2011/09/20
By W.Scott Thompson
IT doesn't seem rational. The cool-headed American president, seeking rapprochement with the Muslim world, reluctantly makes it clear that his rep at the United Nations will veto a Palestinian bid for statehood. Ah, it's the Jewish lobby in the United States, supporting a nutty state that wants it all, so long as it has its single backer in line.
Finally, I find a voice articulating precisely what is wrong in Israel. Carlo Strenger, a professor of psychology, writing in the International Herald Tribune, notes that while 87 per cent of the population supports the demonstrators for social justice et al., the "national-religious parties in the governing coalition... are based on the belief that the Jewish people have a God-given right to what they call the Greater Land of Israel".
But on the American side, it's also a bit more complicated. There is a tendency in human relations for backers of a leader, an idea, an ideology to outflank that idea in its own predilections.
The famous lobby backs positions in America that Israeli defence planners consider absurd. After George W. Bush's election, the neo-cons of America fancifully laid out plans of redrawn borders in the Middle East ludicrously favourable to Israel. That suited the rabbinate in Israel, though it didn't fit the majority of American Jews who argued for "reasonable" behaviour by Israel, peace and settlement (as opposed to "settlements") over intransigence or defiance of world opinion and the American presidency itself.
Read the "J Street" studies in Washington and you see the work of highly intelligent American Jews who see the ultimate fatuity of the lobby's implicit endorsement of the rabbinical position. Instead of seeing an orthodox "majority", they realise the demographic inevitability of an apartheid Israel swamped by Muslim majorities when you include the occupied territories that Netanyahu can't envisage giving up.
The "debate" in America has now become ludicrous, as analysts try to justify the "necessity" of an American veto to head off the Palestinian authority's drive for statehood.
To my astonishment, a former National Security Council official, writing no less for the Council on Foreign Relations, has argued that even if such a state were to gain recognition it would sacrifice much of its long-term goals.
Robert Danin thus says that while achievement of some United Nations status might enhance leverage in bargaining with Israel, "accession to the UN would undermine Palestinians' moral and historical claims to being a stateless people, a status that has kept their plight at the top of the international agenda for decades.
In the international community's eyes, moreover, the conflict with Israel would effectively become a border dispute -- one of scores around the world -- not an existential challenge to the Palestinians. This would reduce the saliency and centrality of the Palestinian issue for many".
Let me see if I got this right. Gaining international recognition and a rightly deserved place at the table lowers Palestinian legitimacy, because there's no "diplomatic framework" that has sanctioned the new position, as if the UN is not the highest one of all.
But, of course, that place at the table precisely enshrines some of the Palestinian agenda. Has any historical grouping of people ever preferred a moral high position to hard-grounded realities, like statehood? Ask the heirs of Mahatma Gandhi. He used the moral high ground not for an "existential position", but for the leverage it provided for nationhood.
In my lifetime of watching politics, I've never seen such meretricious and specious argument by supposedly smart people.
In the real world most of us inhabit, Palestine will win some sort of international recognition that manifestly ups the ante and puts Israel even more on the defensive, however much the rabbis may not give a hoot. America looks ridiculous, and the Muslim world, far from preferring some theoretical statelessness for Palestine, is further inflamed.
It may be worth noting that it wasn't just the Israeli ambassador that was rescued from the mobs in Cairo; it was his whole 80-strong embassy. And it took six hours of negotiations among the authorities in Cairo, Netanyahu and Obama himself to achieve even that. So Netanyahu expects Obama to pull his chestnuts out of the fires he's lit all over the world?
There just may be some limits to the recklessness of the Israeli leader, imposed by realities all around him, however much the rabbinate will put its collective head in the sand. As I write, the International Herald Tribune headlines "Israel at Sea, Adrift and Alone" by Thomas Friedman, a most influential Jewish-American writer.
The writer is emeritus professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, United States
Source : Palestine should've got statehood by now http://www.nst.com.my/nst/articles/19sct/Article/#ixzz1ZgbnH3f9
By W.Scott Thompson
IT doesn't seem rational. The cool-headed American president, seeking rapprochement with the Muslim world, reluctantly makes it clear that his rep at the United Nations will veto a Palestinian bid for statehood. Ah, it's the Jewish lobby in the United States, supporting a nutty state that wants it all, so long as it has its single backer in line.
It must be a bit more complicated. James Rosenau, an American political scientist, 43 years ago presented the world as a series of "systems", in which one variety was a "sub-dominant system" or one where a minority dominates the overall state system. Sounds like Tea Party America.
But his example then, and still could be, was the rabbinical ultra-orthodox Israeli bloc that through constitution, biblical text and emotional sway, dominates the state, and makes deviation from its desired course near-impossible. The 1967 victories in the Six-Day War simply gave them proof of God's will to restore their right to the world of King David, no matter what's happened in the intervening two-and-a- half millennia.
But his example then, and still could be, was the rabbinical ultra-orthodox Israeli bloc that through constitution, biblical text and emotional sway, dominates the state, and makes deviation from its desired course near-impossible. The 1967 victories in the Six-Day War simply gave them proof of God's will to restore their right to the world of King David, no matter what's happened in the intervening two-and-a- half millennia.
Finally, I find a voice articulating precisely what is wrong in Israel. Carlo Strenger, a professor of psychology, writing in the International Herald Tribune, notes that while 87 per cent of the population supports the demonstrators for social justice et al., the "national-religious parties in the governing coalition... are based on the belief that the Jewish people have a God-given right to what they call the Greater Land of Israel".
Their bet is Israeli demography ultimately, with patience, leads to an "Orthodox Jewish majority", just so long as the state doesn't give up the West Bank, with its numerous Israeli holy sites of the pre-Common era. Got that?
I won't bother to refute their conviction, since it's all but self-explanatory in its fallacies. The important part is the depth of their conviction and their unwillingness to negotiate one iota of any of this away. The pressures of the outside world can be left to that world to deal with on its own. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who may not technically be of their number, shares their belief, if only out of bullheadedness and (for now) the desire to show his ability to knock Barack Obama into his own self-dug hole.
I won't bother to refute their conviction, since it's all but self-explanatory in its fallacies. The important part is the depth of their conviction and their unwillingness to negotiate one iota of any of this away. The pressures of the outside world can be left to that world to deal with on its own. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who may not technically be of their number, shares their belief, if only out of bullheadedness and (for now) the desire to show his ability to knock Barack Obama into his own self-dug hole.
But on the American side, it's also a bit more complicated. There is a tendency in human relations for backers of a leader, an idea, an ideology to outflank that idea in its own predilections.
The famous lobby backs positions in America that Israeli defence planners consider absurd. After George W. Bush's election, the neo-cons of America fancifully laid out plans of redrawn borders in the Middle East ludicrously favourable to Israel. That suited the rabbinate in Israel, though it didn't fit the majority of American Jews who argued for "reasonable" behaviour by Israel, peace and settlement (as opposed to "settlements") over intransigence or defiance of world opinion and the American presidency itself.
Read the "J Street" studies in Washington and you see the work of highly intelligent American Jews who see the ultimate fatuity of the lobby's implicit endorsement of the rabbinical position. Instead of seeing an orthodox "majority", they realise the demographic inevitability of an apartheid Israel swamped by Muslim majorities when you include the occupied territories that Netanyahu can't envisage giving up.
The "debate" in America has now become ludicrous, as analysts try to justify the "necessity" of an American veto to head off the Palestinian authority's drive for statehood.
To my astonishment, a former National Security Council official, writing no less for the Council on Foreign Relations, has argued that even if such a state were to gain recognition it would sacrifice much of its long-term goals.
Robert Danin thus says that while achievement of some United Nations status might enhance leverage in bargaining with Israel, "accession to the UN would undermine Palestinians' moral and historical claims to being a stateless people, a status that has kept their plight at the top of the international agenda for decades.
In the international community's eyes, moreover, the conflict with Israel would effectively become a border dispute -- one of scores around the world -- not an existential challenge to the Palestinians. This would reduce the saliency and centrality of the Palestinian issue for many".
Let me see if I got this right. Gaining international recognition and a rightly deserved place at the table lowers Palestinian legitimacy, because there's no "diplomatic framework" that has sanctioned the new position, as if the UN is not the highest one of all.
But, of course, that place at the table precisely enshrines some of the Palestinian agenda. Has any historical grouping of people ever preferred a moral high position to hard-grounded realities, like statehood? Ask the heirs of Mahatma Gandhi. He used the moral high ground not for an "existential position", but for the leverage it provided for nationhood.
In my lifetime of watching politics, I've never seen such meretricious and specious argument by supposedly smart people.
In the real world most of us inhabit, Palestine will win some sort of international recognition that manifestly ups the ante and puts Israel even more on the defensive, however much the rabbis may not give a hoot. America looks ridiculous, and the Muslim world, far from preferring some theoretical statelessness for Palestine, is further inflamed.
It may be worth noting that it wasn't just the Israeli ambassador that was rescued from the mobs in Cairo; it was his whole 80-strong embassy. And it took six hours of negotiations among the authorities in Cairo, Netanyahu and Obama himself to achieve even that. So Netanyahu expects Obama to pull his chestnuts out of the fires he's lit all over the world?
There just may be some limits to the recklessness of the Israeli leader, imposed by realities all around him, however much the rabbinate will put its collective head in the sand. As I write, the International Herald Tribune headlines "Israel at Sea, Adrift and Alone" by Thomas Friedman, a most influential Jewish-American writer.
The writer is emeritus professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, United States
Source : Palestine should've got statehood by now http://www.nst.com.my/nst/articles/19sct/Article/#ixzz1ZgbnH3f9
