So It Goes

Another View on Misguided Diplomacy

BEYOND MANY OF THE EDITORIAL PAGES OF MAJOR WESTERN NEWSPAPERS, most of the public criticism of former President Jimmy Carter's meetings this past week with Hamas leadership came from largely from Israelis and most of Israel's Jewish supporters around the world. That's not to say that the criticism was any less valid. But I worry that, when Israelis and the Jews are once again fighting a battle like this on their own, many others around the world tend to discount their views as the same old intransigence.

So rather than rehearse many of the same arguments that other Jewish supporters for Israel are making about President Carter's misguided diplomacy, I thought it would be refreshing to look at a different source and see what his views are on the subject. In this case, I've chosen someone who has been in a good position to evaluate the role of violent extremism among Arab groups in the Middle East, someone who is not motivated necessarily by his embrace of Israel.

I'm referring to Farid Ghadry, a Syrian-born businessman who now lives in the United States and who founded and currently heads a group called the Reform Party of Syria.

RPS describes itself as a "Syrian opposition party to the Assad regime that has emerged as a result of September 11.  The party is governed by secular, peace committed American-Syrians, Euro-Syrians, and native Syrians who are determined to see that a 'New Syria' is reborn that embraces real democratic and economic reforms." And, with his frequent and vigorous speeches, testimonies in Congress, regular blog entries and various other public utterances, Ghadry provides anyone who will listen regular reminders to pay attention to the misdeeds of the Assad regime and to the courageous efforts of those who oppose it.

With that in mind and knowing of his longtime criticism of extremists (particularly those with strong ties to Assad), it's not entirely surprising that Ghadry would be critical of President Carter's meetings with Hamas. But, as with Jewish and Israeli responses to President Carter's meeting, Ghadry's  perspective still gives his arguments as much power as any.

In a blog posting yesterday, Ghadry wrote:

The direct and indirect effect of President Jimmy Carter's visit to Gaza, Egypt, and Damascus to meet with members of Hamas sends chills down the spine of every Arab and Muslim working for reforms in the Middle East because it legitimizes terror and violence and dilutes all the efforts that peaceful Arab reformers have committed themselves to. One such reformer told me: "Why are we working so hard for peace if the Americans prefer to deal with terror?.'" I could not utter but words of encouragement knowing deep inside that he is right.

He goes on:

Under the auspices of “seeking peace”, President Carter is reversing years of hard work by many Palestinians and Israelis who see the road to co-existence paved by true peaceful acts. For President Carter to meet with individuals with blood on their hands not only legitimizes terror but it also encourages it in two ways: It sends the signal to Hamas that its violence pays off but also inspires those who vacillate between violence and peace to surrender to violence.

Ghadry's most valuable message, then, is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, despite that terminology, not strictly between Israelis and Palestinians. Rather, it is between the forces of moderation and the forces of extremism on both sides of the conflict. My belief (and more knowledgeable people than I would probably agree) is that there are a large number of Israelis and Arabs, who if they had their way, could pretty quickly come close to resolving many of the issues that have divided them for so many years. The main obstacle, however, are those who see any such co-existence and cooperation between the two peoples as a threat and who will do anything to derail peace.

Ghadry is not saying (nor am I) that the forces of good should do nothing at all to deal with groups like Hamas and extremist regimes like Iran and Syria. As he writes:

Part of the blame for Carter’s trip falls on this administration as well. The policy of “no policy” towards Syria and Iran has fostered this sense of mid-air suspension that inevitably encourages people like president Carter to apply the laws of physics. Had the US foreign policy been more forceful than simply attempt to isolate Hamas and Syria, the US may had seen faster pace to peace than what the molasses isolationist policy can deliver.

I'm not completely sure what Ghadry means when he says "more forceful." I hope he means it in the diplomatic sense and not through military action against these groups. That's my preference, and one only needs to look at the mess in Iraq to understand why.

But we need diplomacy that's more careful and evenhanded than what President Carter, who has vilely compared Israel to the South African Apartheid governments of years past, has to offer. Ghadry's right that someone with the stature of Jimmy Carter -- a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and tireless advocate for peace and human rights -- frustrates the careful (and probably not-so-careful) efforts of those on both sides of the Israeli-Arab divide who are trying to solve this problem of extremism. It allows the good guys to look like the obstructionists to peace and the bad guys look like great statesmen willing to compromise without really having to compromise.

If you have any doubt that Hamas really doesn't want to compromise, by the way, just read what Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas's "foreign minister," wrote in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post three days ago:

A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.

This is not compromise, especially when you know that Hamas has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel. Rather, it is like one boxer telling another to tie his hands behind his back so the first boxer can finish the other off -- with knives and bullets.

And these are the guys to whom President Carter decides to lend his prestige? Does President Carter have any prestige left to give?

Jeff

Dealing with Iran

I'M GUESSING IT WAS MOSTLY COINCIDENCE that David Ignatius and Charles Krauthammer’s columns addressing how the U.S. and the West should deal with the ominous threat of Iran appeared on the same Washington Op-Ed page on Friday, September 15. They presented a shorthand of the two primary arguments in a debate about a difficult issue. My own preference –- and hope –- is for the way outlined in Ignatius’s column.

Ignatius, who has reported extensively across the Middle East, including Iran, from which he had just returned from a long visit, based his column on an interview earlier in the week with President Bush. The interview showed that, even when pressed, the President eschewed a military resolution to the Iranian nuclear threat, though he endorsed some of the carrot-and-stick solutions (such as processing plutonium outside Iran) that have been recommended to keep Iran from using nuclear technology to threaten others.

“I came away with a sense that Bush is serious about finding a peaceful solution to the nuclear crisis, and that he is looking hard for ways to make connections between America and Iran,” Ignatius wrote.

Ignatius also asked Bush why he approved the controversial 12-day tour to the United States by former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.

“The Khatami visit ‘said that the United States is willing to listen to voices,’ Bush explained. ‘And I hope that sends a message to the Iranian people that we're an open society, and that we respect the people of Iran.’ Clearly, the White House wants to reach out to segments of Iranian opinion beyond the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“I asked Bush what next steps he would favor in opening dialogue with Iran. ‘I would like to see more cultural exchanges,’ he said. ‘I would like to see university exchanges. I would like to see more people-to-people exchanges.’"

Compared to the inflexible, get-tough tone we heard in the run up to the military attack on Iraq in March 2003, it’s an understatement to say this signals a conversion for this administration. As I wrote in an earlier posting, what a difference a war makes. And it’s a welcome change, as far as I’m concerned, not to lead with the tip of a sword. But that’s not to say a military option would never be necessary. It just seems to be an unimaginable option to exercise, especially given what it has wrought on Iran’s Western border. 

Indeed, in his column, Krauthammer doesn’t dismiss that the costs of military strike to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat would be pretty horrendous. Iran’s military proxies (terrorists) will be deployed to do their dirty business all over the world against Western targets. Oil prices, he says, could go up to $150 a barrel. If the U.S. were to carry out the strike, it will take an enormous diplomatic hit even from its allies in the West and certainly from the Muslim world.

“These are the costs. There is no denying them. However, equally undeniable is the cost of doing nothing…. Every city in the civilized world will live under the specter of instant annihilation delivered either by missile or by terrorist. This from a country that has an official Death to America Day and has declared since Ayatollah Khomeini's ascension that Israel must be wiped off the map…. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble? These are the questions. These are the calculations. The decision is no more than a year away.”

I’ll leave it up to the arms and Iran experts to argue with Krauthammer about the whether the threat is “no more than a year away,” but I will not discount that it is serious.

But I think Krauthammer presents a false choice. Choosing not to bomb the Iran – even if you could figure where is the most effective place to bomb (he can’t be talking about a ground invasion, can he?) isn’t “doing nothing.” I’m not sure our current administration has the diplomatic capital right now to build the kind of trust and good will that President Bush seems to be referring to in his interview with Ignatius. But isn’t that – combined with some other incentives and penalties through the international community – doing something?

Yes, if intelligence tells us that the clock is ticking, that missiles are about to be launched, then the calculus may be different. (Or if, as was the case this summer with Hezbollah, an actual provocation occurs, some action should be taken.)

I realize that ‘building bridges of understanding’ can sound soft and mushy, and to those who just want to kill the rest of us, that sort of stuff means nothing. But we’ve learned that we can’t eliminate that small group of extremists without building alliances with the great majority of the rest who would like, just like us, to put the extremists out of business. I know, I know, we’ve been talking for years about working with the moderates in Iran and in other places, and look what it’s gotten us.

We should be ready with a military option but it should be only remotely deployed. Something tells me that dropping a few bombs to erase the threat, even if it could hit the right targets (a big if), could actually make the threat lot bigger and more terrifying than it is now.

Jeff

On the 9/11 Anniversary: Trust

LAST NIGHT TED KOPPEL AND THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL provided a gift the nation needed on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11: a chance to grapple seriously and candidly with the tension between upholding security and protecting privacy and civil liberties.

It’s not that there’s been no discussion of these issues until last night. On the contrary, hardly a day has gone by since the attacks of exactly five years ago today that people have debated these issues. There have been many books written, lawsuits filed, documentaries produced and God knows how many of those polemical shouting matches between partisans on the other cable news outlets, the kind of programs that leave you more nauseated that enlightened.

Up until now, two camps – one representing hard line security and the other hard line civil liberties – seem to have talked past each another, emboldened themselves, drawn caricatures of one another, campaigned and raised money on those caricatures and widened the gulf of misunderstanding between them. (To be fair, there are some serious, thoughtful people in the middle who have not sullied themselves with these games, but most media find them boring and don’t bother with them.) In addition to death, destruction and fear and trembling, this is what the terrorists have given us.

But last night’s town hall forum, broadcast on Discovery and NPR and which followed Koppel’s documentary called “The Price of Security,” felt like a good first step away from all that nonsense. My only problem with it was that is was too short. These issues are too big to discuss in less than two hours.

But the program began to show that there may just be reasonable minds disagreeing about a difficult, but not necessarily irreconcilable dilemma. Indeed, I think we can find the right balance.

For example, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I have a U.S. government client responsible for developing and operating a portion of border security processes. One of the fundamental and openly stated goals of this program, in addition to enhancing security, is protecting personal privacy.

I can say without hesitation that the professionals who run this program give the goal of privacy far more than lip service. It is embedded in everything they do. And they have shown that security and privacy are not mutually exclusive. We can have both, though that requires hard work and vigilance. Happily, major privacy groups have taken notice and been impressed with the program’s privacy practices.

But of course there are some groups –- mostly those that really have not taken the trouble to learn about how this program works –- that continue to question whether a government can be entrusted with the information about people. Some seem to suggest that any government program that collects information from people is, by definition, too great a threat to civil liberties. To them I would ask: what then would you do to protect the nation? How would you solve this riddle?

That’s what several administration officials (current and former) profiled in the Koppel program were faced with right after 9/11. This was no parlor game or law school case study. Lives could very well be on the line. They offered the rationale for the controversial security policies they wrote. Whether one might agree with them or with their judgments, they seemed quite credibly motivated by the need to protect the nation from future attacks. 

Jamie Gorelick, a Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission, allowed as much when she acknowledged the awesome responsibility these administration officials must feel. She said she would have expected them to do everything they can within the law to protect us from further attacks.

Gorelick, though, did not stop by sympathizing with the current administration officials. She added that it seems we have not as a society had a chance to speak aloud and thoughtfully about how we balance these two essential needs.

What Gorelick didn’t say, perhaps to avoid the appearance of a partisan jab (but I will) was: one has to wonder why the administration for its part has pushed through many measures – such as domestic surveillance, aggressive interrogation practices (call them torture, if you wish), the denial of basic due process for detainees – without asking Congress or the courts for their permission or oversight.

Here again the question of trust arises. The administration, apparently, did not think that the other two branches of government would give it the discretion to do what it needed to do to protect the nation, and in some cases would disagree with the administration thought it might need to prosecute this very unique war.

Maybe. (As Churchill once snootily said, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” But, then, he also said, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried.”) In the case of torture and indefinite detention of prisoners without trial, we now know that Congress and the courts would not have agreed with the administration. I personally would say, thank goodness for that. In the case of NSA surveillance, I’m not so sure. I think what really shocked people was that the administration would not so much consult a FISA court – even under a special, expedited procedure. Doing so might have eased many Americans’ consciences.

The administration’s harshest critics have to understand that this government –- and the next one, whether it is run by Republicans or Democrats – has a tough job defending us against a real, dedicated enemy. The administration has made some bad judgments, in my opinion, that will take many years for us and many other nations to recover from. But this is hard stuff.

Likewise, the administration can’t act as though the rest of us don’t matter –- not only because it doesn’t have all the answers but also because it can’t expect the rest of us to sacrifice for its bad decisions.

Without sounding a little too much like a  Burt Bacharach lyric, I think we need a little more trust here. Trust in the government to try to do the right thing, and trust from the government that its critics might actually have good ideas. The trouble is that the atmosphere has been poisoned so badly (I blame the Republicans for that mostly) that giving the administration the benefit of the doubt means giving them a blank check. And that in turn has given its critics any reason to trust its motives as anything but sinister or focused on undermining the Dems before the next election cycle.

Boy, am I glad Koppel’s back.

Jeff

"I’m not sure what part you don’t understand here.”

NOW THAT I’VE GONE OFF ON the inflexibility of liberal ideologues, it’s only fair that I devote equal time to conservative ideologues, who do the same from the opposite end of the spectrum (though this won’t be the first time in my blog musings).

And who better to use as Exhibit A than Vice President Richard Cheney, who appeared this morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press?” It is he, more than any, who has turned the current administration (and the Congress that has rubber-stamped virtually everything it asks for) into an echo chamber of extremist conservative ideology. And don’t just take my word for it. There are others within the conservative establishment who have said that same thing.

This morning, under the punishing questioning of Tim Russert, the Vice President showed one of the central tenets of an ideologue: don’t let the facts get in the way of your point of view. The other is that rest of us are idiots, and we should just leave it up to Cheney and his people, who know what they’re doing (and the V.P. lets his arrogance slip for a second when he says below “Tim… I’m not sure what part you don’t understand here.”). Let’s go to the videotape:

MR. RUSSERT: All right. Now the president has been asked, “What did Iraq have to do with the attack on the World Trade Center?” and he said “nothing.” Do you agree with that?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I do. So it’s not...
MR. RUSSERT: So it’s case, case closed.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We’ve never been able to confirm any connection between Iraq and 9/11.
….MR. RUSSERT: Then why, in the lead-up to the war, was there the constant linkage between Iraq and al-Qaeda?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: That’s a different issue. Now, there’s a question of whether or not al-Qaeda, or whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11. There’s a separate—apart from that’s the issue of whether or not there was a historic relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The basis for that is probably best captured in George Tenet’s testimony before the Senate Intel Commission, an open session, where he said specifically that there was a pattern of relationship that went back at least a decade between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
MR. RUSSERT: But the president said they were working in concert, giving the strong suggestion to the American people that they were involved in September 11th.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. There are, there are two totally different propositions here, and people have consistently tried to confuse them. And it’s important, I think—there’s a third proposition, as well, too, and that is Iraq’s traditional position as a strong sponsor of terror.
So you’ve got Iraq and 9/11, no evidence that there’s a connection. You’ve got Iraq and al-Qaeda, testimony from the director of CIA that there was indeed a relationship, Zarqawi in Baghdad, etc. Then the third...
MR. RUSSERT: The committee said that there was no relationship. In fact...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I haven’t seen the report; I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but the fact is...
MR. RUSSERT: But Mr. Vice President, the bottom line is...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We know, we know that Zarqawi, running a terrorist camp in Afghanistan prior to 9/11, after we went in to 9/11, then fled and went to Baghdad and set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of ‘02 and was there from then, basically, until basically the time we launched into Iraq.
MR. RUSSERT: The bottom line is, the rationale given the American people was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and he could give those weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda and we could have another September 11. And now we read that there is no evidence, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, of that relationship. You’ve said there’s no involvement. The president says there’s no involvement.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, Tim, no involvement in what respect?
MR. RUSSERT: In September 11, OK. The CIA said, leading up to the war, that the possibility of Saddam using weapons of mass destruction was “low.” It appears that there was a deliberate attempt made by the administration to link al-Qaeda in Iraq in the minds of the American people and use it as a rationale to go into Iraq.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Tim, I guess—I don’t—I’m not sure what part you don’t understand here. In September—or in 1990, the State Department designated Iraq as a state sponsor of terror. Abu Nidal, famous terrorist, had sanctuary in, in Baghdad for years. Zarqawi was in Baghdad after we took Afghanistan and before we went into Iraq. You had the facility up at Kermal, poisons facility, ran by Ansar Islam, an affiliate of al-Qaeda. You had the fact that Saddam Hussein, for example, provided payments to the families of suicide bombers of $25,000 on a regular basis. This was a state sponsor of terror.  He had a relationship with terror groups. No question about it. Nobody denies that.
….Now this was the place where, probably, there was a greater prospect of a connection between terrorists on the one hand and a terrorist-sponsoring state and weapons of mass destruction than any place else. You talk about Iran, North Korea, they’re problems, too, but they hadn’t been through 12 years of sanctions and resolutions by the U.N. Security Council and ignored them with impunity.”

Now, I’m no expert on this, but I seem to understand that Iran had been one of the most egregious sponsors of terrorist groups, especially Hezbollah. North Korea had long been a scourge because of it had exported missile technology to other states for years. But seemed not big rush to invade either Iran or North Korea, which is a relief.

I’m not saying that Iraq was the Great Humanitarian of the bunch. But from everything we’ve heard about even the pre-9/11 rumblings within the Bush Administration, there was a curious and disproportionate fixation on Iraq that, again, no facts were going to dislodge.

Also, there seemed to be a sense that military intervention was the only way to challenge the growing threat of Iraq. Now, let us stipulate that we should never rule out military options when trying to deal with rogue nations (like, say, Israel’s recent attempts to eliminate Hezbollah’s missile capabilities in Lebanon), though I would hope they would be rare acts. And let us also agree that economic sanctions are, as they say, “blunt instruments” that often do not have the effects we intend.

But I need not rehearse for the world that the Bush administration seemed to have little patience for anything but a military option –- also a blunt and bloody instrument that can (indeed, has) backfire. It is an extreme option, and it says something about the character of a government that used it (in Iraq) almost as a first resort. 

There could have been many other ways of protecting the U.S., as Russert suggests. Back to the videotape:

MR. RUSSERT: Three hundred billion dollars spent so far. The Congressional Budget Office says if we stay in Iraq through the end of 2009, it’ll be a half trillion dollars. In all candor, could that $300 billion we’ve spent so far in Iraq not have been better spent securing Afghanistan, improving airline security, having technology for gels and liquids so people can get on without being nervous? Our cargo in our ports. Could that $300 billion have not been better spent securing our nation against terrorists rather than in Iraq?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, Tim, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of securing the nation against terrorists. You know, we’re here on the fifth anniversary, and there has not been another attack on the United States. And that’s not an accident, because we’ve done a hell of a job here at home, in terms of homeland security, in terms of the terrorist surveillance program we’ve put in place, in terms of the financial tracking program we put in place, and because of our detainee policy, where we, in fact, were able to interrogate captured terrorists to get the kind of intelligence that has allowed us to disrupt...
MR. RUSSERT: But could it have been better spent?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I’m not sure that it could have been. I don’t know how much better you can do than no, no attacks for the last five years.
MR. RUSSERT: But the Commission on 9/11 says that we get D’s and F’s.
People with...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well...
MR. RUSSERT: People with radios in police departments can’t—in D.C. cannot talk to Alexandria. Four-fifths of the mayors say they can’t communicate with their localities. People can’t carry toothpaste and shampoo on planes. The administration cut $6 million—or tried to—out of funding to screen those kind of things...

The prepondence of death, destruction and failure, as well as the sagging poll numbers, seem to have rendered the Vice President a bit more demur than we've seen him in the past. But he's still not about to admit that if he had to do it over, knowing what he knows now, he would do it any differently. He says he won't, of course. That's just the usual political bravado, which we can expect from either party. But it's also the sort of ideological stubbornness that has gotten this country, and many others, into a terrible mess.

And now, in retrospect, Mr. Cheney's only options are to rationalize all the bad decisions he made in the past and say that everything's just fine. That's another attribute of an ideologue: self-delusion.

Jeff

The Moral Equation In Killing

THE WASHINGTON POST RAN A REMARKABLE AND FASCINATING ARTICLE the other day giving an inside account of the decision making that goes on within the Israeli military, intelligence and political community when it comes to targeted killings. That's Israel's practice of pinpoint killings of terrorist leaders.

It was remarkable not only for the level of detail the reporter, Laura Blumenfeld was able to gather and describe (she has, over the years, filed many great stories like this one on a pretty wide range of topics). It was notable also because it showed the exquisite dilemmas the Israelis go through before they decide to pull the trigger, as it were, to eliminate their supreme enemies.

The article illustrates vividly what I have noted on this blog several times in the past: Israel is constantly offered two equally bad choices: attacking its adversaries, which sometimes involves killing innocents and, even when it doesn’t, usually brings about the opprobrium of the international community; or backing off and exposing its citizens to harm.

According to the article, Israel arrived at this practice as a way of getting at the hardest of the most hardened leaders of the terrorists who plan deadly attacks against Israelis. They reason that it might be a deterrent to get the guys who don't really kill themselves in these operations and get their own hands dirty, to speak. And they go after them only when all other means of capturing them are exhausted.

But it's not so easy, especially when you consider that doing so could mean hurting or killing innocents. 

Blumenfeld portrays Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, one of the Israel's top military commanders as the proponent of some restraint, as the one more driven by the moral considerations than by the cold military needs. And, in the other corner, she puts Avi Dichter, who at the time of the events described in the piece was the head of Shin Bet, Israel's internal security agency.

As far as Dichter is concerned, Israel's approach to counter-terrorism is, "It's not an eye for an eye. "It's having him for lunch before he has you for dinner." He adds elsewhere: "And if the terrorists walk out [of a targeted attack] alive, and tomorrow another bus explodes, how do we explain it to our people?"

That is the toll Dichter is trying to prevent, and Yaalon is on the same team. But he is also trying to prevent a more insidious toll. "How can we look in the eyes of our pilots if they kill innocent people?"

And, just as we saw in Lebanon and as the Israelis have seen in other battles (such as the 2002 battle in Jenin), there is always a danger that targeted killings will kill innocents. And, as was the case in the operation Blumenfeld describes, that can scuttle a whole mission.

In fact, the Israelis are so concerned about the possibility of killing innocents that they consult with ethicists and have actually taken what sounds like an absurd step of engaging a mathematician to calculate how many civilian casualties in such an operation would morally acceptable. (Maybe not so absurd, a colleague of mine explained. Isn't that what the Environmental Protection Agency does when it calculates many illnesses are acceptable versus the benefits of allowing a certain agent to be released into the environment? And doesn't the FDA do the same with drugs? I dunno, it's just hard to fathom quantifying a moral idea. And, by the way, according to Blumenfeld, "the mathematician whom the military had enlisted had failed to produce a formula.")

What's more the fail safes Israel puts in place to insure it is targeting the right person are formidable, and, as the article points out, they can scrub an operation at the last minute.

I see no evidence that Israel’s adversaries have taken any steps to fight in anything in the neighborhood of a just manner. Indeed, instead of trying to avoid innocents, groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have deliberately targeted them.

This is not to say that killing is ever a purely morally just practice, even if all the ethicists in the world can argue that there are times it is. I'm glad it is not my job to carry out this practice of targeted killing, and it leaves all of us, even those of us who root on a government that practices it, a little sullied.

Still, I don’t see that Israel has much better options considering what it is up against, and I’m glad to see (and not surprised) that it doesn’t take its responsibility to wage war lightly.

Jeff

"The status quo is untenable."

JOHN WATERBURY, the president of American University of Beirut, argues on today's Washington Post Op-Ed page that Israel's "distinct preference for the status quo, founded on conventional military superiority over all its neighbors and some strategic depth through its retaining the occupied territories" is the essential source of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It all began, he says, "at the end of formal combat in 1967, [when] Moshe Dayan declared 'mission accomplished.'"

By Waterbury's lights, I guess, the "mission" was the subjugation and colonization of poor Arab peoples by Israel.

Never mind that on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War the armies of those Arab peoples had massed on Israel's borders and were calling for the extinction of the Jewish state.

Never mind that the doctrine of pushing the Jews into the sea remains clear and present even today among Islamic militant groups, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and many others, not to mention wonderful guys like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president, who has been unambiguous about this.

Never mind that, as far as Israel is concerned, the "mission" has never been about asserting its hegemony across the Middle East but about survival, which is what Moshe Dayan and his Army accomplished in 1967. It has always been about being left alone to thrive on its own small patch of earth. Good relations between Arabs and Jews would be nice, but even the most idealistic doves in Israel would settle for disengagement and peace.

I find it ironic that Waterbury would invoke the term "status quo" because for years I have heard Israelis from the left to the right of the spectrum repeat this mantra: "The status quo is untenable." That's to say, 'Israel's occupation of Gaza and all of the West Bank will undermine Israel's own future well being.' Now, it's fair to say that both the left and the right in Israel (and their supporters in the diaspora) had very different views about how to break away from the status quo, and I personally believe that the right wing was at times disingenuous about their willingness to do so.

I also find it startling that someone so close to the scene as Waterbury can conclude the conflict is all the fault of the Israelis. Even the unilateral withdrawal by Israel from Gaza and Southern Lebanon is, to Waterbury, a suspicious act!

It is yet more startling that Waterbury would tacitly say, by omission, that voraciously ambitious and morally corrupt terror groups, which deliberately put at risk the very people they claim to be fighting for, bear no responsibility at all. Not even the Saudis would agree with him.

What is Waterbury thinking?

Jeff

A Letter to an American Christian Leader on the Current Arab-Israeli Conflict

RECENTLY, REV. JOHN H. THOMAS, the General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ (USA), produced a  “Pastoral Letter to Palestinian Friends and Partners,” which outlines his views on the current chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict. I offer here a letter I have sent to him in response.

July 30, 2006
Dear Rev. Thomas,
I write to you with profound concern about your recent “Pastoral Letter to Palestinian Friends and Partners.” I know your aim, as is mine and many others around the world, is to bring about peace and justice in the Middle East and elsewhere. But I would respectfully submit that your interpretation of events in this letter may do more to frustrate progress toward that goal than to help it along.

A letter like this is no idle matter, as you are the leader of an important faith community in the United States, and with that role comes a high moral authority and a significant forum. For that reason and because you speak candidly and forthrightly, I hope you will not mind some candid and forthright feedback reflecting how your words ring in the ears of at least one American Jew – and, I think, you will find, a great many others. Just as we in the American Jewish community and our brethren in Israel are constantly urged to be mindful of how our views and actions sound to other communities, please allow me to say that you trouble me greatly in this letter when you:

•    single out “lobbying by Jewish groups” of “many in our own churches” as if that is something sinister or unjust, because it renders some of your ecumenical partners to speak “what may seem to you to be an uncertain voice.” According to your letter, this very letter that you’re reading now would be suspect, rather than something that people do in an open society: carry on civil dialogue, in which the parties are free to agree or disagree. Are you saying that there is something improper when Jews “lobby” the Christian community (and others), but that what everyone else argues is perfectly fine? Is there a double standard for honest, open public discourse?

•    characterize Israel’s actions toward the Palestinians as “systematic oppression,” which carries with it undertones of “apartheid,” “fascism,” and even “Nazism,” terms that, as you surely know, are often applied to Israel by many of its fiercest enemies. Whether or not you mean to associate yourself with the use of those ugly terms with respect to Israel, you must surely be aware that when a major American religious leader uses a phrase like “systematic oppression,” it gives others what they think is license to use the more vile terminology I mentioned above.

•    fail to acknowledge the extraordinary and imminent threat Israelis face with the barrage of missile attacks over the last two-and-a-half weeks and how the build up of Hezbollah and Hamas military capability represents an existential threat to the State of Israel. You do cite “Hizb Allah’s attack on military personnel near Lebanon,” and say that “we pray for the Israeli soldiers’ release and safe return to family,” but you make absolutely no mention of the fact that thousands of rockets have rained down on Northern Israel in recent weeks, killing and wounding many civilians – human lives, which I hope have room in your prayers alongside the many other victims of this and other conflicts around the world. Similarly, you say nothing that about how Hamas has fired Katyushas on Israeli towns almost constantly since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip last year.

•    offer any criticism of Hezbollah and Hamas, two groups that have taken over the Palestinian and Lebanese populations by force and represent a source of destruction and death that I’m sure must offend your spiritual and moral sensibilities.

If I have misinterpreted you, Rev. Thomas, or taken your words out of context, please tell me. But I have read your letter carefully and repeatedly, and I find it hard to come to any other conclusions than these.

Before I conclude, please indulge me a few thoughts.

First, throughout its history, Israel has been forced to choose between two options, both of them bad.

The first bad option is, to put it simply, turn the other cheek when its people or its existence as a state is threatened. With every conflict in which it is engaged, there’s significant pressure from many in the international community (and even within Israel and the world Jewish community) for Israel to back off, to restrain itself. But the cost of restraint could very well be exacted in the killing or maiming of Israeli lives – and I’m not talking just about soldiers, as you do in your letter, but also about, say, civilians sitting on buses targeted by suicide bombers in Israeli cities or in their own private homes in the North of Israel targeted by Hezbollah missiles.

That, Rev. Thomas, is why the barrier, the wall, the fence – whatever you want to call it – was erected between Israel and the West Bank. It is there not to oppress Palestinians as you say. Indeed, the barrier has dramatically reduced the number of suicide bombings. That, Rev. Thomas, is why Israel is retaliating ferociously against the Hezbollah missile attacks from Lebanon and Hamas attacks from Gaza.

That is the second bad option, firing back, imposing the terrible privations on the Palestinian people that you have decried and that I assure you no one, most especially the Israelis, likes or cheers for from the rooftops. Israel would gladly stop those actions in a minute if she could trust that the extremists among the Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims would not carry out their unambiguous vows to wipe Israel off the map. But, surely you must agree, Palestinian extremists have given Israelis no reason to believe that they want anything but the destruction of the Jewish state.

I agree with you 200 percent that is heart-shattering that innocent Lebanese civilian lives are being lost in these retaliations. The images on our TV screens of these victims sadden me greatly, and you can bet that the vast majority of Israelis feel the same. Most, I’m sure, likely subscribe to the famous quote by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who said in 1969: "When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons."

But what is Israel to do when Hezbollah is putting its missile batteries in residential neighborhoods in Lebanon? Please, put yourself in Israel’s shoes. Should it just continue to allow the attacks to shatter Israeli lives? In Friday’s New York Times (July 28), an article reported from Tyre, Lebanon, noted that “for some of the Christians who had made it out of this convoy, it was not just the privations they wanted to talk about but their ordeal at the hands of Hezbollah…. ‘Hezbollah came to Ain Ebel to shoot its rockets,’ said Fayad Hanna Amar, a young Christian man, referring to his village. ‘They are shooting from between our houses. Please,’ he added, ‘write that in your newspaper.'”

If you were presented with these two bad options, and these are truly the only two options, what would you do? Would you leave your own people exposed to violent threats, in violation of what any sovereign nation is sworn to do? Or would you fight back, knowing that any blow you launch will be criticized almost immediately by the world community?

Finally, there is another, often-ignored way to look at what’s going on in the Middle East, and it comes from the celebrated Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz.  A few days after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination in November 1995, Oz told the Washington Post that “the real battle in the Middle East [is] no longer between Arabs and Jews but between fanatics of both faiths and the rest of the people in the Middle East who want to find some reasonable compromise."

With that in mind, I will “lobby” you not by “demonizing the Palestinian community in general,” as you say in your letter, because I feel that most Palestinians have long been poor pawns in a bigger game and deserve something much better than they have been dealt over the last half century. The demons are the fanatics, the extremists who have held the average Palestinian hostage with thuggery, violence and nihilism and who have by extension held many others hostage – not just the Israelis, but also the Europeans, the Muslims and Arabs around the world (the vast majority of whom I believe are reasonable and want nothing of this murder and mayhem) and Americans.

Many observers of the Arab-Israeli conflict have, either deliberately or unwittingly, given support to groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, or governments like Syria’s or Iran’s, with language that makes Israel the great bogeyman (the purveyor of  “systematic oppression”), with words that paint its supporters, particularly in the United States, as political manipulators and with silence when morally bankrupt regimes and terrorist groups carry out unconscionable actions that should offend anyone who claims to care about peace and justice. Whenever this happens they gain ever more legitimacy, operating falsely under the mantle of “freedom fighter” or “humanitarian,” and the struggle to defeat them slips further away.

Each of us needs to be clear about this and ask ourselves, to borrow the title of the old labor movement song, which side are we on? I think the lines are pretty clear and that the fight is against the forces of chaos and destruction, which groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas embody. Israel is fighting virtually alone against them and on everyone else’s behalf. It is a fight that neither Israel, nor the rest of the civilized world can afford to lose.

So I ask: Which side of this struggle are you on, Rev. Thomas?

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Weintraub

Walking a Very Narrow Bridge

A NUMBER OF PEOPLE CAME TO SHABBAT SERVICES yesterday morning at my synagogue specifically to draw some collective comfort for the confusion and concern they were feeling about the newest battles this week in Israel’s longstanding conflict with the Arab world.

Before the service began, people were saying (and I paraphrase), ‘I hope we’ll have a chance to talk about what’s going on.’ ‘I’m very upset by it, and not sure what to do about that feeling.’ ‘I’ve been waiting for days for the chance to be with fellow Jews to sort this out.’

I was co-leading the service with another lay member (the clergy were on a well-deserved break), and we had decided ahead of time that we would recite (as we do every Shabbat, even at less turbulent times, which seem so rare) the prayer for the State of Israel. In addition, we would sing “Lo Yisa Goy,” Isaiah’s famous exhortation that “nation shall not lift up sword against nation or practice war anymore,” and “Gesher Tsar Meod,” an evocative song based on the words of Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav that tells us that “the entire world is a narrow bridge. The main thing is not to fear.” 

I tend to favor “Gesher Tsar Meod” as the proper anthem of this particular moment. Israel -– and, I would argue, the entire peace-and-freedom-loving part of the world -– is walking a narrow and precarious bridge, tiptoeing carefully between two bad and dangerous choices.

On the one side, there is the option of restraint, of “not lifting up sword,” as Isaiah might say, which could expose its people and, indeed, its very existence as a state, to maiming and killing.

On the other side is the knowledge that any military action it launches – certainly anything of the scale that it has deployed in Gaza and Lebanon in recent weeks and days – will subject Israel to criticism, to smears that it is a genocidal oppressor. And it delays the possibility by yet another generation that its enemies will finally realize that the Israelis just want to live in peace. Let me quote again, as I did earlier in this blog, the famous utterance by Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who said in 1969: "When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons."

As Rabbi Nachman suggests, given such options, the only thing left for Israel -- and, again, the rest of the world -– is not to fear. That’s the hard part. If the Jews who gathered in Bethesda, Maryland, yesterday morning were feeling fear –- not for themselves, but for relatives and for fate of a land that they love and pray for – imagine how the Israelis themselves feel about it. From what little I can tell from blogs and newspaper reports from Israel, there is fear, yes, but Israelis have lived with fear for a very long time. This time, though, I detect a new (and, for Israel, unusual) consensus.

First, there seems to be a sense that this is The Big One – or the precursor to The Big One – that Israeli analysts have been predicting: the showdown of a generation between Israel and its committed enemies. One of the better developments from this current episode is that there seems to be a growing recognition I have not seen much evidence of before, at least in the U.S. press, that this is not a parochial cross-border spat, but a regional confrontation aching to become a conflagration.

Unfortunately, the poor victims of the shelling and shooting in Israeli and Lebanese towns are innocent bystanders to this battle royale, and, of course, many who can’t (or don’t care to) see past the horrible violence perpetrated by both sides will tend to blame the one who appears (and I say appears) to be more powerful here: Israel.

Second, though I’m reading tea leaves here from a long distance, there seems to be a rare consensus emerging in Israel about the Israeli government’s response to Hamas and Hezbolleh. There’s a strong sense among Israelis and its supporters around the world that they cannot afford to lose this one.

As Shmuel Rosner, the chief U.S. correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, wrote two days ago while he was back in Israel: "It's very  hard to define the exact moment in which a nuisance turns into something you just can't live with anymore. It's not just the kidnapped soldiers on the border -- that has happened before. Just months after the withdrawal, in October 2000, three IDF soldiers were abducted from the Har Dov area. Ehud Barak, prime minister at the time, decided to let it pass - and his approach was repeated many times by his successor, Ariel Sharon, who carried many scars from his previous involvement with Lebanon and preferred not to open a ‘second front’ in addition to the one in the Palestinian territories. But where Barak and Sharon chose restraint over action, the current prime minister chose to go the other way and for many good reasons." 

"You can hear them on every street corner, in every cafe, and in almost every living room: people of the right and the left, young and old, from north and south -- frustrated, toughened, disillusioned."

"Frustration is the most visible motive for the current Israeli mood…. But this cry for the military to act -- to react -- is now more vocal and more desperate than it was 15 years ago. After all, it was a military failure that led to the abduction and escalation in Gaza, and yet another failure on the Lebanese border that led to the kidnapping of another two soldiers and the further deterioration on the northern front.

“In this atmosphere, no military officer and no civilian decision-maker can even think about restraint,” Rosner adds. “Reaching at least one of the two goals they set for this current operation in Lebanon -- bringing the soldiers back home and "changing to rules of the game," meaning no more Hezbollah militias on the Israeli border -- will decide not only the future of the northern front but also the political future of Israel's leaders.”

In another blog entry from a couple of days ago, Rosner said that during this visit in Israel he was taken aback when some hardcore Israeli peacenik friends uniformly endorsed a policy of striking back fiercely to Hamas’s and Hezbolleh’s recent attacks on Israel. Even these people, who typically would be on the barricades protesting such Israeli government actions, he said, wanted to send a message of “don’t mess with Israel," but the second word they really used begins, at least in English, with the letter “f.”

This comes not with the kind of cowboy swagger and faux patriotism we see from many of the more macho leaders and their followers in the U.S. To hear Israelis say it is to hear a doctor say with resignation, "We have no other choice but to amputate."

That, of course, doesn’t mean there isn’t some second guessing in Israel and elsewhere in the Jewish world. It is, after all, a narrow bridge they’re traversing, and Jews can’t let a consensus just sit there. I found it amusing that next to Rosner’s column about this newly formed consensus, the Haaretz Web page featured one of those quicky surveys that Web sites like to offer in the interest of interactivity: “Israel’s response in the north is (vote for one): Weak and insufficent; Reasonable and balanced; Unjustified and irrational.”

You’ve got to wonder: Are the Palestinians offering similar polls on their Web sites? Or are they, like many Syrians profiled in this morning’s New York Times, giddy about the hits Israel has taken? 

At my synagogue, which is made up mostly of members whose views tend to range from left-of-center to even further left, there has been some of that second guessing of Israel's response. But now it is mixed with the frustration that there is no peace movement on the Arab side of the conflict willing to join Israel in turning swords into plowshares. Even after we recited the prayer for Israel and sang “Lo Yisa Goy” and “Gesher Tsar Meod,” people wanted still more. (Our members don’t have much use for quaint institutions like The Suggestion Box; rather, they just spout out what’s on their minds –- mostly on our e-mail listserv and sometimes right there in services.)

Someone started singing an Israeli song of peace (I don’t remember the name) that symbolically includes  Hebrew and Arabic lyrics. Another congregant stood up after that and, very respectfully, emotionally and with real regret and distress, said she could not sing this song, not when there are no similar songs being sung in mosques around the world and when the wrath of the Muslim and Arab world focuses on the eventual destruction of Israel, if not the entire Jewish people.

Sensing that a debate about Middle East policy could overtake Shabbat services and that we may never get out of there (though we were, for perhaps the only time in 4,000 years of Jewish history, running ahead of schedule), my co-leader and I asked the group to stand, and we led them in the singing of “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem. Everyone sang. In unison. With feeling.

One or maybe both of our synagogue co-presidents quickly made an executive decision: we would set aside some tables during the oneg lunch after services for people to talk about Israel. I wasn’t there but heard that 48 people showed up, which is a lot when you consider that there were maybe 80 people at the service, a small crowd of people for us on Saturday morning, but typical for summer. 

That was the right way to handle it. First of all, people -– Jews especially –- cannot debate such serious, emotional issues without a little food in their stomachs. And they need the sustenance of a full portion of prayer before they can contemplate the fate of the world.

Jeff