This mock-realist piece by David Samuels on Slate arguing for an Israeli strike on Iran is outlandish in a number of ways.
Most outlandish: Samuels's assessment that it is a "fiction" that there would be a "mass public outcry" in the Muslim world against an Israeli strike. That prediction would seem to carry the same authority about the Muslim world as Ken Pollack had about the Arab one when he predicted that it would not care about a U.S. invasion of Iraq. Both writers fail to address Israel's human-rights violations
against the Palestinians. These echo around the Muslim world. The
occupation is mentioned by neither of them. The desperate conditions under which
Palestinians must try to live their lives–unmentioned. Given these oversights, Samuels is a far less reliable narrator about Muslim attitudes than, say, Rashid Khalidi, who said last week that an Israeli strike on Iran could bring the Muslim brotherhood to power in Egypt.
The West Bank is twice mentioned by Samuels for the "demographic threat" it presents to the Jewish state. That is to say, the eventuality of a Palestinian majority is the big problem with Israel's holding it. Not the apartheid conditions, the demographic threat.
Later, demographic benefits. No quotation marks. Imagine someone accepting Boer or French or Japanese nationalist arguments with the same credulity.
Credulity is the issue here–point of view. Gaza is cited by Samuels only for its "stomach-turning" imagery. The
imagery, mind you. Not the slaughter, which has
rightfully isolated Israel in world opinion. Then Samuels says that the "price" of a strike on Iran would be a Palestinian state.
The price?
I thought a Palestinian state was a desideratum.
It is a desideratum for Obama, for the U.N., for the Palestinians themselves. It is a desideratum for anyone who favors democratic self-determination for a people who were promised a state 60 years ago and who live today as "helots," per Khalidi.
Point of view… David Samuels grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household, the Times says, and he once visited this blog to talk with some real authority about Jewish belief; his refusal ever to look at Israel's human-rights abuses make me suspicious. It's like if I was reading someone from a Christian background telling me why the alternative procedures to stem-cell research are far more sensible on scientific grounds than stem-cell research. I wouldn't trust his argument. And I don't trust Samuels either, I wonder if there is some religious belief at work here.
That's why I said mock-realist at the start. Throughout the piece, Samuels affects a cold, realist tone about the American interest. He says that Israel is our client-state in the Middle East, important to us only because it is powerful. Remember: it served us so well in both Iraq wars we waged. Now it serves the Sunni Arab states as their army against the Shi'as, Samuels says.
So you see, religion means a lot to him when it comes to political strains in the Arab world. But he dismisses the Israel lobby explanation of American support for Israel as a "dim-witted" theory of Jewish power. I say Samuels's realism is an affect because this piece feels like the same old Israel-lobby-in-journalism: putting Israel forward as a strategic American interest and leaving out any consideration of the power of religion in our public life.
