Palestinian defeat in the civil conflict that took place as the British mandate was falling apart. After the new Israeli state prevailed and expanded its territory in the 1948 war, the official Arab governmental and intellectual position was that Israel was a temporary aberration that would quickly be expunged. In particular in 1967 there was an absolutely irrational and deluded (I use the second term in order to emphasize the extent to which the Arab people have been lied to about this issue by leaders and opinion makers, including Nasser’s then-megaphone Haykal, not only at that time, but historically and to the present-day) certainty of victory, which made the trauma of the rapid, decisive and catastrophic defeat all the more deep and painful. I don’t think the Arab world or the Arab people have fully recovered from it even today. 1948, 1967, all the wars and all the ghastly eventualities that have taken place over many decades have, astonishingly, done little to undermine the faith that many people have in the idea that Arab territorial and demographic size spells doom for the Israeli national project.

Haykal’s commonplace but highly questionable assertion is based on an enormous set of underlying assumptions that are, it seems to me, extremely dubious. First, it assumes that in the long run, smaller powers cannot survive in the presence of ones that are larger in territory and population. I think both the sweep of human history and present Middle East and indeed global realities do not support any such idea. Second, it assumes that the Arab world was, is and/or will be united in placing the goal of eliminating Israel on the top of their national agendas. Again, both history and present reality suggest this is a dangerous assumption to make. It’s certainly true that the Arab world has been and remains strongly supportive of Palestine and quite hostile to Israel, but it’s also true that most Arab governments and much of the Arab populace have lost their taste for endless wars with Israel. There was a concerted effort to reverse the catastrophe of 1948 for a couple of decades after it occurred, but even by the 1973 war, the focus for countries like Egypt and Syria was the reconquest of their own lost territory and not a broader ambition to do with Palestine.

Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel signaled what certainly appears for the foreseeable future to be an irrevocable end to a concerted and united Arab effort to do away with the Israeli state. Since then, Jordan has signed a similar treaty, Syria and Lebanon have made it clear that they are willing to do so given the right terms as well, and the entire Arab world has endorsed the Arab Peace Initiative which embraces the formula of land for peace that would result in the recognition of Israel and normalization of relations. Whereas Israel was once surrounded by Arab states committed to its elimination, it is now surrounded by Arab states pursuing a reasonable peace agreement that would ensure Israel’s long-term survival.

Of course one could always argue, as I’m sure many people would, that this strategic shift reflects only the parochial, unprincipled and unrepresentative behavior of corrupt, self-serving ruling elites that serve at the pleasure of imperial masters, and reflects only American and Israeli interests, not the interests of the various Arab states and societies. It’s hard to argue against that kind of categorical assertion that cannot be tested or disproven — it’s based on a set of allegations about the collective attitudes of ordinary Arab people from Morocco to Iraq, and a set of extrapolations based on those allegations about what different kinds of governments (democratic, revolutionary, Islamist, or whatever people have in mind) would do differently when it comes to Israel. However, there is no basis for thinking that Arab regimes in general are about to be replaced by some radically different governments anytime in the near future and no way of anticipating what those governments would look like or what they would do if they did suddenly or even gradually emerge.

Another of the dubious assumptions behind Haykal’s glib assertion is that Arab states don’t have their own specific national interests that can or will take priority over matters regarding Israel; or that Israel will be at the top of the national security priorities for all Arab states with any governments other than the ones that currently exist; or even more fancifully that the present Arab state system will be replaced by either a pan-Arab or pan-Islamic political entity that will then focus all of its energies on a long-term project to eliminate Israel. What we have witnessed over the past few decades is logical, predictable and often unrecognized in the kind of silly pseudo-analysis of the Haykal variety: Arab states and societies have many interests and priorities, and even though Israel is extremely unpopular with most ordinary Arabs and Palestinian suffering heavily identified with, both governments and societies have increasingly focused their main energies on other problems. Indeed, for better or worse, the question of Palestine is not the main national security or national agenda priority for most Arab states and societies at the present time.

North Africa, from Morocco to Libya, has always been and remains practically and politically distant from the conflict, and all those states have other priorities. Egypt is certainly focused on Palestine as a national security issue, but not with an eye to eliminating Israel but rather containing the threat to its stability and security concentrated on the Gaza border and preventing itself from being sucked into responsibility for Gaza again as the Israeli right frequently fantasizes it can be. Jordan has similar concerns to Egypt and also views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict mainly through the lens of its own internal security. Iraq is wracked by civil conflict, occupation, rebuilding, power struggles and sectarian tensions. Like North Africa and Sudan, Yemen has always been distant from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and it is now the site of two separate insurrections and a major infiltration from international terrorists taking advantage of the chaos. The Gulf states are increasingly focused on the rise of Iran as a regional hegemon that is attempting to project its power throughout the Middle East, and especially in the Persian Gulf, and which has repeatedly announced its full territorial claim on Bahrain and hinted at broader territorial ambitions as well. Indeed, much of the Arab world eyes Iran with considerable suspicion, and great anxiety about its possible rise as a nuclear as well as a hegemonic power.

This means that the only Arab societies that place Israel at the forefront of their national security concerns are, at most, the Palestinians, Lebanon and Syria. But Lebanon and Syria have made it clear that they’re willing to sign a peace treaty with Israel as long as the price is right. Moreover, for all its bluster about “resistance,” the Syrian regime has maintained the quietest border with Israel of any of its neighbors, including the ones who actually have signed treaties. Indeed, it’s one of the quietest borders in the world. Iran, Syria and others are happy to use proxies in south Lebanon and Gaza to bedevil Israel, but the idea that Syria remains committed to the eventual elimination of Israel flies in the face of both its conduct and its stated positions. Lebanon’s concerns have to do with its own vulnerability to Israeli attack and to additional possible future wars involving Hezbollah. And, while none of this means that Syria, Lebanon or the Palestinians as societies remain committed to the elimination of Israel, it is worth keeping in mind that these are the three Arab societies with territories still under Israeli occupation, which is undoubtedly the main source of tension, anger and conflict.

Certainly in the Arab world Islamists and the extreme left continue to talk in terms of the need to destroy Israel, but these comments have to be taken in the context of a quest for domestic political power in which strident populist and nationalist rhetoric is deployed in order to gain credibility and do not reflect the exigencies of actually running a country and being responsible for its foreign policy and national security. None of these groups seem to be in a position to come to power, and if they did it’s very questionable if their governing policies would reflect these attitudes.

Beyond the Arab world, Iranian leaders speak in terms of the “inevitable” downfall of the Israeli state, but again, this is calculated political rhetoric designed to appeal not only to a domestic constituency but an Arab one that otherwise might have severe doubts about the intentions of a Persian and Shiite power. In other words, outbidding everybody else on Israel is one of the best ways an Iranian leader can get otherwise skeptical Sunni Arabs to regard their hegemonic agenda in the region and nuclear ambitions sympathetically. More importantly, it’s obviously not reflected in any practical Iranian policies. Iranian financial and other support for Hamas, which is well documented, not doubted by any serious person and openly admitted by the Gaza leadership the other day, certainly qualifies as an effort to spread its influence, destabilize its rivals and take advantage of chaotic situations. But I don’t think it qualifies as part of a policy that ultimately seeks the elimination of Israel, as this would be extremely difficult and dangerous and yet not advance any obvious Iranian national interest.

My point here is that Haykal’s remarks may have seemed insightful or reasonable at first glance to people like this frankly idiotic blogger, his hosts at Al Jazeera and much of the audience, but they are based on a set of assumptions that aren’t reflected by history or the present reality, and on an imaginary future that is really quite implausible. I think it’s definitely true that Israel faces a grim future if it does not come to terms with the Palestinians, and may in the end find itself confronting forces beyond its control or comprehension. But the outcome of such a confrontation is not clear at all, especially given the fact that the Israelis have an extensive stockpile of high-tech weaponry including many scores of nuclear warheads and probably a submarine-based second strike capability as well.

Of course the same kind of foolishness is readily be found on the Israeli right as well: racist assertions of Jewish and Western superiority over the Arabs; baseless confidence that Israel’s undoubted successes in the 20th century can be indefinitely extended; a delusional, self-destructive dismissal of the Palestinians as a society and national movement that can be “defeated;” and in some extreme cases borderline-psychotic balderdash about chosen peoples, covenants with God and redemption of holy lands. Many Israelis look at their past military victories, weapons stockpile, high-technology and special relationship with the United States and much of the West, and draw the reckless and indefensible conclusion that their position in the long-run is secure and that they have no need of a reasonable, viable peace agreement with the Palestinians. There is a sense, and it’s unfortunately reflected in parts of the present Israeli Cabinet, that a reliance on brute force and a certainty that realities will remain more or less as they are now relieve Israel from any need to end the occupation or otherwise accommodate the Palestinian national project. Frankly, it’s a suicidal attitude, and there’s no other way of putting it forthrightly.

But, as I’ve tried to show above, Arabs like Haykal — who look at the map and note the geographical size and the burgeoning population of the Arab world, and thereby conclude that in the long run “victory” and the elimination of the Israeli state are “inevitable,” or who are glib about the extraordinary carnage and cataclysm for both sides that would be involved in any such eventuality — are at least as misguided. As long as the conflict and the occupation continue, and there are enough Israelis who will not reconcile themselves to a Palestinian state and enough Arabs who will not reconcile themselves to a Jewish state, both Arabs and Israelis are in a very vulnerable and exposed situation. Even though I spent a great deal of space above interrogating the dubious assumptions underlying Haykal’s facile remarks, none of it should give any comfort to supporters of the occupation, or any friends of Israel for that matter.

The point is that no one can anticipate the future, and neither side should have the least confidence in its ability to secure a maximal “victory” that consists of the permanent elimination of either the Jewish or Palestinian states respectively. It is precisely this ambition that places both societies in grave danger, because they both have, especially in the long run, the ability to do incalculable damage to each other. Almost any scenario that does not involve the realization of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and an end to the occupation instead promises the likelihood of a lose-lose outcome with no winners and horrifying consequences for all parties.

There are lessons to be drawn from both recent and deep history, but grand historical analogies are, as I have argued many times before, dangerous because they are, at some level necessarily, arbitrary. They usually illustrate more about the political orientation and ideology of those proposing them than they do about any future developments. Haykal and others seem to think Israel faces the fate of the medieval crusader state in Palestine. Others imagine that the recent South African experience is the best guide to what not only can, but will, happen between Israel and the Palestinians. Right-wing Israelis and all those opposed to the end of the occupation obviously think that the Palestinians will experience the same fate shared by the indigenous peoples of the New World. It’s remotely possible that some version of one of these scenarios might play out, but infinitely more likely that what the future holds in the Middle East is not foreseeable, predictable or analogous to any of these models. It’s also possible that the grim future I imagine in the absence of a peace agreement will be avoided as well, by some means which I cannot anticipate. But I do think the most plausible scenarios are really quite chilling, which is why, in spite of the extraordinary difficulties, I am convinced we need to press on in trying to achieve a two-state peace agreement that ends the occupation and the conflict.

The one thing I think all Israelis and their friends and all Arabs and their friends need to recognize, in contrast to the glib and frankly stupid certainties offered by people like Haykal or supporters of the occupation, is that it is entirely possible for either Israel or the Palestinians or, quite conceivably, both to lose everything.

I took advantage of this recent MLK Day long weekend to reread Hamlet in light of the fascinating conversation I had with Seth Duerr, Director of the York Shakespeare Company, in New York City a few weeks ago. Among the many things we agreed on was that our opinion of Hamlet was fairly unenthusiastic, at least in comparison to some of the rest of the Shakespeare canon and in comparison to the play’s iconic cultural status. My rereading confirmed many of my reservations, but also rekindled interest in the play itself, its somewhat puzzling role in popular culture and some of the core mysteries about it that I think the lie at the heart of the fascination it continues to hold.

There’s no doubt that overall and over time Hamlet has proven to be Shakespeare’s most influential and popular play, but it has certainly endured mixed fortunes across the centuries. It was apparently very popular in its own day, with numerous references to it in several contexts, but in the 17th and early 18 centuries, critical reception was often unenthusiastic. The generic and plot-oriented formalist criticism of the Restoration period felt that Hamlet indefensibly mixed elements of comedy and tragedy, debased royalty and aristocracy, and otherwise failed to adhere to the strict rules of classical drama. It was thereby adjudged at best flawed, and at worst a failure. Nonetheless, it remained a popular performance piece with theater-going audiences. Increasingly during the 18th century, critics found Hamlet a compelling heroic figure. As modern literary criticism emerged towards the end of the century, Romantic commentators such as Coleridge, Goethe and Schlegel shifted attention from genre and plot to character and psychology, and thereby lighted on Hamlet, a play about the tension between contemplation and action and an exercise in representing interior thought in a medium that had theretofore invariably emphasized action rather than mentation, as not only Shakespeare’s greatest achievement, but perhaps all of literature’s.

Its reputation grew to almost preposterous proportions in the 19th century, which saw the rise of a fanatical cult of bardolatry with Hamlet as the jewel in the crown of the king of high culture. The 20th century saw a slow but steady decline in the fixation on Hamlet, at least among academics and critics, with modernists like T.S. Eliot drawn more to the dazzling heights of the poetry in Antony and Cleopatra, myth-oriented critics like Wilson Knight and others including many “new critics” increasingly drawn to the formal perfection of King Lear (now probably the leading candidate for “greatest Shakespeare tragedy,” whatever that means), post-colonialists to the social commentary and raw power of Othello, and new historicists to directly topical plays like The Tempest and Coriolanus (with obvious overlaps — The Tempest, for example, is also staple of postcolonial criticism, etc.) In the process, Hamlet has faded somewhat as an object of obsessive preoccupation in the Shakespeare canon among critics and academics. However, the play remains an enormously powerful force in popular culture — more than any of these late-coming rivals for the top spot — in part due to its uncanny ability to appeal to a wide audience in spite of its enormous length and extreme complexities, and in part due also to its iconic cultural status acquired during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Kenneth Branagh, Kevin Kline, Ethan Hawke and (sigh) Mel Gibson are among the actors and movie stars to have undertaken the role on film in recent years, and one has the impression that the Adam Sandler Hamlet cannot be all that far behind. Still, it could be worse — Richard Burton’s 1964 performance, preserved on a kind of early video, has all the quality of shock and awe, insofar as it’s shockingly awful. He seems to have confused acting with shouting, and the louder the better. If you can get past the first 20 minutes, you have more of a resistance to headaches than I do (although to be fair, Hume Cronyn did make a splendid Polonius). Branagh’s 1996 four-hour, 70 mm “uncut” epic strikes me as so self-indulgent, self-important and thoroughly over-the-top that it can only be described as obnoxious. As he delivers the third soliloquy in front of a mirror, it’s not only Hamlet addressing Hamlet, but also Branagh exulting in the glory that is Branagh. However, because its drawbacks, however breathtaking, are offset by some fine performances and imaginative production, it has to be classified as one of the least bad Hamlets on celluloid. The best one can get at home, I think, is the 1980 BBC production with Derek Jacobi doing a superb starring turn (as it happens, I saw Jacobi playing Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1978, and this TV performance is pretty close to what we got on stage), with lots of secondary performances that are at least as good, especially Patrick Stewart’s flawless, definitive Claudius. One of the most interesting things about Branagh’s 1996 version is watching an older Jacobi shift from Hamlet to Claudius, and contrasting not only Branagh’s Hamlet with Jacobi’s, but Jacobi’s Claudius with Stewart’s (I think both earlier performances win hands-down).

The point is that while the play’s stature is somewhat diminished among academics and critics, with theatergoers and in popular culture it is not and that’s reflected in the large number of (mostly bad) versions on film. There are a great many reasons why Lear, Othello and the other pretenders with their passionate academic champions remain secondary in the popular consciousness and culture, and I wouldn’t begin to try to identify, let alone explain, all of them. Obviously, as I noted above, almost 200 years of relentless drumbeat pressing its iconic status as the height of English language and even global theatrical (and possibly even literary) achievement, is the single most important element. Another is the simple fact that this is, in both its longest and second-longest versions (more on this later), the most sustained play in the Shakespeare canon and therefore the most detailed and richly drawn. Obviously, it’s always going be possible to get people to pay close attention to any compelling meditation on the mysteries of life and death that obsess the drama and its central character. And it is this very quality of mystery that I think is one of the factors that has given the play not only its iconic status, but also its enduring popularity. There are an extraordinary number of riddles and irresolvable puzzles in and surrounding Hamlet.

Some of the most well-known conundrums leave me fairly cold, insofar as I don’t think they’re that resistant to a semi-satisfactory answer.

Is Hamlet ever really crazy? I think he plainly is, and certainly when it comes to his three private and semi-private encounters with Ophelia, as he says “it hath made me mad,” in which I read a heavy and surprised emphasis on the “hath.” I think you can add to this the wrenching and incredibly powerful scene in which he berates his mother in the most obscene terms (only thinly-veiled, at most) after he has killed Polonius. In those four instances, there is almost no doubt that the character has absolutely lost self-possession, and the common theme is women and sexuality. At the simplest level, he has completely lost faith in the two women he loves, seeing his mother as at best betraying his father’s memory and at worst being an accomplice in his death, and Ophelia as being, through her father’s commands, another instrument of Claudius against him. The chronology of events suggests that it is Ophelia’s rejection of him at precisely the time when he is confronted with the ghost of his father and the monstrosity of the situation that sends him over the edge. Both women are transformed in his mind into “whores,” leading to a horror of sexuality and an obsession with sexual corruption, corporeal revulsion and syphilitic infection (the play is permeated with imagery of venereal disease). Unlike the political intrigue in the court, in which his “antic disposition” is an obvious and badly performed affectation, Hamlet’s sexual hysteria is, I think plainly, genuine and it indeed hath made him mad.

Other familiar problems have become overdetermined and stale, most notably: why does Hamlet delay?

The whole play is basically a meditation on that theme, but following Coleridge, Jones, Eliot, Wilson Knight, Lacan, Bloom, Greenblatt and everybody else, this problem has become as overworked, one might almost say scarred, as the clichéd-to-death third soliloquy (to go over this yet again, or not to go over this yet again, that is the question). It obviously needs to be continuously re-asked and answered, but must be approached obliquely to get around all that scar tissue left by hundreds of years of hacking away at the nub. And, it should not be forgotten (as it usually now is), that one of the most obvious answers is that the endless delays are a necessary plot device to keep the play going, since if revenge were taken immediately as ordered by the ghost, the drama would never make it past Act I.

In this context it is important to recall that Hamlet is firmly part of a well-established genre, the Senecan Revenge Tragedy, and that it is a distinctive feature of the Elizabethan version of the genre that the avengers hesitate, vacillate or delay for one reason or another. They also usually feign madness and consider suicide (all of this applies to the first of many English Renaissance characters of this type, Hieronimo in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which, like Hamlet, also includes a play-within-the-play). Vacillation or delay, for whatever reason, is an essential plot device in these narratives, but it also reflects the key hesitations in the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus in which Christ, Pilate and other key figures hesitate before taking their final, cosmically momentous decisions. In all three of these instances — hesitation, feigned madness and suicide — Shakespeare takes elements of the generic form and builds upon them in a manner that creates something new, remarkable and unique. (Horror of feminine sexuality and male hysteria about female chastity and sexual agency are also marked features of this genre, traits Hamlet shares with many other protagonists of English Renaissance revenge tragedies.)

Hesitation is an almost universal characteristic in the world of Hamlet as well, although not everyone hesitates or vacillates as much as the title character. However, Laertes certainly hesitates when he returns to Elsinore seeking revenge, and again hesitates before deliberately poisoning Hamlet during the duel. Claudius hesitates before his attempted and failed repentance. And, most tellingly of all, in the speech recited by the First Player at Hamlet’s request, Pyrrhus, shocked by a giant crashing sound, hesitates before the gruesome slaughter of Priam. I take this to be the most telling echo of the broader play of Hamlet within the First Player’s speech — not the avenging son killing the guilty father-murderer, but rather the telling moment of hesitation. The only avenging son who does not, as far as we can tell, hesitate (although he is restrained by Old Norway) is Fortinbras, who, perhaps not coincidentally, ends the play not only revenged, but on the throne of at least two countries, and with almost no effort on his part.

A corollary question, not quite so overdetermined as the first, might provide an oblique entry point: does Hamlet ever really decide to take his revenge? Has he at any point in the narrative actually resolved the contradiction between contemplation and action and decided to avenge his father proactively, or is vengeance forced on him by his enemies’ botched plot against his own life? The contradiction only really applies to the specific task of killing Claudius — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are callously dispatched and he takes bold, indeed rash, action in the killing of Polonius. It seems impossible that he would really have thought that it was the King behind the arras since he had only just gone to his mother’s chamber having left Claudius in mid-prayer unharmed. Indeed, his question upon the killing — “Is it the king?” — I think demonstrates that he is pretty sure that it isn’t. Moreover, Hamlet is an extremely cruel character with a strong sadistic streak and takes many actions to torment those he is angry with. It’s this one specific task that causes so much difficulty.

Many efforts have been made to explain this anomaly, and Hamlet struggles with it throughout the entire play. Certainly the question of his mother is at the heart of the problem. The ghost, after all, has set him what appears to be a contradictory task: take revenge on Claudius but do no harm to Gertrude. Insofar as she remains in love with her husband, it’s an impossible task. Moreover, killing the King is an act of high treason. Hamlet wishes to be king, and bitterly complains that his mother’s “o’er hasty marriage” was needed in order to ensure that Claudius rather than Hamlet acceded to the throne (this is what most strongly makes her an accomplice to the crime — her decision to quickly re-marry ensured the killer achieved what he calls “those effects for which I did the murder, my crown, mine own ambition and my queen.”). There is enough of the medieval, divine right of kings, monarchism, just enough of Richard II, in Hamlet’s worldview to make regicide, no matter how justified, an especially difficult task. But I do think that the explanation suggested by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams and later elaborated by Jones remains the most powerful reading of the problem: Hamlet’s greatest difficulty is that he is implicated in Claudius’ desires, if not his actions. The killing of Claudius becomes metaphorically and at the level of liminal and subliminal desire an act of self-accusation and self-destruction, and so it literally proves in action.

In many productions much is made of the fourth soliloquy, in which it is often said Hamlet decides to become a man of action rather than of contemplation and to do the deed at last. In Branagh’s film, it’s centrality as a turning point is unmistakable as it is staged as an outrageous set piece with the camera pulling back onto a gigantic mountainous landscape as it reaches a thoroughly overblown crescendo, coming very close to unintended parody. However, this is hardly the first time that Hamlet has resolved to kill Claudius, and, when he returns to Denmark, he does no such thing. It’s true that there doesn’t appear to be a lot of time for him to act, but circumstances are driven forward not by anything he does, but by the Claudius-Laertes plot. Hamlet accepts the challenge delivered by Osric but asserts first that he will “win at the odds,” and then in his beautiful “there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow” passage he stoically accepts the prospect of his own death. But at no time does he explain how he’s going to use the occasion to fulfill his revenge, or indicate that he believes that Claudius and/or Laertes can be killed in the duel. Hamlet’s hand is forced, and there’s nothing in the plot or the action to suggest that he ever actually decides to take his revenge, at least until the point where both he and his mother are dying and there is nothing left to lose at all. Jones argues that the death of Gertrude frees Hamlet from his Oedipal conundrum and he can now kill Claudius, but I think it’s important to remember that Laertes has told him that he’s been poisoned and he himself is going to also soon die. So, whatever the causes for Hamlet’s indecision and inaction — he lists numerous reasons himself, and critics have advanced countless explanations — to me it seems to be a state that he never really overcomes, and I think understanding it requires recognizing this.

Another important question, and one that that I think is not considered carefully enough, is how we should read Hamlet’s instructions to the players on how to perform The Mousetrap. Traditionally, and even today, the advice is generally regarded as Shakespeare’s own opinion of how acting should and should not be done on stage. But I think the passage is quite different and far more complicated. There is no doubt much of it is sound advice, and at first glance it seems to make a lot of sense. However, much the same can be said of Polonius’ advice to Laertes, which is usually regarded as a mockery and as again demonstrating the old courtier’s tedious pomposity. The quality of the advice in both cases, it seems to me, is quite beside the point, and these pronouncements are not intended to be taken by the audience as either a guide for living or for acting, but rather are designed to illuminate aspects of the personalities of both characters. Polonius’ advice reveals him to be anxious, cautious, Machiavellian and self-interested. It reflects the attitude of a man who is very concerned about getting what he needs and deeply frightened about the ability of other people to take that away. His famous parting comment, “to thine own self be true,” is not about honest, introspective self-criticism, it’s about looking after numero uno. It’s certainly what Polonius does, and he’s urging his son to adopt the same cautious, politic and self-serving attitude.

Similarly, Hamlet’s advice to the players reveals a lot more about his own character than it does about the craft of acting. It shows him to be an elitist with a strong sense of propriety and a marked distaste for the popular and the entertaining. He is especially concerned that excessive clowning might attenuate the pointed message aimed at Claudius, and has very harsh words about clowns generally, and especially clowns who extemporize and ham it up. In contrast, Shakespeare adores clowns, uses them in every single play, and often attributes to them the sharpest insights. This was no aristocratic elitist, like Hamlet. Shakespeare was a money-making, populist playwright, and was much criticized for this by the university wits and others in his own time.

Moreover, Hamlet’s attack on clowns is strikingly ironic because he himself is the main clown in his own drama. Particularly when he is affecting his antic disposition in the court, his main symptoms are punning riddles, clever paradoxes, practical jokes, mockery and other attributes of a Shakespearian clown. Even more ironically, his performance as a clown is a complete failure in the sense that if it’s designed to provide him cover to develop his revenge plot, it absolutely backfires, calling a great deal more attention and suspicion to him that if he had simply and quietly gone along with things until suddenly striking, and it increasingly alarms Claudius. The other clown in the play, the gravedigger, gets the better of Hamlet every time in their comical exchanges — he’s the only person in the drama capable of not only keeping up with Hamlet’s wit, but bettering it at every stage (more evidence, I think, of Shakespeare’s profound affection for his clowns). So Hamlet’s advice to the players not only shows him to be a cerebral, overly-serious elitist (we knew that already, but it’s underlined), it also suggests a powerful blind spot about his own role and behavior. Of course, one could note that after ripping Polonius to shreds with mockery, he tells the First Player, “Follow that lord; and look you mock him not,” which might indicate that he’s consciously giving himself license to perform clowning that he disapproves of in everybody else. But it seems more reasonable and consistent to read the extemporizing and over-the-top clown Hamlet’s attack on extemporizing and over-the-top clowns and clowning as indicative of a certain blindness and self-deception in his own personality.

There are scores, and perhaps hundreds, of other enduring mysteries surrounding Hamlet, some of them not particularly fascinating, that continue to engage scholars, critics, readers and audiences. But at least one strikes me as exceptionally rich (though ultimately undecidable): what is the relationship between the three distinct versions of the play?

The earliest known published text, the 1603 First Quarto (Q1), is much shorter than the other two, and contains different and in many cases much less compelling language (“To be, or not to be, aye there’s the point, To die, to sleep, is that all? Aye all: No, to sleep, to dream, aye marry there it goes…”). When it was discovered in the early 19th century, and for many decades after, it was generally assumed that this was a first draft or a rough draft of the final product, but this view is now generally rejected for a variety of complicated reasons. Q1 is one of the quintessential “bad quartos” that have historically been regarded as garbled versions of the real thing. It’s still not highly regarded, although it is heavily studied, in academic circles, but many actors have expressed appreciation for the pacing of this much shorter version of the play, and there have been numerous performances of Q1 in the past hundred years or so (John Gielgud called it “Hamlet with the brakes off.”)

The 1604 Second Quarto (Q2) is more than twice as long as Q1, contains much more familiar and obviously superior poetry, and because of its length is often considered to be definitive. The 1623 First Folio (F1) is much closer to Q2 than Q1, but is missing a good deal of Q2 material and introduces or restores some very important passages — most notably the extended conversation about the children’s acting companies that seems to reflect the theatrical rivalries in London at the start of the 17th century, precisely when Hamlet is generally held to have been written. F1 is also given primacy in many cases because F1’s texts appear to have been much more carefully prepared and presented than any of the quarto editions of the plays, and they come with stamps of approval from Shakespeare’s acting fellows John Heminges and Henry Condell, and from Ben Jonson.

It’s not really possible to hold to an obvious chronology of composition that coincides with the order of publication leading from Q1 to Q2 to F1. But the current theory en vogue which holds that composition actually went from Q2 to F1 to Q1 makes very little sense to me because of the obvious deficiencies in the language of Q1 — I mean, radical cuts for staging are obviously needed (Branagh’s four-hour plus “uncut” version combines all of Q2 and F1 with pretty dire consequences for the audience), but why on earth would anyone deliberately jettison the often profoundly superior passages in Q2/F1 for the comparatively awful stuff sometimes found in Q1 (as in the opening of the third soliloquy cited above)? And then, of course, there is the additional complication of the relationship of Shakespeare’s “foul papers” (his discarded and long-lost working manuscripts) to these three very different versions of the play. Like so much else regarding Hamlet, the mystery of the nature of the relationship between the different versions of the text and the really strange conundrum of the chronology of its composition is both fascinating and ultimately irresolvable.

The Arab-American community is routinely subjected to political nonsense on the Internet and in many other media and forums. The most damaging form of nonsense is not bad analysis or angry idiocy, damaging though that certainly is, but factual inaccuracy and blatant falsehoods that are all too common and create serious confusion and misapprehension. If we don’t have our facts right, there is no hope of coming to an accurate analysis. Without an accurate analysis, there is no hope of coming up with a workable strategy to deal with a situation. Extraordinary and extravagant nonsense is to be readily found, but at some point someone has to draw the line.

When I was communications director of ADC, there were numerous occasions in which we had to intervene with public statements to clarify misapprehensions, rumors and false information that were circulating through the Internet and causing harm in the Arab-American community. When the second intifada began, a rash of forged advertisements purporting to show the enthusiasm of various corporations like Coke and McDonald’s for Israel circulated online and were believed in by very large numbers of people. It took a great deal of our effort to convince many people that these were crude forgeries. The same thing applied to ridiculous rumors about various corporations supposedly donating percentages of their profits to the Israeli military.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a rumor spread like wildfire online that a nonexistent Argentinian professor in a nonexistent University who maintained a nonexistent database of news footage had demonstrated that images of a tiny handful of Palestinians celebrating the attacks was actually footage from the time of the first Gulf War in 1990-91. This was, unfortunately, completely false. But it quickly gained so much currency, and was so demonstrably false, that we felt compelled to issue a statement refuting it and confirming that the footage was, most regrettably, genuine, although it certainly didn’t reflect the generalized Palestinian sentiment.

These are only two examples among many of the instances in which when I was at ADC we took it as part of our mission to not only make sure that what we were saying was accurate but also to advise people when wild inaccuracies were coming from other quarters. These days, it seems there isn’t anybody prominent in the Arab-American community who is playing the role of proactively and authoritatively putting the brakes on falsehoods, rumors and nonsense, and that’s extremely unfortunate.

The most recent case in point was a press release issued yesterday (somewhat ironically) by my former employers and colleagues at ADC that announced, with some fanfare, that the IRS had pledged to investigate tax-exempt funding for Israeli settlement activities in the occupied territories. Obviously, the subject line which contained this “information” was exciting and I immediately read the e-mail in hopes of learning about the IRS’s pledge to get tough on settlement funding by tax exempt US organizations. I was utterly dismayed to find that there is, in fact, no truth to this at all.

Here’s the truth: IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman appeared on a local Washington DC public radio call-in program and was asked by a caller about the problem of settlement funding by tax exempt US organizations and what the IRS would do about it, if anything. This is an excellent question, and I think there’s no doubt that the IRS should be pressed to take such action. It would be wonderful if they really pledged to do so and even better if they actually did. Unfortunately, Mr. Shulman, rather than giving any kind of pledge to investigate settlement funding as advertised, merely gave the following generic answer: “I really don’t know the specifics of the case that they brought up. But if I wasn’t clear, if a charity is breaking the tax law, is engaged in activities that they are not supposed to be engaged in, we certainly will go after them. Every year we pull 501(c)(3) charity status from a number of charities. We’ve got thousands of audits going on regarding charities, and so we don’t hesitate to administer the tax laws and make sure that people are following the rules.”

I’m sorry, and I wish this were not the case, but this is NOT a pledge to investigate settlement funding by tax-exempt organizations, and even though he was asked directly by the show’s guest host, Susan Page, if settlement activity funding was illegal or violated 501(c)(3) tax status, Mr. Shulman did not express any opinion on the question. He simply said he was going to enforce the tax law in all cases. What else is he going to say? It’s an obvious and standard dodge to a question that is either unanticipated, uncomfortable, or difficult to answer for an official to give a generic pledge to uphold the law or fulfill the mission which they have been appointed to perform. I immediately had to ask myself if ADC thinks it’s being clever by spinning this answer in this frankly ridiculous way in order to try to create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, and that if we all say the IRS has pledged to investigate settlement funding enough, even if they haven’t, then perhaps they actually would. Or, perhaps they genuinely fail to appreciate the actual meaning of the Commissioner’s remarks. I’m not sure which it is, and I’m not sure which is worse.

Having been excited and then disappointed by this indefensible bait-and-switch of falsehood and truth, I decided to try to find out more about the matter. This proved even more depressing. ADC’s press release is simply a warmed over version of a statement issued on January 11 by some outfit called the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (no, I’ve never heard of them either), whose director was the individual who asked Mr. Shulman the question on the call-in show to which he gave that generic reply. The organization then issued a statement claiming that, “Commissioner Douglas Shulman today publicly committed the Internal Revenue Service to fighting US charities that launder tax exempt US donations into illegal Israeli West Bank settlement activities.”

So that’s the genesis of this particular tidbit of hogwash: a staffer at a small and virtually unknown organization asked an official a very good and politically sensitive question, got a generic reply, and then decided to spin it wildly and grossly inaccurately for not very mysterious reasons. Why, on the other hand, ADC decided to parrot this rubbish, thereby spreading it far and wide in the Arab-American community, is simply incomprehensible, but obviously at some level they thought it would be in their interests to do so.

At some point we have to decide whether or not we value the truth, both as a category for its own sake and as an important element of effective political engagement. Obviously, everybody prefers to hear what they wish to hear, and everybody wants to put their own spin on matters, but at a deeper level telling people things that you know, or certainly should know, are totally inaccurate doesn’t serve any useful or defensible purpose. It gives people the wrong impression leading to mistakes of judgment and it makes you look pretty silly in the process. Everyone gets their facts wrong sometimes, but errors have to be corrected and one ought to try in so far as possible not to give people false information. Analysis, evaluation and interpretation are another matter. But I can’t see any rational, responsible explanation for saying something has happened when it simply and obviously hasn’t happened.

Of course, it’s not mysterious why people do this: it’s pandering and an effort to generate positive responses in the target audience whether or not there is any validity to the claim. I’m not trying to single out or pick on ADC, although that might sound a little hollow at this point, because many organizations and media outlets in the Arab-American community do this sort of thing all the time. But it’s particularly poignant to me because when I was working there we did our best to try to be the grown-ups and clear up inaccuracies and falsehoods even when we could easily have ignored them. We tried to tell people what they needed to hear as opposed to what they necessarily wanted to hear.

Probably the greatest single source of misleading information among Arab-Americans has to do with the boycott movement. My regular readers will know that I take a nuanced position supportive of certain kinds of boycotts and skeptical of others. They will also know that I’m quite skeptical that a large number of major American institutions can be convinced to divest from Israel and I think the difficulties of achieving this goal are greatly underestimated by a lot of people. Nothing would please me more than to be proven wrong, but my opinions are not based on a lack of knowledge and experience. One of the most salient features of BDS rhetoric is the rather large number of reported successes that turn out, on closer inspection, to be either nothing of the kind, or certainly very different than they are being portrayed.

In numerous instances including Hampshire College a large investment fund and several other recent and highly publicized cases, the entities that supposedly divested from Israel insist loudly and publicly that they did no such thing and that their actions were not prompted by political motivations. These statements are almost always ignored in BDS rhetoric, so that it would be and indeed is entirely possible for people to hear about these developments and not realize that the entities that were supposedly making a political statement by divesting in fact have gone to great lengths to insist that they are not making any political statement or taking a political action. It could be argued that the reality is murkier and that either pressure from pro-Palestinian organizations that prompted consideration of the issue played a role in the eventual decision no matter what the institutions say, or that the institutions are actually taking a powerful political action in spite of their denials. I would say that whatever the reality of the motivations behind some of these actions, if the entity supposedly making a political statement denies that they are making a political statement, then as a practical matter and in reality they are not making a political statement, and it’s misleading to tell people that they have. In instance after instance I find that some of the most celebrated supposed acts of divestment prove on closer inspection to be either nothing of the kind, or at best extremely murky and difficult to interpret.

My objection to being repeatedly told that something has happened, only to discover that, in fact, it hasn’t, is not in any way based on my opinion about whether it should happen or not. I think it would be great if the IRS actually started investigating tax exempt funding for Israeli settlement activities, and I think the more pressure that’s put on them to do it, the better. This whole posting was prompted by my disappointment to learn that there is no basis for thinking they’re going to do that even though I received an e-mail from my former colleagues alleging that they pledged to. I’m not opposed to boycotts as much as I’m skeptical about their plausibility and efficacy (there is a difference, but this is lost on a lot of people who are passionate about the issue), and I think certain kinds of boycotts are extremely useful. I don’t look into these matters hoping to find out that supposed acts of divestment from Israel didn’t actually take place as advertised. But it’s certainly an annoying, unnecessary and indefensible burden to place on your audience if they have to fact-check everything you say because of the amount of inaccuracies you are tossing in their direction, the awkward facts you leave out or a level of spinning that constitutes misleading manipulation.

I don’t question the personal or political motivations of organizations and individuals that engage in this kind of distortion of reality in order to advance their often laudable goals. But I do question their judgment and their tactics. And I think there’s no doubt that this sort of thing does harm. Like all other people, and perhaps even more than most, Arab-Americans frequently are not in possession of very good bullshit detectors, and those who put themselves forward as communicators, whatever their political orientation, have an obligation to at least get the basic facts right. This is yet another Ibishblog posting that isn’t going to win me any friends, but as a member of the target audience of various Arab American websites, publications, blogs and e-mail lists I have a right to be annoyed when someone has told me something that I can easily discover is simply untrue. Moreover, someone has to be the grown-up and say, stop talking crap.

The Obama administration deserves credit and praise for its determination to push forward with Middle East peace diplomacy. It is very reassuring that the administration has not regarded the frustrations and false starts of 2009 as evidence that nothing can be accomplished or that efforts are being wasted. It is vital that the United States continue to pursue progress towards peace on a variety of fronts, including at the diplomatic register. However, given the extremely difficult internal political circumstances in Israel and among the Palestinians, a healthy skepticism about what can be accomplished in the near term is warranted and serious consideration of innovations and parallel tracks is required.

For all of the considerable efforts and expenditure of political capital by Pres. Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, Special Envoy Mitchell, National Security Advisory Jones and the others, last year the administration was confronted by weakened leaders on all sides who lacked either the ability or the will, or both, to make dramatic moves towards a peace agreement. Prime Minister Netanyahu is clearly hamstrung by a crazy-quilt coalition that includes several parties and many individuals to his political right. He has coalition partners he relies upon that are overtly opposed to any realistic peace agreement. Moreover, his coalition is unsteady, and he does not even have the largest party in the Knesset. So there is no doubt that his ability to maneuver is limited.

However, there are also serious questions about his intentions. Historically, and maybe still in his heart of hearts, Netanyahu is of the party in Israel that does not believe an agreement is possible, or at the very least, that if it is possible, it will not end the conflict. There are at least two factors that may, however, have shifted his perspective in recent years.

First, many right-wing Israeli leaders have reluctantly come to recognize that peace based on two states is a strategic necessity for Israel. If Netanyahu has made this psychological and political breakthrough, he would be only the latest in a long line of individuals who have come to this conclusion privately, although the critical mass to push Israel into serious pursuit of such an agreement has yet to be developed. As it stands now, and as the vigorous debate in the Israeli press on the subject reflects, it’s really not possible to know what Netanyahu currently believes about whether or not a painful, difficult but workable peace agreement with the Palestinians is a strategic imperative for Israel. No one should dismiss the possibility that he does, but no one should be sanguine about it either. He has adopted a sphinx-like posture on the subject, preferring to remain an enigma to friends, rivals and opponents.

Second, this preference for ambiguity on the part of the Israeli Prime Minister is a reflection of his character as a pragmatic and indeed opportunistic politician who has shown many times in the past that he is willing to do whatever is necessary, within limits, to acquire and maintain power. It’s been pretty clear for quite some time that Netanyahu belongs to what we might call the “deal-making class” of political actors, and this is reflected in his ability to assemble a coalition partnership that makes absolutely no sense ideologically or programmatically, but makes perfect sense in terms of political power, beginning with his own. That his ideological fervor is tempered with a pragmatic sense of bowing to what is necessary was also demonstrated during his first tenure in office on several occasions. That Netanyahu is at heart a hawk, and expansionist and a greater-Israel ideologue is really not open to question. The question is, does he now or will he come to see that a reasonable, workable peace agreement with the Palestinians is essential to either his own interests or his country’s, or both? Such a conclusion is by no means difficult to imagine, even if it cuts against the grain of deeply-seated inclinations.

Netanyahu’s calculated ambiguity on his intentions regarding peace with the Palestinians is a reflection of both his own pragmatism and the political cost of having an unambiguous position either way. There would be a heavy political price to pay with his right wing coalition partners if he were to seriously and unambiguously embrace an agenda that pursued a workable peace agreement, since this would involve a willingness to compromise on shibboleths and cross the Israeli far-right’s red lines. On the other hand, it’s clear that the Obama administration has no patience for an Israeli position that unambiguously rejects the concept of a two-state peace agreement with the Palestinians, and Netanyahu’s highly attenuated and apparently reluctant acceptance of this principle a few months ago was plainly designed to appease the United States. So was the limited, temporary, partial and semi-fraudulent settlement freeze that is now ongoing, for what it’s worth. These measures go further than Netanyahu ever has in the past, or suggested he would, but they’re not obviously reflective of a government that has a real commitment to seriously pursuing a peace deal.

So in the case of Netanyahu, one can easily see the political limitations on his ability to pursue serious measures that advance peace, and one can easily argue and be forgiven for strongly suspecting that his fundamental attitudes have not, in fact, shifted. On the other hand, there are also firm grounds for suspecting that if he becomes convinced that pursuing peace is a political necessity, he would be willing to do so. It’s by no means inconceivable that in a different coalition, or with a different diplomatic or strategic environment in place, Netanyahu could, as many other right-wing Israeli politicians have in the past, surprise both friend and foe alike. But don’t hold your breath.

Regarding the intentions of the senior PLO and PA leaderships, there can be no serious doubt. They have based their entire political as well as diplomatic strategy on negotiations and peace, gambled everything on this hand and doubled down on it too. The status quo, although some on the Israeli right like to kid themselves about this, is not something the Palestinian leadership can live with for very long. The nationalist leadership is in a zero-sum competition for political authority in the Palestinian national movement with Islamists led by Hamas. These two factions agree on virtually nothing, including the national strategy for liberation and the future of Palestine, as well as the nature and character of Palestinian society. If the peace-oriented strategy of the PLO were to decisively fail over the coming decade or so, there is almost no question that the outcome would be the collapse, marginalization and possibly even disappearance of the PLO itself, or at least as we have known it, and its replacement by Hamas and/or other Islamists. Therefore, both in terms of their personal and ideological inclinations and because of their political interests and indeed survival, the commitment of the Palestinian leadership to a peace agreement can’t really be seriously doubted.

However, its political strength, authority and ability to take bold, decisive actions that show leadership and incur significant costs are all in question. The new PA security forces have done a lot to deliver security to the Palestinian public where they operate and to live up to Palestinian obligations under the roadmap, and progress has been made on numerous other issues in the West Bank. However, the leadership was obviously badly weakened over the past few years due to its irreconcilable differences and wide-ranging confrontation with Hamas, and the loss of power in Gaza.

2009 was a very complicated year for the PLO. For the first six months, the organization and especially Fatah party enjoyed a resurgence of credibility, popularity and authority based on guarded optimism springing from the Obama administration’s re-engagement with the peace process and push for a settlement freeze, and the extremely successful Fatah General Party Congress in Bethlehem. Unfortunately, the last six months of last year involved a series of severe blows to the PLO’s credibility and popularity and its internal political standing in Palestinian society. The Obama administration’s failure to achieve a full settlement freeze followed by its insistence of a Palestinian return to negotiations without a meaningful freeze resonated damagingly with deep-seated cynicism about the peace process, Israel’s intentions and the American role among Palestinians at the expense of the credibility of the PLO. The Goldstone report fiasco — which was partly a result of the unavoidable contradiction between the Palestinian leadership’s diplomatic imperatives on the one hand and domestic political necessities on the other, and partly due to their own prodigious mishandling of the affair — proved another extremely damaging blow. The last straw was probably Secretary Clinton’s poorly phrased and misunderstood comments that seemed to imply a certain degree of satisfaction in the administration with Israel’s gestures. Although this false impression was quickly corrected by many officials, including Secretary Clinton herself, the damage was done.

The point here is that the political weakness of the Palestinian leadership, although its intentions cannot seriously be questioned, has become extremely problematic. The current position is that the United States is trying to convince the Palestinians to return to final status negotiations, but at this point does not have a settlement freeze or workable terms of reference to offer them. The situation is so precarious that the Palestinian leadership obviously feels that it cannot simply return to negotiations under these conditions, but requires some additional measures, assurances or guarantees, along with clearly defined and appropriate terms of reference, not only for strategic and diplomatic reasons, but for domestic political reasons as well. Many ideas for how to square this circle are circulating in Washington, but it does not appear that in spite of last week’s Middle East visit by Jones and Mitchell’s visit that begins today the administration has made any firm decisions on how to proceed.

This caution is commendable. It is imperative that the administration remains actively engaged in the process at the very highest levels and spares no efforts to achieve progress. However, it is also essential that all parties avoid the potential disaster of getting into high-level, formal permanent status negotiations that result in some sort of spectacular, public failure or collapse. We have seen in the past what the results of such spectacular failures can be, especially when the Palestinian political scene is particularly volatile. Now is precisely such a time. My concern about the potential fallout from a spectacularly failed high-level negotiation is much greater now than it was before the fall, precisely because the Palestinian political scene has become very highly charged and very finely balanced. The diplomatic process must continue, and continue to accelerate, but the timing and conditions for formal, high-level permanent status talks need to be carefully determined in order to assure that not only is failure manageable and not catastrophic, but that failure is also unlikely.

There are a number of safety-nets that deserve and require sustained, serious attention. First of all, it is necessary to get the structure and terms of reference of the talks right. If serious permanent status issues such as Jerusalem are off the agenda or tabled for some indefinite period and future date, to take one of the broadest and crudest examples possible, the talks will be doomed to failure from the outset. Netanyahu is demanding negotiations without preconditions, which might be workable in terms of the settlement freeze issue, but is certainly not workable when it comes to terms of reference and permanent status issues. Those are not conditions, they are necessary mutual understandings about what is being talked about and to what end in order to avoid getting into another situation in which the two sides are talking past each other and trying to raise mutually exclusive issues or keep essential matters out of the discussion. In other words, the top-down world of diplomacy is right now operating in a political context of great delicacy, and care and caution needs to taken to avoid the pitfalls created by this highly charged atmosphere.

These grave difficulties confronting the diplomatic track at the moment necessitate serious attention, support and funding for the parallel bottom-up approach that concentrates on positive changes on the ground. The PA state and institution building program announced this summer is increasingly being recognized in Washington and by the administration as an essential component in the array of necessary measures required to produce a successful peace initiative. Recent remarks by Mitchell urging international donors to support the program indicate that it is starting to become an integral part of the administration’s agenda, and not a minute too soon. The program, which would unilaterally develop Palestinian administrative, infrastructural and economic institutions with an eye to independence in the near future, provides a parallel track that is entirely supportive of the diplomatic register, and provides an alternative source of momentum towards peace that is independent of a diplomatic process which can and is now being greatly complicated by political considerations. It is nonviolent, constructive, not inimical to any of Israel’s legitimate interests or concerns, and has been rhetorically supported by almost all international actors.

Now is the time for the United States and the rest of the international community to take advantage of this crucial component of Middle East peace-building. The state and institution building agenda has been almost universally praised, but has also been far too often ignored or treated casually, and has not enjoyed the attention or support it deserves from governments, multilateral institutions, corporations, NGOs or the media. While it is essential that the Obama administration continue to pursue the top-down diplomatic agenda with as much vigor, wisdom and caution possible, it is just as important for all actors to embrace and engage with the bottom-up state and institution building plan that will complement, reinforce and protect the diplomatic track, and lay the essential components on the ground for a Palestinian state, when it is established, to be successful.

The new TSA security directive following the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit raises the specter of ethnic and religious profiling in the most direct way since the 9/11 attacks. The first thing that needs to be acknowledged is that the primary blame for all kinds of negative fallout from terrorist attacks — whether they succeed in killing the innocent or, as in this case, are simply a halfwit setting fire to his own trousers — belongs squarely with the terrorists themselves and with their sympathizers. Other than the individuals directly affected by these attacks and their families, the maximum negative impact stemming from violent outrages by self-described “salafist-jihadist” groups like Al Qaeda, or solo actors imbued with their ideology like the Fort Hood murderer Maj. Hasan is borne by the Arab and Muslim American communities. Just as these dangerous extremists are the single greatest threat to Arab and other Muslim societies in Asia and Africa at the present moment, they and their supporters also pose the most serious dangers to Arab and Muslim Americans and their ability to thrive in the United States and other Western societies.

Ever since the 9/11 attacks, a veritable cottage industry of self-appointed “terrorism experts,” grandstanding members of Congress, right-wing ideologues, anti-Arab racists and Islamophobic bigots have been demanding that the government institute systematic discrimination against people of Arab ethnic origin or Muslim religious affiliation. The government’s response has been complex. With the exception of a couple of short-lived policies, broadbrush profiling that would affect US citizens has heretofore been rejected by the government as unworkable and ineffective. Indeed, it’s extremely revealing that there was probably more profiling going on at airports before the 9/11 attacks than afterwards, largely because the authorities suddenly had to take airport security much more seriously and therefore recognize that crude ethnic profiling is absolutely pointless.

However, the government did institute a large number of policies regarding immigration and immigration law enforcement that discriminate against, or rather between, non-US citizens on a whole range of subjects. Courts have historically held that immigration policy and law enforcement are essentially branches of foreign policy, subject to the discretionary authority of the executive. Citizens of different states may therefore be treated very differently simply on the basis of their nationality (it is unconscionable but not unconstitutional that historically and typically refugees from Cuba have been virtually guaranteed green cards and eventual citizenship while refugees from Haiti have frequently found themselves in mass detention centers). The post-9/11 restructuring of US immigration policy and law enforcement without question dragged the United States into levels of discrimination that had not been seen for many decades, however these policies were strictly limited to affecting foreign nationals and not US citizens.

The new security directive holds that any individual traveling from or through a list of 14 countries — Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen — will be subjected to as yet not fully specified enhanced security scrutiny and measures. The first question worth asking is, does this mean a return to crude forms of profiling by the federal government? I think the answer is, not quite. But it’s certainly the most dramatic step in that direction in the past 10 years and therefore quite troubling. There is an argument, of course, that the new policies do in fact rise to the level of profiling: there is no question there will be disparate impact for people with origins in those societies, therefore the policy is plainly discriminatory. In addition, the list of countries is fairly homogenous: with the exception of Cuba, all of them are Muslim-majority states (or, in the cases of Nigeria and Lebanon, Muslim-plurality states). Therefore, it might be argued with some justification that this list of countries uses national origin as a proxy for religious affiliation.

On the other hand, it might be pointed out that the policy apparently does not distinguish between which kinds of travelers traveling from or through the countries in question will be subjected to the new measures. The disparate impact is unavoidable, but in theory the policy ought to apply to everyone traveling from or through these destinations, thereby mitigating the overt discrimination built into the policy. More tellingly, the policy does not apply to most Muslim-majority states, or most Arab states for that matter. Therefore, disparate impact and discrimination are not tied simply to ethnicity or religious affiliation, or to national origin or nationality as such, but to the act of traveling from or through certain states. This may be cold comfort regarding a policy that is plainly going to be discriminatory and involve disparate impact on specific groups (especially Arabs), but I don’t think this policy can be described accurately as involving profiling as such. It is definitely a major step in that direction, but it hasn’t arrived there quite yet.

The worst aspect of the new directive, of course, is that it will almost certainly be completely useless as a security and counterterrorism measure. It’s often an unrecognized reality among Arab and Muslim Americans that our communities have an almost incalculable stake in effective security and counterterrorism policies, since it is our communities that suffer most directly from the social and political consequences of the words and deeds of Muslim extremists. All such policies need to be examined carefully on a case-by-case basis in order to determine first of all if they will actually make anybody any safer, as well as whether they are consistent with American laws and core values. The new directive is almost certainly consistent with the law, and enjoys an uneasy relationship with core American values as it will have a discriminatory impact, but it crucially and definitively fails the test of effectiveness. It can’t possibly make us safer, and I think almost everyone who is serious about security and counterterrorism understands this.

As with so much of post-9/11 air travel security measures, the new policy seems designed to mollify the public and allow the government to claim that they are taking dramatic and effective action. There is no basis whatsoever for thinking that enhanced measures for anyone traveling from or through this, not exactly random but certainly somewhat arbitrary, list of countries is actually going to make anybody any safer or make it more difficult for terrorists to attempt to murder people on airplanes. True enough, the malevolent clown who set his pants on fire on Christmas Day began his journey in Lagos, but he was passing through Amsterdam. Like the 9/11 attacks themselves that were cooked up in Hamburg, a huge percentage of terrorism from Muslim extremists aimed at the United States seems to have its origins in Western Europe. But, of course, it wouldn’t make any more sense if Germany, Britain, Holland, Spain and so forth were added to the list either. It is extremely helpful that virtually all serious security and counterterrorism experts who have opined on the new policy have expressed a negative opinion, ranging from serious doubts about its efficacy to outright scorn at the foolishness and wastefulness of such a silly approach. Since the policy appears to have virtually no support from the experts and professionals, its long-term future is questionable. We’ve already seen a number of ill-conceived post-9/11 security measures shelved because they proved even more idiotic in practice than they looked on paper.

So there is no doubt that the TSA is instituting a policy that is both discriminatory and extremely silly, but I really don’t think it can honestly be described as fully-fledged profiling either. I understand the political motivation for labeling what is a foolish and in effect discriminatory policy as “profiling,” since this term is often used as a synonym for all kinds of forms of discrimination that are not, in fact, profiling as such. But I think it’s probably more useful to try to develop accurate, precise language to describe a troubling and wrongheaded new policy, and that an effective critique is better based on careful accuracy rather than emotional appeals. In fact, widespread, systematic profiling on the basis of Arab ethnicity or Muslim religious affiliation, including US citizens, is unlikely to emerge in the foreseeable future, first because it would be a huge waste of resources which all serious people would readily understand would be totally ineffective, and second because as a practical matter there is no method for distinguishing who is an Arab or, even more absurdly, who is a Muslim. Obviously it would be a tragicomedy of errors and absurdities if thousands of TSA and other security employees were to try to distinguish who is an Arab or Muslim based on appearance or name. Quite simply it can’t be done, even if there were an argument for doing it (which there isn’t).

The proponents of profiling don’t recognize this, of course. Many of them seem to live in an imaginary world where you can simply look at someone or read someone’s name and instantly and accurately distinguish who is an Arab and/or a Muslim. This is obviously a holdover from the historic cultural attitudes in the United States that were shaped by a society generally divided between black and white Americans with the false assumption that the distinctions were readily apparent on sight. There are also proponents of profiling who understand this problem but choose to ignore it because they realize that it makes their arguments completely untenable. But obviously the first question to be asked of anyone who proposes crude ethnic or religious profiling is, how will your average security agent accurately identify the targeted profile? As yet, I have not encountered a proponent of profiling who had a reasonable answer to this most obvious question, and the provisions of the new directive only emphasize these difficulties by creating a blanket category based on the objective and easily determinable fact that someone has traveled from or through a very specific set of countries.

Finally, for all those who worry about the adoption in the United States of systematic ethnic or religious profiling against Arabs and/or Muslims, there is therefore an obvious trigger for major concern that such a policy may actually be emerging. The day that policy advocates, security experts, counterterrorism professionals, members of Congress and so forth actually begin seriously discussing the need for new compulsory national identification cards or a national database that identifies people on the basis of their ethnicity and/or religious affiliation is the day that serious, systematic profiling becomes a real threat in the United States. Such a system of classification is the sine qua non for any really existing program of broad-based profiling, although implementing it would almost certainly be unconstitutional. But as long as people are talking in vague terms about ethnic or religious profiling without any system for identifying the targets of a profile, we are in the realm of grandstanding, balderdash and the imaginary. That the TSA’s new directive is discriminatory because it will have a disparate impact on numerous Arabs and Muslims who travel most frequently to the listed countries is unquestionable. That it will fail to enhance airline security is also unfortunately almost certain. But until we begin to move in the direction of the government systematically classifying people on the basis of ethnicity and/or religion, an actual system of profiling Arabs and Muslims in general will remain the fantasy of bigots and not the policy of the state.

Yesterday, Grand Ayatollah Hosein Ali Montazeri passed away at his home in the Iranian holy city of Qom, without question delivering another serious blow to hopes for internal reform to the Iranian political system. Montazeri leaves behind him a decidedly mixed legacy, and a very interesting set of questions about the immediate and long-term consequences of his absence from the Iranian political scene.

Montazeri was one of the most senior clerical figures in all of Shiite Islam, and also one of the original architects of the concept of villayat e-faqih (rule by jurisprudential scholars) most powerfully advanced by Ayatollah Khomeini. As such, he was a leading figure in the “Islamic revolution” that overthrew the shah in the late 1970s. Montazeri was one of the central figures behind the creation of the Revolutionary Guards organization that has now effectively taken over the Iranian government, and also the most enthusiastic of the senior “Islamic” revolutionaries in pushing for the exportation of the Iranian model and the establishment of sympathetic organizations among Arab Shiites such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and several of the Iraqi political parties that now dominate the government in Baghdad. His stature can be measured from the fact that he was at one point formally appointed to be Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader.

During the course of the 1980s, Montazeri became disillusioned with the path the “Islamic Republic” was taking earlier than most internal dissidents. Although he was in line to take over the leadership, he quarreled with Khomeini on several key points, including how aggressive Iran should be in trying to export its revolutionary ideals (Montazeri wanted to be more aggressive), the leaking of embarrassing information regarding the Iran-Contra scandal, and his increasing calls for the liberalization of the governing system. Montazeri, unlike Khomeini and certainly unlike Khamenei, apparently believed that the jurisprudential supreme guides should be more removed from power and act essentially in an advisory capacity rather than as direct rulers. It’s also clear that he was very uncomfortable with the mass executions of opposition members in the late 1980s. Beginning with his call in 1987 for the legalization of political parties, he increasingly became the most credible, and often lonely, voice for internal reform of the system. Following the election fraud and subsequent unrest this summer, most hopes for internal reform of the system centered around the idea that senior clerics led by Montazeri could make common cause with political reformers like Mousavi and Karroubi and create conditions for a nonviolent, peaceful “velvet revolution” in Iran.

There is a sharp disagreement over whether Montazeri’s death constitutes a significant blow to the opposition in Iran or not. On the other hand, there is almost universal agreement that the Khamenei-Amhadinejad clique will be utterly delighted to be rid of this turbulent priest. It was not just his reformist tendencies and liberal views that were a thorn in their side, but his scholarly eminence stood in marked contrast to Khamenei’s own dearth of academic credentials. His mere presence on the scene was an embarrassment, simply in terms of a contrast of academic CVs, to the current supreme leader. This alone suggests, but does not necessarily mean, that his death is by definition a blow to the Iranian opposition, whether reformist or more ambitious in its intentions.

Some argue that Montazeri’s death is not a blow to an opposition movement because it is largely spontaneous, barely organized, nascent, fledgling and essentially without coherent political leadership. Others say that Montazeri was an important source of inspiration and religious legitimation for the opposition, just as he was a powerful source of delegitimation for the regime. It strikes me that there is no way in which his death is not a blow to reformists, by which I mean specifically those who wish to transform the nature and behavior of the regime from within, without a total overhaul of the system and doing away with the whole bizarre concept of villayat e-faqih. Such forces would necessarily require not only religious legitimation and the validation of one of the foremost leaders of the “Islamic revolution,” but also someone who is ready, willing and able to say that the present system is not that intended by the originators of the villayat e-faqih system including not only himself, but also Ayatollah Khomeini.

This point, that Montazeri stressed time and again, that Khomeini himself would disapprove of the extreme illiberalism and repressive nature of the present regime is exceptionally dubious but also exceptionally powerful as a means of rhetorically undermining the current leadership. And, if Montazeri says so, few would be in a position to credibly disagree without invoking the idea that Khomeini too approved of repression and illiberal policies. Given their own belief systems and political rhetoric, this constitutes a trap from which the ruling elite had no easy way out other than ignoring it or arresting anyone who repeated these claims too loudly or vociferously. So the fact is that the Iranian reformist movement as such has lost its most authoritative and credible champion, and probably the only figure in its circles who was, essentially, untouchable (insofar as one can be effectively immune to the power of the state in a country like Iran).

On the other hand, as I have been stressing for many months now, I do not think there is any reason to believe that the movement for internal reform and civil rights in Iran has any serious hope of succeeding in the foreseeable future. Therefore, the centrality of people who essentially believe in but want to change the system, as Montazeri almost certainly did, it seems to me is becoming increasingly diminished as time goes on. I have written many times that I think the Iranian ruling elite has given the public a simple choice: stick with us on our terms or enter into a dangerous revolutionary spiral which will have unpredictable consequences and involve terrible risks and enormous pain. It seems clear that the reform movement, including Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, has found no effective answer to this. The regime is beyond scolding and shaming, and has answered calls for reform with brute force. Mousavi, Karroubi and Montazeri, it seems to me, although they serve as powerful voices of delegitimation of the regime from a position that is essentially within the system, have been rendered increasingly irrelevant by the tactics of the government. I suspect that the reformist movement has found itself in a lose-lose situation: if the government prevails, they remain marginal and things don’t change; but if change is actually to come, it will require much more far-reaching measures than they have been willing to countenance or would probably be enthusiastic about, again leaving them marginal.

Reformists including Montazeri have staked out an honorable middle ground that is sensible, reasonable and constructive. Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any space in which it can operate effectively in the current Iranian scene, which the government has decided to force into a rather stark binary of acceptance of the present situation versus revolutionary change. Therefore, while Montazeri’s death is certainly a blow to the reformist movement, I doubt it’s a major blow to the prospects for significant change in Iran because I think these are only really possible, under the present circumstances, through much more far-reaching restructuring than reform proposes. Insofar as there are nascent revolutionary movements developing to correspond to the government-created revolutionary situation in Iran, the passing away of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri probably won’t be much of a blow to them, and could even serve as an inspiration and source of religious legitimation for measures, agendas and organizations that he might have recoiled from if he were still alive.

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.