Total number of comments: 36 (since 2011-01-05 22:58:54)
I "came out the other end" of law school and Operation Iraqi Freedom II. If you didn't know, invading Iraq was Operation Iraqi Freedom II, at least as of March, 2004. Maybe the first year was OIF I. Two distinct phases, as you see.
Israel is perhaps the most successful totalitarian state in history, in terms of mobilization of social resources for an irrational objective. Your use of the term "repellant" is repellant, as is your citation of the "reality is in your head" fallacy. Israel celebrates what England only allowed itself to get away with by assiduous inattention in its imperial policies: racial prejudice, which is a subsitution of arbitrary and capricious standards for forensic procedures of state. A Jew in Israel has a thousand times better chance to get a building permit than a non-Jew. And in the US, why is it so hard to get any discussion of what "Jewish state" means? Because it doesn't mean anything and we're "people who want to know". Israel reduces "Jew" to "supporter of Israel certified by Israel". Israel is a perpetual motion machine, something that cannot exist, and its defenders defend an absence. Where is the improved security for Jews and Jewishness? In Palestine? In the US?
To call the Israel movement a suicide cult draws a reasonable conclusion, but does not penetrate the culture of the movement. Suicide is a real-world goal, whereas the movement's goal is to escape the real-world, by presenting a, what, Bob Dylan, perfect image of a priest, albeit in a temple of idolatry: where reality is in one's head and God is a fool. And outside in the streets, people marvel at the priest's anxiety. As a supporter of J Street said to me on the phone, "You don't know how hard it is for a Jew to talk about Israel." I should have told her, "That difficulty is painfully obvious." But I don't understand why it is so hard. There seems a, to note Chesterton's analogy, tribal consciousness ("why don't Jews wear sheets, live in tents, and ride camels?") that, the more it is examined in empirical terms, the more it strives to turn over the tables and end the examination: something you can do as a state: which in fact defines a state: that which ends discussion when its own welfare is endangered. But what is the purpose of the Jewish state, or of Jewish identity? Is it not merely to proclaim, "I am a human, and so are you, and so are they?" What else is there to say? How can anyone pretend that that is a proprietary secret?
Credo quia absurdeum est, I believe it because it is absurd, is the credo of a sycophant. That is the national character of the Jewish state in Palestine and in the US: nothing to do with Jewish history or philosophy: everything to do with the decaying English empire.
Your comment seems to have strayed from its intended site.
But, speaking of Israel, it's perhaps the most successful totalitarian state in history (defining "totalitarian" as claiming the right to not only own the bodies of the subjects but to dictate the laws of nature: legitimacy ex nihilo), in terms of mobilization of social resources, but...but that spells a bigger boom when it finds its doom, to paraphrase the NYT Magazine's cover story this week. I think we're finding that it's a lot harder to leave the ghetto than just buying a station wagon. "You don't know how hard it is for a Jew to talk about Israel." But it's hard for a WASP to unlearn the idea of global dominance, which is where Israel springs from in practical terms.
What other way is there to look at it? What does "Jewish state" mean in physical terms?
Your headline and the source of its quotation are the telling story here. A physicist identifies the salient pattern of events in bare mechanical terms, force equals mass times acceleration, or energy equals mass times the speed of light, squared. Israel is headed for disaster.
But that's not quite right, although it is admirably terse. Israel is a disaster, and one by design. A Jewish state oppresses non-Jews. What else could it do?
The framework needs room for the five-thousand-foot runways for the state-of-the-art Palestinian air force and the ports for its nuclear-armed submarines. The virtue of the two-state-solution is that it brings things down to concrete matters. It's like proposing, as Rich Little did for Ronald Reagan's inaugural ball, building a railroad to the sun to bring back solar energy. That was the last we heard of Rich Little--he added that the President regretfully announced that the choo-choo's kept burning up. Israel is a laugh from start to finish. LOL.
Cheaters never win.
If the "Jews" (who determines who's a Jew in Palestine?) can't pay, they have to leave. This is a lot simpler process to envision than the present project of determining the rights of "the Jewish people" on one side, "the Palestinian people" on the other, a whole lot of coercion directed from the former "side" to the latter "side", and the whole thing such a deliberate fog of vague notions that it is guaranteed to only develop more instability over time. It combines two roles for Israel, a negotiating side and the supervisor of the whole landscape and process. That in turn locates Israel somewhere "in the air" between Palestine and, say, Hollywood. The only force that forces people to reconcile with neighbors is good sense, which gets more and more sensible in prospect, the more dire the conflict gets. So I'm led to expect Jews in Israel to call a halt to the genocide long before their US country cousins are, despite those Israeli Jews being the architects and so on of that genocide as a matter of national self-definition. A bad idea is most reliably spotted as bad by the guy who had it and is trying to make it work, not his cousin up for the weekend, perhaps concerned or perhaps elated by the adventure.
I'm glad you, the editor, the moderator, are reading my comments. That's my main objective. You seem to be proving my point by not publishing them. You have un-personed me here. Perhaps when I click "post comment" I will find I am permanently un-personed ("othered"?) from this site. Still, I feel heard. I have diagnosed part of the problem and shared that diagnosis with the appropriate chain of command, like Bradley Manning. Still, again, I mourn, if not dread, the consequences of the un-personing, the implications: that Israel still has not got a friend in the sense (what other?) of someone who tells it the truth--except for me. As I was saying to someone the other day, everybody gets the chance to be a hero--it wouldn't be fair if you didn't. But you could well reply, it is not for me to mathematically define what heroism entails.
No, I am not irrevocably un-personed by you.
The law would seem to assume that a person knows what she likes--until we get to insanity. For that not to become a limbo, a convenient wastebasket for political loose-ends, and to do justice to freedom where it must operate--in the freedom of thought (Die Gedanken sind frei)--the law looks at the person claiming to like the thing, and sometimes says, "No, you don't: it's a hateful thing, and, anyway, when you say you like it, you almost have a look of frenzy on your face--so I think you're just trying to talk yourself into liking it, for whatever perverse reason."
As to the Jews of the Jewish state being more or less willing to blow the whole thing up than the indigenous people (realizing that a few thousand Jews are/were indigenous people there)--what is it called, the Samson plan, to blow up the whole region if someone attacks--it would be part of insanity to destroy things out of envy or spite, but my goal is to sketch the negotiations, in which the colonists have the bombs and the assets but the indigenous people have the honest desire to be there (where it is a real homeland and not a symbolic one) (I wonder if any Israeli Jews make a living herding animals or growing olives, out in the open air, up hill and down, like in "A Bedouin Boyhood"). An effective negotiation would be one where delusions are revealed to be such to both parties and where the honest desires are allowed to have precedence: "well, you obviously want it more than I do."
How do you talk to a mad man? First thing is to make sure you want to, and then make sure you are making intelligible noises. Then find out what language he speaks. And so on.
If you start with the assumption that someone can lose his liberty and forget where he put it, you have foreclosed yourself from the path of the law. Whose book title was that?
Perhaps that is the crowning irony of the Jewish state in Palestine, God's little joke by it: this Vast Arsenal of Law and Procedure, from Tel Aviv to Hollywood, can't fathom the irony of its violation of the first principle of law as I see it: that people are not stupid. That is, Israel starts with the assumption that, if you don't like Israel, the Jewish state in Palestine, there is something so wrong with you that you can't be talked with. I believe the original meaning of "irony" is "dissimulation". "Dissembly", says Merriam-Webster's Eleventh Collegiate. It's not nice to fool Mother Nature. Irony is what we call it when someone wants us to believe that God is doing something perverse: they are accusing God of dissembling when God promised to be competent and careful--"it's ironic that God would call his people to eliminate the Palestinians because someone else tried to eliminate his people, but that's what he's evidently doing"--while we accuse them of dissembling in allowing God to be ungodly--"what are you, kidding me?"
I wonder if that's how Israeli democracy works: people freely reject talking with each other with the thought, "You just can't talk to that settler/secular/religious/Druze/etc." So the whole polity is a huge mass of unfinished conversations.
The proper point to ask Mr. Stephens, as the comments approach asking, is, "What were you thinking when you were the enforcer--what were you defending?"
Your interlocutor says there are a couple of generations left for the Jewish state in Palestine. I think the trajectory indicates a scale of weeks, although there are many projectiles in the air to track.
I propose Jews in Israel provide ninety percent of their assets in restitution to Palestinians, along with brigadier-and-above public officials for war crimes charges. That would "clear the air" legally.
The point is to eliminate "exceptionalism" as a legal defense, perhaps formerly known by the term "special pleading". When every plea is an exception to a rule, there are no rules and no legal procedure left.
Indeed, one of the projectiles in the air seems to be that high courts in Israel sometimes issue decisions that are simply ignored. That joyous polity is merely a sedate lynch mob, the one thing they agreeing on, "f**k the haji" (to use the US military vernacular), as the new settler government reveals lividly.
Why would a Jew want to live under such a regime? The answer must be, she really does not. She is not happy there. This presses the theory of law to its apogee, but the orbit is preserved: people fight for what they like, naturally would prefer to not have it damaged in the process, but would rather destroy it than have it stolen. So Solomon's verdict to the contrary, for we are talking about land, not babies. But perhaps many Jews have grown to love the land and will pay the price of normalizing relations with the local people. The main price is recognizing the local people.
Since you're evidently "moderating" still, maybe you can edit my comment here to add one more point. If we are to escape the suicidal intentions of the millenialist-racist regime--a concept which embraces most US persons as much as it does most Israelis--since membership is known by what you say and so, regardless of the incentives aimed at you, up until the point that you can point to the gun at your head and say, "I would have, e.g., asked what 'Jewish state' means if not 'anti-non-Jew state' if that gun hadn't been there"--it is going to take a major mobilization of public opinion by those in a position to do so.
There does seem an alternative national salvation on tap. We can take this seeming slip of the military shift to the western Pacific as the signal for our own Operation Barbarossa (if OIF was the invasion of Poland, as a retired CIA guy commented in 2002) whereby we conquer China only to be conquered by it thereafter like several barbarian invasions before us. If there is a "sub specie bonum" element at work in the most arbitrary mentality, in our case it might be the dim recognition that the Chinese seem to grasp the essence of government, and we're going to get some of it if it kills most of them and most of us. Bullies maybe are generally motivated by such an intuition. If so we ought to be able to work out a less violent means to the same end. It might be nice if China said to Israel, like the girl in the David Bowie song, "Just you shut your mouth."
I’ve been tracing back the evident irony (?) of a Jewish state in a liberal world, generally by paralleling racism as an Israeli and a US constitutional trait (that’s a “small-c” constitution–what actually predicts a group’s behavior, as in the case of the “basic laws” of Israel or of the “unwritten constitution” of the UK). Racism seems part of arbitrary government, along with suicidalism and millennialism: all of which drink deeply of the sickly whimsy suggested by the term “arbitrary”.
Your column today forces me to be less academic, more practical. We need not just a literary critic but a psychiatrist–for escapism seems a major component here in today’s Israel and today’s US (maybe grown from the seeds, at least that old, of Reaganism–the first era I heard (albeit as a twenty-year-old) fantasy identified as a US character, was it by Jacob Bronowsky on public tv?, and William Safire referring to a Reagan staffer–to his face–as looking like a robot or mannequin). Is such caricature a feature of European history as well? For all the mocking of non-European cultures by bearers of the “white man’s burden” as non-rational, superstitious, if not downright demoniacal, it seems the rule stringing together a thousand or two years of “western” civilization that you are supposed to switch suddenly from non-fiction to fiction and back again at the drop of a hint if you are an honorable member. Use of non-sequiturs is the defining national trait.
Is that the case of any bureaucratic society, where the difference between what “is supposed to happen” and what actually happens always threatens to embarass Authority? Or is it more characteristic of a society built on another western trait, what I might call, being a quarter Swedish, the Viking thing–whereby you are democratic with your fellow Vikings (“raiders”), but merciless to your slaves and enemies–we might almost call them “prey”. Norsemen set up both the current English and Russian states, not to forget. William the Conqueror displaced his cousin from the English throne. The Danelaw.
So Israel would merely be the latest case of the irony whereby democracy is for “us” and not for “them”, who ain’t hardly human: them damn hajis.
But is this irony even in the tradition of Abraham? Whose name seems to mean “father of mercy”? Is there something about monotheism that is arbitrary, as if “we” know God personally, the Big Guy, Whom “you” (never mind “they”) might not have met?
Israel as a suicide cult raises the question of US destiny. Maybe it's just too hard to meet the David Hume standard for democratic viability: that you go to the aid of the stranger in the city street.
I answer that doubt with the thought that love is natural and inborn, while hatred and suspicion are taught.
So if the practical question is, how do you train people in democratic virtue when all indoctrination starts with the premise that "you" are special and "they" need this and that from "you", and "you" and "I" can do this thing, etc.? I think the whole notion of personal identity is bosh. You cannot simultaneously do what you're doing and know what you're doing. There is no place on which to stand from which to observe yourself doing something. So you either sit and daydream about who you are, or you get out of your own way and wing it in action instead of in self-serving reverie.
The practical answer about education in virtue is that education consists of telling your kids to go play in traffic (what was that, the comedian who didn't get no respect, Rodney Dangerfield?). Then, when they look perplexed, if they do, ask them, "Why do you look perplexed?" If they say, "Aren't you going to tell us how?", you can let them in on the big secret: "Do I look like I know how?"
It does sound like some breakthrough is being made. I was told two years ago by a Jewish woman on the phone from northern Maine, "You don't know how hard it is for a Jew to talk about Israel."
Compare this to the new Pope. Assume he is as Francis-like as possible. He would not be promising, nor is anybody expecting him, to abolish the Papacy, or the episcopate (office of bishop). But that is what is being asked of Israel, and by God, the God of circumstances. But this raises an idea. Could Zionism become the basis for a delocalized Jewish established religion, with a set of officials, regalia, canons, banks, butlers, Swiss Guards, with a headquarters in some quaint out-of-the-way tourist destination?
Someone in history used the phrase "heavy battalions", comparable to someone else asking how many divisions the Pope had. I mean "hard power". I mean laser-guided bombs. Contrasting Syria with Libya, mentioning Iraq (I was told by an Iraqi there in 2004 that the US objective was "a weakened state"), looking at Afghanistan versus Pakistan, I would say the Israeli/AIPAC strategy (summarizing crudely) is to blow some Arab frontline states completely to smithereens, to leave the most conservative (pro-Israel) states untouched (like Saudi, Bahrain, and Qatar), and those in the middle get the slow crumbling treatment, like Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. That is, the long-term strategy for Israel's "security and legitimacy" is to leave it alone on a scorched earth, pleny of room for a Saudi prince to drive his SUV around in.
The likelihood that that obvious intention will instead mobilize the entire planet to somehow drop a bomb on Israel seems larger than the likelihood that the strategy will come out as planned. But on that point, the constituency for the Jewish state in Palestine seems resolved that the one outcome is as good as the other.
So, is this "war weariness", or is it fatigue at fighting to be heard amid the Mafia-like machinations (both gunfire and Muzac theatrics)? The trend I've seen is Zionists coming out to speak for themselves, like Jane Wales giving David Sanger a pulpit in late June. The more proponents of Israel spell out its assumptions, the more people will abandon the idea of an anti-civil-rights state. Rehm's question is a candle indicating that breeze. A very small candle. Let her do a show on "How is the Jewish state supposed to work?"
Since your evidence supports my claim, down below, about Israel sponsoring Rwanda to play pirate in Congo, I'd like to open up this hole a bit wider. To quote Qatari public diplomacy in Al Jazeera on another topic today, what is the endgame for Israeli piracy? I propose that the normal division of labor in a mafia-type organization has broken down with Israel. Like English Kenya, there had been three police forces , in three tiers, defending Israel's security and legitimacy: the Israel mafia (William Safire comes to mind, damning Admiral Inman because he questioned open-ended US intelligence support to Israel), the Jewish lobby as a whole (that is the term from "Game Change", the authors calling AIPAC "the Jewish lobby") but J Street last year identified Israel as the defining issue for US Jews today, and the goy apologists--every imperial force uses local or third-nation auxiliaries. What seems to have happened is that the division of labor has collapsed.
Confusion seems the result. Syria as a target of "Western" diplomacy, public and private, makes Iraq and even Libya seem truly surgical strikes (Vietnam talk). One day Damascus is "engulfed" with rebels (AFP), or Aleppo is "full of total war" (Reuters), and the next day the army is "storming" a pocket of rebels in one of those cities. But I mean local confusion, too. "America Abroad" makes a new program this month about religious minorities in new Islamic democracies, but fails to note in the introduction that the case in point for gauging constitutional change in the region would be Israel: how do non-Jews fare under Zionism?
I never esteemed division of labor as an organizational prerequisite--it practically defines "organization", the division of bodily functions into specialty organs--"machines"--since I never dealt with successful organizations, only academia, the military, a failing office supply business. But I do now esteem it: someone has to identify the objective and gain everybody's endorsement. Someone has to fix the food. Someone has to go out on patrol. A mere horde merely muddles.
This seems to be the state of Israeli polity, reading "Israel" as the transnational enterprise of Zionism in Palestine. It would seem to augur ill: muddle is bad enough, but when you had previously succeeded beyond all expectations at intimidating everybody else in town: well, intimidation is not easy, and it's not cheap. Who is staffing the indimidation desk now? Who is devising the latest intimidation mission statement? Jefferson told us, be of no doubt, slavery relies on intimidation.
Rwanda is an Israeli agent.
The story of the birth of the Hutu-Tutsi bifurcation is right out of Israeli history.
You wouldn't want to read about Israeli security measures in the "occupied territories", Lebanon, Syria, etc., would you? So you don't want to read about its security measures in Africa.
The Times is only trying to be helpful.
What's my evidence that Paul Kagame is an Israeli agent? I'll just bet this: if you went looking for it, you'd trip over it.
What possible rationale could Israel find for security operations in Congo by Kagame? What does "security" mean in Israel? Two things: money, and intimidation. You can't intimidate people if you don't have an income. Rape and pillage as a source of income also have nice intimidation effects.
What makes a mafia go away? People realize they'd rather pay a little bit less and get their fun in the sunshine.
As you know, Tom, The Secretary and the Prime Minister are fully on board with the notion that the US Ambassador to Israel and the Israeli Ambassador to the US should be the same person.
We have achieved conversation.
Author writes: "Except for maybe Morocco, US military support and defense is absolutely essential to their security. These regimes could not survive without the US guarantee of protection from regime-changing internal and external threats."
This seems the one clear error in his essay. Tremendously refreshing to have something to work with.
His own arguments defeat this claim. So why do they cling to US weaponry and bases (Bahrain, Qatar--I'd add Turkey)? I can only think it's a cachet for them to offer their people, a logo-embossed key-chain: "We have the inside relationship with the Big Monkey." So, again by one or two of the author's arguments, this will turn out to be a waste of money as well as be viewed as their tyrants' siding with US, the biggest tyrant. "Better the tyrant you know than the one you don't" only holds as long as tyranny seems inevitable. Not only by the author's citing of strategic factors, but many little operational and tactical developments all point to the US's exhaustion in the region, and even the trans-Pacific "card" Obama claims to now be playing is a, ahem, damp squib, a fizzle in the works. Israel itself, let this remark provoke it if it will, is signalling its readiness to put off Armageddon until next year.
It is time for Israel to finally think about Judaism and statehood, and realize that "separation of church and state" is the only possible relationship. Only in a credible secular state structure--one which does not depend on a momentary majority--is any cultural identity sustainable. Only when my "identity" is "hands off" to the government can I be said to have one.
It seems the only flaw in Islam's history of treatment of minorities (realizing how nebulous a concept Islam is in history, or at least Protean--I mean it is a very successful privatization of religion so that states have almost nothing to do with it, perhaps in managing money supplies without interest on loans, if that's every actually happened) has been the payment of moderate financial penalties by non-Muslims--to my own dim historical understanding. I'd predict in general that Islamic republics of the future would have little legal difficulty with absorbing--embracing--welcoming non-Muslim populaces into what to all practical measures would be secular states. Iraq has been that, allahu akbar, and can be it again, speaking from my nine month sojourn there in 2004. "God is greater", meaning that you'd better mind your p's and q's, because all the big questions are entirely beyond our ken.
You have exchanged your heritage for a fleshpot.
kma's comment about the IDF being a bunch of wimps matches exactly what Kenneth O'Keefe said after the attack on the Turkish aid flotilla: the IDF soldiers he disarmed wilted like ferns (my term).
link to ynetnews.com
kma supplies the reason for the weakness of the IDF, one recognizable to military historians: occupation duty rots out an army (never mind enforcement of racism). This is no surprise to a supporter of Israel. You don't go to Disneyland and expect Mickey Mouse to leave foot-long droppings in his path. You know it is an illusion. You know there is a real latrine somewhere for the person inside the Mickey suit. You know someone must pay the theatrical expenses. In the case of Israel, you know the actors who perform the part of slaves ("terrorists") must be coerced. Over in the US, you know the media must be similarly coerced and the people in general intimidated into looking away. So how do you expect this all to end? In a big glorious holocaust. So, one wonders, why do you bother? This is your Judaism? Why not think of God as a God of justice? That would even include exemption for ignorant enthusiasm which did not traceably lead to hurt or death. But remember Aesop's fable about the captured bugler. Do you think that day is impossibly far away, or that there are too many buglers to deal with? Another way of saying that God is just is to say that people are not stupid. You can even use that as an argument for the existence of God.
Stop at the headline. "National suicide"?
If "Citizens United" hangs up on the question of whether a corporation is a person, now we have a group of millions of people a single volitional energy?
Part of a definition of the rule of law is the use of concrete language. Metaphors, not.
Perhaps we can speculate, from my premise, on the reason for the use of metaphors in legal documents.
Good question, "Was it relevant to you?" I remember my friend Jim Kamin, in seventh grade, maybe, saying that an anti-Semitic member of the town council had been leveraged out of his seat in some way that did not address his anti-Semitism (I don't recall the factual basis, if any, for that characterization) but was some kind of cheap nasty trick. It struck me as sort of a knee-capping: the bastard getting what he deserved albeit outside normal legal channels. This friend: he slapped me in the face once, during high school, because I said to him, "Okay, God, what should I do?" He had a high status in my view, but he didn't want it that high. I probably never got over that incident in seventh grade, where he'd apparently given me an ultimatum: if you want to be my semi-friend from here on out (counting from first grade or something), you have to accept my right to stand with my people against threats in a way that you will regard as unjust. The premise, therefore, was, we cannot be friends any more. My shame is that I did not immediately challenge this. I didn't say, not that I can recall, that this town councillor should have been called out on his crimes and convicted, at the ballot box or in court (law school lay in the future for both of us), and that defense of community values could not come at the cost of law. Maybe I envied him his community, but that was the warning that his community was not healthy. Maybe that's why he told me this thing: he wanted to see if I'd challenge him, and prove I wanted to be his friend. So I flunked his test, and settled for semi-semi-friendship, mixed with envy, contempt, the whole package. We met ten or so years ago, thirty years later, and he remarked I'd had some "serious things" going on in those days, but I think the real last word (inferred from a missive, his last communication to me (so far)) was that I'd previously failed to challenge him. (Even in high school, at the end, he gave me "A Separate Peace" and tried to tell me that I'd been the natural leader whom the envious sidekick had ambushed when I thought the story applied to us the other way around; he was telling me I was supposed to lead him, help him out of something, resist his ambushing, despite his, to facile appearances, having all the badges of leadership, success, etc.) The last missive (letter or postcard, very terse) said that my talking, in a letter or two, about denial made him feel very, very tired. ("I have your postcard mounted by my desk, and looking at it makes me feel very tired.": pretty much a quote, remembered after these several years.) I guess now that this was his saying, "Thank you for finally being honest and giving me your best aid, as crappy and untidy as it was, some very tendentious and contradiction-riddled theory of psychology suspended in mid-air but it was the start to a line of thought that I know I must pursue and it may take the rest of my life to lift up that burden" or words to that effect, all implicit in the "very, very tired--so no more talk, please" missive. Friends may be able to share burdens or not, but they point out burdens that are concealed by self-deception.
I should have said that the professor at the small Catholic college described present or coming social conditions (as of 1982 or so) as "cybernetic": that being the science of monitoring and coordination, what a German might call Gleichschaltung: synchronization. The Nazis used that term, apparently, for their one-party state, from knitting circles to Lutheran bishops: they had to be Nazi knitting circles and Nazi Lutheran bishops. It's a fair description of life in the goyish majority here today: synchronized dysfunction.
I think that the significance of Reagan is that he was the first Israel-lobby-supplied President. I think there is a lot more to unearth following the line of Norman Finkelstein that US Jews first got mobilized for Israel after the six day operation by the IDF in 1967 (I think that's his historical judgment on that so-called war). Reagan was our first Obama--a President palpably for sale. A soap seller (This is Ronald Reagan for Twenty-Mule-Team Borax). Israel had some part in his October surprise etc. arms dealings with Iran. You have to wonder what he intended by putting the Marines in Lebanon, having the USS Missouri shell Syrian army positions. Cui bono? If the rhetorical strategy, marketing strategy, of the lobby has always been obfuscation (since there is no case to be made for a Jewish state) if Israel must be discussed publicly at all, Reagan was the god-father of blur. I fondly imagine the local law school putting up a statue of Reagan in the yard with a plaque reading, "I paid for this microphone." My theory of propaganda is that it doesn't convince or persuade, because people always know when they're being lied to and only go along if they're either bribed or threatened. Propaganda is the public announcement, in effect, that discussion is closed on this topic: hence the party line. In '67 Israel was the blue-eyed Spartacus defeating the hairy, smelly Mediterranean intruder, furnishing a refreshing antidote for bad news in Vietnam. By '80, that had worn thin and mass involvement by Jews in US politics in behalf of Israel created what you might call the Stephen Spielberg effect: total bullshit (yes, Phil). Translation: Israel is off-limits.
As a predictable outcome, per John Stuart Mill, the lack of fresh air and circulation caused the errors of the design (just how is the Jewish state supposed to function internally and regionally?) to deepen and ramify, bringing us to this day.
How long does it take a denizen of a police state to shake off the somnolence, wariness, etc. of living under a party-line apparatus that is (to quote a professor of many interesting subjects at a small Catholic college) "cybernetic" in scope and depth? For one thing, it requires a massive breakdown. Viz. our economy, the stock market being the only part of which is functioning normally, which is a very abnormal event: what is it measuring? From the ridiculous to the sublime, Lebanon is apparently still governed by the deal worked out by the French, so that today the 25% who are Christian (?) have "equality" with the 75% who are ascribed as Muslims (but no census has been done since, what, the '30's because the topic is so "delicate") in terms of Parliamentary representation. (Before the Taif Accord of a decade or so ago, "Christians" were allotted a majority of seats.) Somewhere in the middle of that spectrum you have Afghanistan, in which we all look forward to the successful termination of that war in three years. It's hard not to laugh and cry at the same time. No wonder most people go around like characters in an old Bob Dylan song: "really shook".
So the narcotic effect seems to have worn off; the patient has acquired a tolerance so that any increased dosage would kill her. We're already so sedated we can hardly walk.
The choices available now are a general catastrophe and a measured transition to what professionals might soon be calling a reality-based politics.
NPR is a yardstick for the Israel lobby's influence on non-Jews. There is nothing public about NPR. It has no duty to fairness. It either receives money from Congress to talk about what Congress wants to hear about, or it sells air-time to the highest-bidding private donor. But listeners tell themselves that this is public radio so they can believe it. The psychological dynamic here is magical thinking: the talismanic word "public" indemnifies the listener from responsibility. Contrast that with the NY Times or WaPo. We can tell ourselves that money talks and who's going to shut it up? It's the pure case of reading the advertisements because someone is paying to say that stuff so it might be worth reading (Jefferson on journalism). But then you might worship money, in which case these organs are authoritative. On the other hand we have Congress. George Mitchell commented last fall that the Israel lobby has never been so strong in Congress as it is right now. Now this is evidently "public", these people were elected, the courts are independent, though foreign policy is admittedly free territory, and when Congress gives a standing ovation or fifty five to Netanyahu, or gives the President authority to arrest anyone "linked to" (?) the 9-1-1 attackers anywhere anytime by use of the armed forces, we can truly chart the downfall of the republic. But in that case we can crawl under our beds and say, "Who will save us?"
NPR is the no-load mutual denial fund. It's rather a shame that the Israel lobby sees value in such a shoddy investment. It tells us the sales resistence of the intended audience.
Whose fault is Israel? It's our fault. If we can't make the case that separation of church and state and equal treatment of the laws, and more generally the rule of law, are best security for both persons and ideas--if we can't speak truth to power, or to money--then we don't deserve law.
And she would say something like, "Well, my God is kind of insane."
"If there were no bad people there would be no good lawyers." Charles Dickens. My idea of a lawyer is asking the tough questions of the guy most likely to explode in your face, but not with the intent of making her explode but rather of relieving her of that built-up anxiety (redundancy). So, in this atmosphere of "surrealism"(my brother told me when I was in Iraq that the atmosphere on the home front was "surreal"--he not realizing how insulting that was to me, who would necessarily be viewing some very surreal things) at the venue Pat describes, you'd want to ask about it. So rather than creep up to a tete-a-tete by confidence building or putting the record on the witness stand, so to speak, like Pat did, it probably would have been better to go at the most insane sounding part of the talk. Like, "What do you mean, you're part of Israel?" Get her to talk about what Israel means to her. I predict you'd quickly come to fear: she toes a party line, the party line that got her her job at NPR, that she retails, that she raises her children on, and the first article of the party line is that it is not a party line, it is God's truth, and as such unquestionable. So you might ask her, in short, what she thinks of God.
We might speculate about the role of scholarship in politics. If politics is the art of the possible, then "seismic" political change happens when a lot of people change their idea of what's possible. How many of you think the current Egyptian elections are very bad news for the Jewish state?
Scholarship is wordcraft. There is a general political discourse (the Rehm show can be taken as illustrative of it), there is specialized political discourse (the think tanks, college campuses, things like Noah Weiner of MoveOn saying to me several years ago that they "talk about Palestine behind closed doors"), and finally there is the gold standard of discourse. Let us designate Noam Chomsky as this Bard. The Bard currently believes that Israel is regrettable in a thousand ways but must be endured just a while longer. His tone says this more than his arguments, which always circle around just when they're about to get interesting. Combine his tone with what he doesn't say and you have the heart of the defense-in-depth which is Israel. Protecting what? Nothing. A contradiction in terms like "Jewish and democratic state" (Basic Laws, 1991). He sets the standard of what is possible.
One day people shift their idea of what is possible. They say, "Israel is in a cul-de-sac and the mob is coming down the alley--we'll either have a change in legal structure or, as Norman Finkelstein was saying about Dershowitz the other day, we'll blow up the solar system."
A defense-in-depth is compromised all at once, all across its echelons. A sudden collapse throughout the system. Suddenly everybody stops resisting.
I suspect that you could walk up to Netanyahu today and say, "Israel is done," and he'd say with a smirk, "Don't tell anyone!"
He in effect did say that in the home video from ten years ago where he calls US support for Israel absurd.
This is the battle as the Chinese philosopher describes it: won before the fighting starts.
Christopher Hill in a biography of Oliver Cromwell says that Cromwell intended to bring back to England the Jews whom a previous monarch/despot had expelled and send them down to Palestine, so as to bring on the Second Coming. So this preposterous reading of the New Testament as to the End Times was already current in the 1640's. And notice how the Jews figure in Christians' delusions yet again.
The greater point, however, remains that being the victim of prejudice should teach you to not be prejudicial yourself. In particular, it should teach you how fragile are prejudicial regimes: by definition, they do not respond to events but only enact their prejudices.
Israel is a monument to human inefficiency. Human efficiency stems from cooperation. That stems from negotiation. Negotiation depends on "coming to terms" (Mortimer Adler, "How to Read a Book": the structure of an argument: thesis, evidence, relevance, and the first step in listening is to figure out what the words mean (to quote Holmes on "hard cases")).
The terms of Israel, "Jewish and democratic state", amount to a proclamation that we shall fail because we will not talk with each other because the premise of our group is that we already know exactly what to do, and philosophy is a complete waste of time.
When all is said and done, what gets done depends a whole lot on what gets said. Israel is a teetering pile of cliches.
Let me define Judaism. It is saying to everybody at the seder table, "Elijah is here, he is you--what can you tell us?"
That is also my definition of democracy.
Someone who comes to Maine, or even is born and grows up in Maine, with the idea that they don't want to know their neighbors, is a bump in the road.
You missed my last paragraph in that comment.
Cliches don't get the work done.
"...the ‘getting paid’ thing is boring. let’s all just agree most ziobots work for free,..."
Thanks, Annie, for your suggestions. This copy and paste feature is an equal-opportunity offender. If you want Tal to reply, you'll stop calling Tal a ziobot.
If we want a peaceful transition to majority rule in Palestine, Jews there and here have to be convinced that it is doable. They need someone to surrender to who looks capable of managing the job. The first requirement in the job description is that this champion insists on their either surrendering or otherwise giving up the struggle for the Zionist state. The second is that this champion manifest some sense of proportionality, for instance in preferring a peaceful transition, which includes redistribution and restitution of land and assets. The third is administrative competence to make that preference effective.
The style of leadership will be what it always is, encouraging constructive deliberation while discouraging "sharp-shooting", etc. "Free speech" has its constraints. The leader is marked by her capacity to elicit constructive suggestions from the led and to put them into effect. That is the service she provides to the led--as an entrepreneur of new institutions, which is probably ever only a matter of making existing institutions work--such as comment functions on blogs.
What are your plans for the future in Palestine?
And I meant "Tal" where I wrote "Annie". The more I read in this comment stream, the more I wish I'd read it all before speaking. But that, too, speaks to the legitimacy of the process. Local sovereignty means diction and etiquette are not final arbiters. We can manage to make ourselves understood, one to another. Ultimately as well as practically, process and substance are one: we reach peaceful accommodation with each other by airing grievances, which means knowing they're heard, without having to wait to see if our tires have been slashed over night.
The thing is to have the conversation.
Would you, Annie, or anybody, like to give me your response to my reaction to the article, which is the last-added main comment, which you probably haven't noticed since it's down at the bottom? It's an attempt to state the premises of the ideological conflict, to ask what the crisis is about, via a brief allegory.
In the meantime, having scanned some of the comments here, the issue as you all have engaged it from your various sides seems to have this resolution. Israel came too late. Look at Katanga, thirteen years later, a Belgian grab for a corner of Congo, summarily swept aside by the UN.
What makes law legitimate? It has to bring peace. It is the thing that marks an economic transaction as opposed to a smash and grab. It proposes personal autonomy. "The common law created the common man."
To locate the latter end of the window of opportunity within which a European Jewish state might have been successfully set up in Palestine, consider Hong Kong. Let me haphazardly date it from the Boxer Rebellion/Opium Wars period, mid-1800's. It was reabsorbed by the local population in 1997.
But does this mean that these Zionist Jews must leave Palestine? It would surely depend (what do you think, Annie?) on how they handle the transition to majority rule, counting all the people under their jurisdiction. The more they resist this transition, the more they require the majority to resort to martial law structures which guarantee the rights of neither they nor its own citizens.
The issue is properly set out by the 1947 article included above, by the Jordanian person, my quick scan suggests. What gives Israel a right to exist--what act of what competent authority brought it into existence? Where does its claim of legitimacy come from? How, in particular, does it justify ignoring separation of church and state and equal treatment of the laws?
There is a tenet from English equity (the parallel to law in the traditional legal order--so you would speak of "law and equity", administered in separate organs of the judiciary), that one must have "clean hands" to seek injunctive relief, the standard remedy of equity courts.
This is what is lacking in protests of anti-Semitism by Israel. It sits on stolen land and represses the non-Jewish majority under its jurisdiction precisely because they are non-Jewish. The land is stolen in that the trustees converted that land to their own benefit rather than returning it to the local population.
All property, all legitimacy, all sovereignty stems from the local population. Would you contest that premise? So the question is, next, who is properly there, who is local?
Well, I like to say, here in Maine with its own local/new-comer problem, if you want to be a Mainer, you're a Mainer. That means, act like one. Take responsibility for the place and that includes everybody who is already here.
Not only does the first sentence gravely misrepresent the crisis--44 years of occupation of the West Bank (and Gaza) is a symptom, side-effect almost, of the anomaly that is "the Jewish democratic state" (Basic Laws of 1992) of Israel. The title betrays, brays, the writer's prejudice. This is a conflict (other than the sense of an ideological conflict, as properly used by Finkelstein in his book title: "Israel-Palestine Conflict") only in the sense that a lynching is a conflict.
We are here today in Georgeport, Mississippi, scene of a recent surge in the violence of the long-running conflict between African immigrants and local people, speaking with Jesse Alderson, who speaks to me now as he dangles from a rope under this beautiful old live oak in the courthouse square of this bucolic southern town. Jesse, what do you say to those who call you a terrorist--are you willing to take any responsibility for the fear you have brought to this previously peaceful town with your strange antics and words?