I was enthused by the coverage of the Defense of Marriage Act arguments before the Supreme Court Tuesday and the clear signs that the Court will strike the act down as discriminatory against same-sex marriages.
Here are two ways in which this case sheds light on Israel/Palestine policy.
1. Obama’s failure to lead.
Many have commented on the attack by the Supreme Court’s Chief Justice on Obama as not having “the courage of his convictions,” in continuing to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act– depriving the plaintiff in the case, an 83-year-old lesbian widow, of over $350,000 in taxes– even though Obama regards the act as unconstitutional. From the Times:
“This is totally unprecedented,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said of the way the case had reached the court. “You’re asking us to do something we’ve never done before.”…
He expressed irritation that the case was before the court, saying President Obama’s approach — to enforce the law but not defend it — was a contradiction.
“I don’t see why he doesn’t have the courage of his convictions,” the chief justice said. He said Mr. Obama should have stopped enforcing a statute he viewed as unconstitutional “rather than saying, ‘Oh, we’ll wait till the Supreme Court tells us we have no choice.’ ”
The criticism caused anger at the White House, the Times says today.
But a friend points out to me that Obama’s willingness to continue to enforce principles he doesn’t believe in is just what he did on his Israel trip: He said he’s for a Palestinian state and for seeing settlements through Palestinian eyes, but he did absolutely nothing to enforce that belief. As MJ Rosenberg wrote, deploring Obama’s obsequiousness toward a foreign politician who had worked for his opponent in last year’s election:
Obama made clear which side he is on, going so far as to embrace the whole Biblical Jewish claim to Eretz Yisrael. How could Palestinians ever trust him?…
Obama must know all this but he obviously thinks that Palestinians have no choice but to go along with anything he proposes.
The friend who pointed this out to me observed, “The president’s guiding maxim–force me to do what I want to do–stems from the Community Organizer’s Fallacy: ‘Leadership is a fiction, the people lead from behind, it’s up to YOU to make some noise and make it happen.'”
(P.S. This is why this website has gained such traction; because it performs community building, and that’s the only place there’s movement on the issue. Leaders could steal our thunder. If they were leaders.)
2. Palestinians still aren’t human beings
Edith Windsor, 83, is the charismatic plaintiff in the Defense of Marriage Act case. This is from the New York Times’ profile of her the other day:
But there was one question that she heard immediately. Why are more people beginning to accept gay marriage?
“As we increasingly came out, people saw that we didn’t have horns. People learned that, O.K., we were their kids and their cousins” and their friends, she said. “It just grew to where we were human beings like everybody else.”
Human beings like everybody else! We all know Windsor is right; I experienced a complete change of attitude in myself.
And I immediately associate it with my learning curve about Arabs and Palestinians. The more of them I’ve gotten to know, the more ordinary they seem to me. Nowadays I can say that I have a wide circle of Palestinian friends and associates, some of whom I adore, some who I can’t stand, etc. And as these people have become normal to me, I have seen their demands for the restoration of their property and rights as utterly normal too, even draped in an exotic keffiyeh. In fact, whenever I hear people praising Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad and the economic growth in the West Bank, I think, Palestinians who reject these ideas are absolutely no different from my American political ancestors who cried, Taxation without representation is tyranny! Really, what’s the difference?
But my experience is unusual: and the demonization of Arabs and Palestinians as jihadists in weird head coverings has been a key component of the “war on terror,” and of neoconservative dreams of tailoring new polities to help out their beloved Arab friends, whose civilization is so backward that they are not ready for the full exercise of self-determination, etc.
This demonization is really what we’re up against. But as soon as Americans get to know Arabs and see them as human beings, they’ll understand that notwithstanding different cultures, they’re just ordinary people clamoring for what people get in democracies. This is why Chris Hayes’s work has been so huge. He’s held MSNBC panels made up of both Zionists and Palestinians. He’s let Americans hear from Rashid Khalidi and Noura Erakat and judge for themselves.
But Hayes is very singular. And this is what breaks my heart about seeing Edith Windsor. She has gotten an opening, culturally and politically, to make her case to Americans, and she’s a hero.
And yes I think there’s a Jewish piece to this. The Jewish liberal leadership is now firmly in the same-sex marriage corner. When people speak of the liberal wing of the Supreme Court, they are referring to a block of four justices, three of whom are the Jewish members of the Court. Years ago The New York Times crushed homosexuals who worked on staff, but many of those brave staffers led the newspaper to become a beacon of progress; and it has been celebratory of same sex marriage, lately comparing the lawyer Mary Bonauto to Thurgood Marshall.
Imagine for one minute if this liberal east coast political and cultural power were unleashed in behalf of another oppressed group; many Americans would be brought to feel sympathy for Palestinians, not contempt. (And yes, some day it will happen.)
It’s hardly right to blame Obama though, given what happened to the last President who demonstrated the courage of his convictions to take on the establishment.
“When people speak of the liberal wing of the Supreme Court, they are referring to a block of four justices, three of whom are the Jewish members of the Court.”
Oh, there goes Phil’s Jewish self-hatred again–he’s counting Jews in an influential political agency. I guess he wasn’t impressed by the hasbara bot here who voiced steel umbrage against such a habit on another thread here recently.
Let’s see demographics of American Jews=2% at most. Demographics of American Jews on SCOTUS=33.5% Must be because of that extra 15 points of brains? What did WASPS use to explain their former preponderance on SCOTUS for so long?
The man has convictions?
“In fact, whenever I hear people praising Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad and the economic growth in the West Bank, I think, Palestinians who reject these ideas are absolutely no different from my American political ancestors who cried, Taxation without representation is tyranny! Really, what’s the difference?”
No difference. Fayyad is Colonel Nicholson in Bridge over the River Kwai, building the perfect enemy bridge; in this case a small island with a semblance of normalcy and prosperity in a sea of staggering oppression and refugee camp misery. Fayyad is a privileged stooge and quasi-collaborator who thinks that the simple are also simple-minded and who believes they can be bribed to relinquish their rights.
Palestinians are not only human beings, but they’re an intelligent and extremely resilient people. Which people in modern history could resist for decades such brutal, invasive and prolonged oppression and the massive, unrelenting Zionist deception and propaganda campaign waged against their freedom and rights on an international scale? And still, these broken human beings manage to wake up yet another day RESISTING on their land or in their refugee camp with the hope of freedom and justice in their hearts while imprisoned by a formidable oppressor with the support and complicity of no less than the most powerful country in the world.
Palestinian courage is admirable and underestimated.
To be fair the Executive branch has a legal obligation to enforce current law. Hopefully SCOTUS will change that. The legislators are the culprits that passed it.