Leibovitz writes:

Still, for all his method’s success, Popovic feels that those who should be paying the most attention—academics, politicians, journalists—instead continue to view politics largely as a game played by governments and decided by war. “Nobody, from very prominent political analysts to the world’s intelligence services, could find their own nose when the Arab Spring started. It is always this same old narrative: ‘It happened in Serbia by accident. It happened in Georgia by accident. It happened in Tunisia by accident. But it will never happen in Egypt.’ And this is the mantra we keep hearing—until it happens.”

The Revolutionist [The Atlantic]
Related: Generation X [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Crisis in Cairo
Why Egypt Can Handle Democracy

Kagan’s purpose in defending U.S. foreign-policy activism here is to deflect criticism of America’s unpopular engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is no easy task, and to perform it, Kagan adopts the two-stage approach to persuasion made famous by Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man: Establish first that there is trouble in River City, and then propose a solution, namely a marching band. Kagan also offers a marching band, but with 40 divisions behind it.

Where River City is concerned, Kagan’s argument is unexceptionable: Without American leadership, the feckless Europeans can’t be counted on to do anything, and the Chinese can’t be counted on not to do things badly. America shouldn’t abandon its position as the leading world power.

What America should do with that position is a different question. In his columns at the Weekly Standard and the Washington Post and in a series of books, Kagan has been the punditry’s most insistent advocate of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. After 6,400 U.S. dead and more than 30,000 wounded, and direct and indirect expenditures in excess of $3 trillion, nation-building is ballot-box poison. Kagan finds it easier to preach generalities. That makes the present volume read like a poor man’s cholent, with the meat of the matter lost in filler. His most important and controversial assertion is that Muslim democracy constitutes a new global wave of democratic advance, but he makes his case weakly and in passing.

“Americans have often been plagued by doubt [about nation-building],” Kagan allows. “They have resented the costs, both material and moral. Wars are expensive, and occupations even more so. A century ago it was José Santos Zelaya and Victoriano Huerta. In recent years it has been Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi.” That’s like saying, “Honey, I bought a lawn mower, a tennis racket, a Bentley, and a new set of patio furniture.” The highest estimate I have seen for the cost of America’s 1998 action against Serbia’s Milosevic, refugee resettlement and all, is about $25 billion, perhaps a hundredth of the combined costs of Iraq and Afghanistan—not to mention the near absence of casualties.

There was little opposition to bombing Serbia and sending peacekeepers afterward. But there has been impassioned objection from both left and right to a massive, multiyear commitment on the premise that America could engineer Muslim democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even worse, the Iraqi adventure exacerbated the Iranian nuclear threat. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, explained in 2009, America couldn’t strike at Iran’s bomb-building capacity: “We have lots of Americans who live in that region who are under the threat envelope right now [because of the] capability that Iran has across the Gulf.”

In 2004, Kagan lauded in the New York Times the “small but growing movement among scholars of Islam, a group diverse enough to include Gilles Kepel of France and [fellow Weekly Standard contributor] Reuel Marc Gerecht of the United States, that believes the real promise of democracy lies with devout Muslims.” And he continues to believe that the world revolves around the prospects for Muslim democracy. After the second great wave of democracy that followed World War II, and a third wave from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Kagan writes:

it is possible that in the Arab Spring we are seeing a continuation of the Third Wave, or perhaps even a fourth. The explosion of democracy is about to enter a fifth straight decade, the longest and broadest such expansion in history.

He has no illusions that Muslim democracy, should it materialize, will be friendly to America:

Americans, having helped topple dictators in the Middle East, are not sure how they feel about what may follow. The inevitable victory of Islamist parties in some Arab states will probably bring governments to power that are less accommodating to some American interests than the previous dictatorships had been.

But Kagan thinks this is a good thing rather than a bad thing: “Americans’ enduring interest in a liberal world order generally transcends other, more narrow and temporary interests. The United States can lose an Egyptian ally but still gain a healthier world order.” Indeed, he lauds the Obama Administration for helping to topple erstwhile Arab allies: “America found itself withdrawing support from longtime allies like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. … American power became a decisive factor shaping the regional and international environment in which the Arab political turmoil unfolded.”

One doubts if any outcome in the Arab world would change Kagan’s mind. In fact, an Islamist government may be the least of Egypt’s problems. With its economy in free fall and its foreign exchange reserves running out, Egypt may soon find itself with no government at all, like Somalia. The Deputy Supreme Guide (that is his actual title) of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood warned recently that economic collapse would “transform a peaceful revolution into a hunger revolution” and asked for American help. Nonetheless, Egypt also is prosecuting American democracy activists, risking the American aid it now receives.

Continue reading: Democratic processes

One of the U.S. organizations that’s been targeted, the International Republican Institute, released a statement on Sunday arguing that these arrests represent a “politically motivated effort to squash Egypt’s growing civil society, orchestrated through the courts, in part by Mubarak-era holdovers.” Perhaps the organization, headed by Sam LaHood, son of U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood and one of the Americans set to be prosecuted, put out this statement to give the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces a chance to blame the incident on Egypt’s bogeyman.

But the truth is that this crisis has nothing to do with civil society or the work that American pro-democracy groups do in the new Egypt. Had American hikers been available for kidnapping, they’d have served just as well as LaHood and the 18 others. No, this is simple extortion—and the Egyptian government expects to be paid.

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has already dubbed this the “Obama Hostage Crisis.” He’s not too far off. What Ayatollah Khomeini said about the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis applies equally well here: America cannot do a damn thing.

By blaming the situation on “Mubarak-era holdovers,” the International Republican Institute seems to be suggesting that this incident does not really reflect the new Egypt. Instead, it must be the old regime that is responsible for threatening Americans. Only Mubarak’s cronies could want to hold back Egyptian democracy.

The reality is rather different. A December Gallup poll showed that 71 percent of Egyptians oppose U.S. economic aid of any sort, and that 74 percent oppose “direct U.S. aid to Egyptian civil society organizations.” While this doesn’t mean the majority of Egyptians support threatening American democracy activists with prison time, such behavior on the part of the country’s ruling authorities certainly reflects popular opinion—and that’s to say nothing of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists, who combined won more than two-thirds of parliament in recent elections. Given their history of resistance to the West and their perception of the United States as an imperial power, it’s safe to assume that these groups aren’t much interested in U.S. involvement in Egypt’s new political arena.

It’s worth noting how these December poll numbers track in parallel to last March’s constitutional referendum. That vote gave the Egyptian electorate a choice: Either vote on a few amendments to the 1971 constitution and push ahead to elections, or write a new constitution, a process that would delay elections. The army and the Islamists favored the first, while the revolutionaries who brought down Mubarak opted for the second, since it would give them a chance to organize coherent political entities capable of winning seats in parliament. Ultimately, three-quarters of the voters sided with the army and the Islamists. Only one quarter voted with the revolutionaries—presumably the same quarter of Egypt’s population that polled in favor of continued U.S. aid to civil society, support that gave rise to the revolution itself.

The most curious question is this: If so many Egyptians are against U.S. aid money to Egyptian civil society, how did organizations like the International Republican Institute and its counterpart, the National Democratic Institute, manage to do their work for so long? If they are charged with operating without a license, but had been working in Egypt regardless for many years before the arrests, how did they get away with it? Because Hosni Mubarak let them.

The man who now lies in a hospital bed in Sharm el-Sheikh under house arrest and is typically blamed for everything that has gone wrong in Egypt over the last 30 years is the same man who was at the helm as Egyptian civil society grew. The revolutionaries who toppled the Egyptian president arose under him. The middle-class, ostensibly liberal-minded, and Western-oriented demonstrators who protested in favor of democracy were drawn from the nonprofit organizations, independent media outlets, and private-sector enterprises that had all come about under Mubarak.

These weren’t real reforms, runs the argument against Mubarak. He didn’t go nearly far enough. It’s true. Forty percent of Egypt’s population still lives on less than $2 a day, and Mubarak’s security services were still torturing and murdering innocent Egyptians, like Khaled Said, whose June 2010 death helped inspire the January revolution.

The tragedy is that the choice the revolution revealed was never between dictatorship and democracy. Rather it was between a pro-American ruler who kept his country out of war and allowed moderate, halting reforms, and whatever order would follow Mubarak. Because the transition into the post-Mubarak era was not managed, neither by Mubarak nor the White House, the post-Mubarak order is effectively a repudiation of everything that Mubarak stood for.

Continue reading: U.S. aid in jeopardy?

• Prime Minister Netanyahu will address the AIPAC conference next month in Washington, D.C. It is not yet known whether he’ll meet with President Obama, though chances are good. [JTA]

• While we don’t know whether Israel will attack Iran, it seems clear that all the chatter is not merely idle (and not merely intended to bluff). It is on the table in even the most private discussions. [NYT]

• New York police have upped security at prominent Jewish sites in Manhattan, such as synagogues and the Israeli consulate, for fears of Iran’s retaliating for scientist assassinations and other covert actions. [CBS NY/Vos Iz Neias?]

• The special “shomer Shabbos” Nevada caucus turned controversial when participants had to sign something about their religious observance and when Ron Paul supporters flooded it and won. (Mitt Romney won most of the state easily.) [NYT]

• The Egyptian gas pipeline. It was bombed. For the 12th time in the past year. [Arutz Sheva]

Congratulations to the New York Giants on their fourth Super Bowl win—all of which have come in the past 25 years. They beat the Patriots 21-17. An even bigger congratulations to those who bet the prop that the first score of the game would be a Giants safety at 60:1 odds or better.

• A State Department spokesperson criticized an Israeli announcement of new West Bank settlement-building. [Haaretz]

• The Mossad head has recently had secret meetings with top U.S. officials on Iran. It’s not clear if we are supposed to know this (though it’s not exactly shocking, either). [Haaretz]

• The story of Bernie Fine, the former Syracuse assistant basketball coach, takes a turn for the even-more-tawdry. [ESPN]

• Israel sent the Muslim Brotherhood a note of cautious congratulations on its success in Egypt’s parliamentary elections. [Arutz Sheva]

• Jewcy’s Jason Diamond reviews Ben Marcus’s new, super-Jewy novel, The Flame Alphabet. [NPR]

Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, whose The Law in These Parts, a documentary about the West Bank legal system, just won the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in Documentary, made a short “Op-Doc” for the Times.

It seems like Meshaal is backing away from the Hamas leadership less out of exhaustion than out of ambition. Nathan Thrall, a Tablet Magazine contributing editor who is a Jerusalem-based analyst for the International Crisis Group, answered my questions by email earlier this week.

How credible are these reports?
Highly credible, as the announcements have come from Hamas itself. One doesn’t really “run” for election as politburo head; there are no campaigns. The leader of the politburo is elected by Hamas’ senior decision-making body, the Shura Council, which is itself comprised of elected Hamas leaders. Although there remains a significant possibility that he will be chosen by the Shura Council despite announcing his intention to step down, the announcement doesn’t seem to be a ploy by Meshaal to be begged to lead for another four years.

How voluntary is his retirement?
Hamas’ internal elections are quite secret, so the deeper we get into the mechanics of them the less reliable the information we’re discussing. That said, it appears that Meshaal’s decision was not entirely voluntary.

His ambitions seem larger than to be the leader of Hamas. He speaks more and more as a leader of all Palestinians. Some suspected that he was pushing much harder than his colleagues for reconciliation with Fatah because the end-game for him was Hamas joining the Palestine Liberation Organization and his eventually becoming that organization’s chairman, which is to say, leader of the Palestinian people. These suspicions caused his behavior to come under extra scrutiny, as happened when the May 2011 signing ceremony for the Hamas-Fatah reconciliation agreement was nearly derailed by a dispute over whether Meshaal would be given a seat at the podium beside Abbas. Some in Gaza saw the highly conciliatory speech he delivered in Cairo that day as pushing the boundaries of Hamas’ internal consensus. After meetings with Abbas in Cairo in November and December 2011, Meshaal stressed that Fatah and Hamas had agreed to a joint program of popular resistance, which many—especially Fatah spokesmen and leaders—interpreted to mean that Hamas was committing to a program of nonviolence. Though Hamas leaders on the outside, including Meshaal himself, were quick to clarify that they had not abandoned their right to armed resistance, they didn’t do so as loudly, clearly, or forcefully as they could have, and some in Gaza were unhappy with the resultant misperception that Hamas had radically changed its positions.

At the end of the day, Hamas is a popular movement, based in the West Bank and Gaza, with roots in local schools, mosques, welfare organizations, charities, and, since municipal and legislative elections in 2005 and 2006, government institutions. It is the inside leadership that must be more attentive to the base of Hamas supporters. The outside leadership gets a lot of publicity, but it is the inside leadership that has borne the heaviest burdens of the movement, from arrest to torture at the hands of the Palestinian Authority to the death of family members through assassination attempts by Israel. As one member of the inside leadership told me, “Hamas is not an office in Damascus.”

In discussing Meshaal’s decision, I would caution against using the word “retirement.” He is highly respected, experienced in diplomacy, charismatic, well-connected, and powerful within the movement. It seems likely he will continue to play a prominent role, whatever his official title.

It seems Meshaal’s decision would be connected to Hamas’ abandoning of Damascus in the midst of the Syrian civil war. Is Hamas’ next leader going to be more or less committed to staying in Damascus? If they leave, do they go to Cairo? Doha? Amman?
With the exception of a small group among the outside leadership, Hamas has all but left Damascus already. If Hamas’ outside leadership had been offered an alternative home in a state bordering the West Bank or Gaza—an alternative home in which they were permitted to conduct the business of the movement unobstructed—it’s quite likely they would have relocated by now. That said, unlike Hezbollah, Hamas has managed to avoid supporting the Syrian regime while continuing to express its gratitude for the years of support Assad had offered. Having avoided the mistakes of Hezbollah and other groups, Hamas may be able to stay in Damascus should Assad be replaced.

There is talk that Hamas, much like its cousins the Muslim Brotherhood, is genuinely reforming. Do you buy it? How does the Meshaal news affect your calculation? Does this make reconciliation with Fatah more or less likely?
There’s no doubt that Hamas has undergone significant changes in the last several years. In 2006, they participated in elections for a body many of its members deemed illegitimate because it was the product of the Oslo Accords. In 2007, they agreed with Fatah to form a national unity government that would respect the past agreements signed by the PLO, which include, of course, the recognition of Israel. The platform of that unity government affirmed the PLO chairman’s right to negotiate a final agreement with Israel and to bring such an agreement back to a referendum whose outcome Hamas has said it would respect. In Gaza, Hamas is arresting and prosecuting rocket launchers, albeit less completely than Israel would like. In Cairo in May 2011, Meshaal said that Abbas could take a year to continue pursuing negotiations with Israel. Today Hamas sits in a committee affiliated with the PLO while that organization negotiates with Israel. Hamas speaks loudly, albeit not exclusively, of a state on 1967 borders, though it should be noted that the difference here is one of emphasis, as Hamas has repeated this position many times since it was first uttered in the 1990s by Sheikh Yassin. And in fall 2011, Meshaal stressed his commitment to engage with Fatah on a joint strategy of so-called popular resistance.

These developments notwithstanding, Hamas leaders also say that though they are willing to engage for a defined period in popular resistance with Fatah, and though they are willing to embrace the creation of a Palestinian state on 1967 borders, and though they were willing to form a government whose platform respected the past agreements of the PLO, including its recognition of Israel, they still retain, as members of a people under military occupation, a right to armed resistance; they still hold a long-term goal of liberating not just the territory Israel occupied in 1967 but also the remaining 78 percent of historic Palestine; and they still refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Israel. It should be noted that Fatah too insists on its right to armed resistance.

By all accounts, Hamas makes its decisions collectively, so even if Meshaal had been pushing harder for reconciliation, he cannot make decisions of enormous consequence to the movement without the consent of the Shura council. His successor will be similarly constrained. If the successor is Musa Abu Marzouk, I don’t expect to see changes with respect to reconciliation; Abu Marzouk had been the primary negotiator for Hamas for quite some time. If the successor is from the Gaza leadership, I imagine reconciliation could become more difficult.

Who is his likely successor?
The two names most frequently discussed are Ismail Haniyeh, the Gaza-based Palestinian prime minister, and Marzouk, the deputy head of the politburo, who was an early follower of Hamas’ founder, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, created the politburo, and headed it from its inception until his arrest in the United States in 1995. The former is a skilled orator and fair mediator, is popular among female voters, and would be Hamas’ most viable candidate in a presidential election. The latter hails from Rafah [in Gaza], is respected by the Gaza leadership, and has a reputation for being one of Hamas’ leading strategists.

(Interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Hamas Says That Its Political Leader Does Not Plan To Seek Re-election [NYT]
‘Mashaal Planning to Visit Gaza With Abbas’ [JPost]
Hamas Leader To Make Historic Visit to Jordan [AP/Haaretz]
Earlier: Hamas Smartly Departing From Damascus

• U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will visit the Holy Land to encourage more peace talks. [JPost]

• The current talks having gone nowhere. [NYT]

• The Western countries, backed by several Arab states, have drafted a prospective Security Council resolution that would call for President Assad to step aside and have the Arab League take over. [FP Turtle Bay]

• In what is likely its first broadcast in a Muslim country, Shoah will be seen, subtitled, on Turkish TV. [Aladdin Project/Forward Arty Semite?]

• Believe it or not, Mein Kampf is still banned in Germany. [NYT]

Maurice Sendak was on Colbert last night. It’s an incredible interview.

• Egyptians gathered en masse in Tahrir Square to mark the one-year anniversary of #Jan25. [NYT]

• You will be shocked to learn that, according to President Abbas, the past month of negotiations in Amman went nowhere. [JTA]

• A newly uncovered Irving Berlin song was not actually written by him after all, but by the lesser-known Lew Brown and Cliff Friend. [NYT ArtsBeat]

• Jewcy’s Jason Diamond sketches Nathan Englander. [Capital]

• Fascinating new Website about the Jewish refugees who came to Apulia, Italy, after World War II. [University of Salento (Lecce)]

• Richard Brody on Agnieszka Holland, whose In Darkness received a Best Foreign Language Film nomination yesterday. [New Yorker The Front Row]

Yes, you’re allowed to cry.

As Egypt’s first post-Mubarak parliament—the first whose composition was actually determined by something resembling free and fair elections—sat this week and Egypt’s military council softened the emergency law, there seem to be two fault lines at risk of causing an earthquake or, alternatively, of peacefully settling in and remaining stable. And, unsurprisingly, the Muslim Brotherhood—the oldest Islamist movement, Egypt’s oldest political party, and the group that received nearly a majority in the new parliament—lies at the center of both of them.

The first tension is between the Brotherhood, which though explicitly Islamist is comparatively moderate and ran primarily on an economic platform, and the more conservative religious parties, such as the Salafist Nour Party, which won a full quarter of the seats (in addition to the 47 percent garnered by the Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party). A great Washington Post write-up quotes a Cairo businessman: “A lot of people don’t appreciate how conservative the Brotherhood is, and by that I mean cautious as well as pious.” Essentially, and as always: It’s the economy, stupid! (Especially since the economy is in seriously bad shape.) Egypt’s is reeling, and the Brotherhod, whose semi-official social services were providing a semblance of a welfare state for some even under Mubarak, has a mandate less to impose Sharia than to fix the economy. And as the party in charge of parliament, complete with the speakership, it will be held responsible. But a good economy means, say, maintaining robust trade with Israel, to say nothing of keeping the peace with its northern, prosperous, and Jewish neighbor. How will the Salafists respond? And what of some ultra-religious lawmakers who added to the oath of office the line “As long as God’s law is not violated”? Power means needing to respond to such provocations. What will the Brotherhood do?

The other divide is between the parliament and the ruling military council, which is still the ultimate authority. Which is to say, it’s a battle between two old adversaries: the Brotherhood, now in control of parliament, and Mubarak’s generals, who had long banned the party and who now, with precious few exceptions (chiefly Omar Suleiman and Mubarak himself), are the people still in charge. Before parliament was sat, the Brotherhood was sounding hawkish notes, signaling it would not enable the army to continue dictating how the country is run. But the ruler, Field Marshal Tantawi, may have listened: He just pledged to restrict extrajudicial crackdowns to cases of genuine “thuggery”—which could include anything he defines, of course, but this was seen as a sign of increased leniency. (Besides the Brotherhood, he may have been responding to President Obama, who last week warned him about his crackdowns on pro-democracy non-governmental organizations.) And yesterday, reports emerged that the Brotherhood and the military are actually bargaining amicably and slowly coming to compromises on a presidential-parliamentary system, freedom of speech, and a state no less secular than the current one.

The two tensions are not unrelated, of course. If the Brotherhood gives too much to the military, it will lose legitimacy in the eyes of its constituents, who will turn their gaze toward the more radical parties. If it refuses to compromise with the military on Islamic law, say, or Israel, then the military may never give up its power, and unstable pseudo-democracy will continue, at risk of blowing up at any moment. Robert F. Worth summed it up: “It may make Cairo’s liberals wince, but the fact remains that only the Islamists have the power to face down Egypt’s military and deliver a more democratic government. And if they fail to do so, they may face a rebellion within their own ranks.”

Which is why most prognostication has accepted that Egypt’s democracy will be an Islamist democracy, and we should accept this. Olivier Roy, the esteemed French scholar of political Islam, wrote over the weekend that the Brotherhood and 2012 Egypt are a perfect match: “Their conservative agenda fits a conservative society, which may welcome democracy but did not turn liberal.” He added, “They have neither military forces nor oil wealth to bypass the people: They have to negotiate and deliver. Their electorate wants stability and peace, not revolution.” Robert Satloff and Eric Trager have the model of a more pessimistic take, and if they are not nearly as hopeful as Roy (they believe, for example, that the peace with Israel is in jeopardy), their prescription for U.S. policy is identical: Insist on regional stability, political pluralism, and minority rights; in Roy’s words, “the issue is institutionalizing democracy, not promoting liberal policies. Democracy could take hold only if it is based in well-established values. Liberalism does not precede democracy.”

It seems like Turkey, governed by a democratically elected, moderate yet undeniably Islamist political party (the dangerously charismatic Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP), is the model we should be hoping for, short- to medium-term. Actually, this is what people generally said a year ago, when Mubarak regime was being overthrown, and this week columnist Jackson Diehl made the case: “The reality is that, like it or not, ‘Islamist-oriented’ governments are about to become the new normal in a region dominated for decades by secular autocrats and pro-American generals,” he argued. Hamas, Hezbollah, and their ilk cannot be recognized as legitimate, he continued;

others, like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, are likely to weave through an ambiguous middle ground, trying to balance the need for Western investment and the secular aspirations of their populations with their religious ideology. The right way to respond to them is to be nimble: tolerate some turbulence, roll with some punches, push back against others and keep pressing leaders to stick to democratic principles.

And, I’d add, insist on certain regional red lines: And it’s worth noting that while Erdogan shamelessly demagogues against Israel, he hasn’t really provoked it since the 2010 flotilla (despite plenty of opportunities) and meanwhile has fully joined Western pressure against Syria’s regime and even agreed to participate in an embargo of Iranian oil. Really, it could be a whole lot worse.

Chaotic Start to Egypt’s First Democratically Elected Parliament [NYT]
Egypt Military Council Partly Curbs State of Emergency Law [NYT]
Final Results Confirm Islamists Winners in Egypt’s Elections [WP]
Egypt’s Human Bellwether [NYT Magazine]
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Adopting Caution on Economic Matters [WP]
Egypt’s Brotherhood Warns Military [WSJ]
In Egypt, Signs of Accord Between Military Council and Islamists [NYT]
A New Generation of Political Islamists Steps Forward [WP]
How the U.S. Should Handle the Islamist Rise in Egypt [WSJ]
Turkey’s Government Is the New Normal in the Middle East [WP]

• The Arab League proposed an ambitious plan for Syria that would involve President Assad stepping down in a matter of weeks, to be replaced by a national unity government. [NYT]

• The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier, made a routine trip into the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz without incident—the first to do so since Iran’s threats. [DPA/Haaretz]

• Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, (Jewish) Democrat from Arizona, will resign to focus on her recovery from being shot in the head a year ago. [NYT The Caucus]

• Jackson Diehl argues that Turkey’s Islamist, anti-Israel government has also been an important U.S. ally and represents “the new normal” for the region that can’t be wished or denounced away. [WP]

• Reports have it that the United States is considering shutting down its embassy in Damascus, in part out of security concerns. Marc Lynch hopes it can be kept open and Ambassador Robert Ford on the job. [FP The Middle East Channel]

For the United States, this is about bolstering Jordan, one of only two countries that has a peace treaty with Israel (and Egypt’s future stance is unpredictable given that country’s impending Islamist parliament), a close Arab ally sitting on a crucial piece of territory and possessing ace intelligence services. for Jordan, this is about bolstering the Palestinian Authority, which it hopes can contain Hamas (who have brethren among anti-regime Islamists in Jordan) and bring a Palestinian state to fruition before talk grows about Palestinian-majority Jordan absorbing the West Bank. One thing Jordan is doing to help P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas consolidate his power is persecute his archrival within the Fatah Party, Muhammad Dahlan: upon the P.A.’s request, it stripped Dahlan of his assets, said to include companies together worth millions of dollars. The P.A. has accused Dahlan of corruption, which he denies.

Abdullah is starting to get antsy. On his fourth prime minister since a year ago, there are reports that he has begun to crack down violently on some dissent. Jordan provides more reason for the U.S. to pressure Israel to make concessions for the sake of the peace process—pressure that almost certainly won’t be forthcoming until at least November.

Remarks by President Obama and His Majesty King Abdullah of Jordan [White House]
Jordan’s Abdullah Sees Glimmer of Hope in Mideast Talks [WP]
Jordan Seizes Assets of Muhammad Dahlan [The National]
Earlier: Israeli-Palestinian ‘Meeting’ Today in Jordan

• The NYPD have arrested the man allegedly responsible for the recent spate of anti-Semitic vandalism in various Brooklyn neighborhoods. He’s Jewish. [NY Daily News]

• Cast Lead 2? The IDF’s southern command has been ordered to plan for a major Gaza offensive in case the rockets continue. A more important question is: Why would Israel expect more rockets? [JPost]

• Maybe for the same reason the U.S. and Israel postponed a joint military drill: Israel may be in earnest planning a strike on Iran. Or not. (More at 10.) [NYT]

• When Egypt’s parliament meets within a week, its speaker will be Muslim Brotherhood. The army okayed it. [WP]

• Syria continues its slip into civil war. [NYT]

• The Websites of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and El Al were temporarily shut down by hackers yesterday, similar to the theft of thousands of Israelis’ credit card numbers a couple weeks back. [NYT]

• A meeting this month in Vienna with Iranian nuclear scientists could reveal whether Iran has secretly been working on nuclear weapons. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Eli Lake reports both that the Mossad is likely responsible for the Iranian scientist assassinations and that it would like other countries to think it is anyway. [The Daily Beast]

• Because you couldn’t get enough of the first two, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators will meet for round three of the latest talks in Amman on Satuday (Shabbos?). [Reuters/Haaretz]

• “It’s the economy, stupid.” With a plurality and near-majority in the forthcoming parliament, the Muslim Brotherhood begins to turn its attention to bread-and-butter issues. [LAT]

• Charles Krauthammer agrees that the threat of Ron Paul isn’t Paul himself, it’s lingering Paul-ism, including in the form of his son, Rand. [WP]

In his small, dusty Cairo apartment, the Los Angeles Times finds Banna despondent. “The revolution has lost its freedom,” he says. He adds,

The heir of these revolutions is political Islam. The Islamists’ parties are the big winners. The Islamists are established figures in this time of tumult. They have credibility and people are willing to give them a chance. But they must move quickly to fix years of social and economic neglect. If not, they could lose this opportunity and it all might collapse.”

He refers, of course, to his longtime foe, the Muslim Brotherhood. In a 2005 profile in Egypt Today, Banna posits that Islam, properly understood, call for a liberal, democratic state.

It is up for debate just how liberal this Banna is. In his most recent book, The Flight of the Intellectuals, Paul Berman reports that even though Banna’s heretical interpretation of Islam, which does not accept the divinity of the Sunnah (the collected words and deeds of the Prophet not recorded in the Koran), “is bound to seem congenial to people with liberal and secular views,” Banna is also a man who praised the 9/11 terrorists for their “extremely courageous” deed. “In a modern political world shaped by the rise of the Islamists,” Berman sighs, “even some of the most attractive of thinkers tend, if they have come under an Islamist influence, to have a soft spot for suicide terrorism. And a soft spot for anti-Semitism.”

But back to Banna’s dusty apartment. “What struck me most over the last year was the gathering of the masses,” he tells the Los Angeles Times. “Even the prophets weren’t able to pull together millions of people behind a single aim. It was as if we had become a city of angels.”

Islamic Scholar Casts a Skeptical Eye on the Emerging Egypt [LAT]
Related: A Liberal Brother at Odds with the Muslim Brotherhood [NYT]
In Word and Deed [Egypt Today]

• Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, dominant in recent parliamentary elections, seems willing to go along to get along: it will defer to the military rulers for six months and, it claims, not ally with more radical parties. [NYT]

• The IDF apparently stopped a terrorist attack, arresting four men with weapons and pipe bombs trying to enter Israel from the West Bank. [Haaretz]

• Dennis Ross has several proposals for how to kickstart the peace process, and they all amount to giving concessions to the Palestinian Authority in order to strengthen it. [WP]

• “You know how to make the Jew jealous?” the pop megastar Katy Perry’s father reportedly preached at his Ohio church. “Have some money, honey.” [JTA]

• A vigil was held in Tucson, Arizona, to mark the first anniversary of the terrible shooting that killed six. Both amazingly and naturally, it was led by the shooting’s main target, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. [NYT]

It’s worth remembering, if and when the attacks on Obama for engaging with our enemies begins, that it was (Republican) neoconservatives, such as Elliott Abrams, who most fervently welcomed the Arab Spring, the toppling of dictator Hosni Mubarak, and the democracy that would presumably follow. And also that it was President Bush’s second-term Freedom Agenda that first made it U.S. policy to support democracy in the Middle East no matter the consequences—as when that administration pushed for Palestinian elections and watched as the Brotherhood’s cousin, Hamas, won. (The administration’s refusal to negotiate with Hamas wasn’t exactly a success—it led to Palestinian civil war and President Abbas’s lack of credibility. It wasn’t, however, definitively wrong or worse than negotiating would have been.)

The administration is casting its decision simply as the least bad option. “There doesn’t seem to me to be any other way to do it, except to engage with the party that won the election,” a senior administration official told the New York Times. Added Sen. John Kerry, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and a potential future Democratic secretary of state: “You’re certainly going to have to figure out how to deal with democratic governments that don’t espouse every policy or value you have.” (He compared it to President Reagan’s negotiating with the Soviets.) And how long until supporting secular nationalism in the Palestinian territories will seem similarly impractical as Hamas and other Islamist parties gain popularity?

What’s going to become increasingly clear is that even Sunni Islamists in the Levant and Egypt are, much like the Islamists of Al Qaeda and the Taliban and Iran and Pakistan, neither homogenous nor ideologically in sync. When Mubarak first went and people spoke of Turkey as a good-case scenario for Egypt, that meant some kind of Islamist government. You can wish for a world in which free and fair Egyptian elections put secular liberals in power, but right now that world doesn’t exist, and so if somebody were to argue that the administration is wrong to talk to the Brotherhood—offering them the blandishments of legitimacy in exchange for the moderation that responsibility and accountability inherently bring—then the appropriate response is: what would you do differently?

Overtures to Egypt’s Islamists Reverse Longtime U.S. Policy [NYT]
As Israelis and Palestinians Talk, the Rise of a Political Islam Alters the Equation [NYT]
Earlier: Perry’s Ascent Heralds Israel’s Rise as Issue

Lebanon’s Maronite community has long been the region’s Christian citadel. “It used to be that when Christians around the region looked at the situation in Lebanon, it cheered them,” Elie Fawaz, a Lebanese political analyst, told me this week in Beirut. “They saw that here the Christians were equal to their Muslim counterparts. They were citizens and had the same rights as Muslims.” The citadel is now tottering. If Lebanon once served as a beacon for the region’s other Christians, the dimming of this light is making Christians in unstable countries like Iraq, Syria, the Palestinian territories, and Egypt even more vulnerable.

Lebanon’s Christian community comprises up to a third of the country’s total population. It is made up largely of Maronites but also includes Greek Orthodox and a number of other sects, like Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Greek Catholic, and Roman Catholic. Christians were likely never a majority in Lebanon, and yet, says Fawaz, a Greek Orthodox, “the Christians didn’t act like a minority. They pushed their vision for an independent and sovereign Lebanese state.”

Historically, Lebanese Christians have provided some of the region’s most influential intellectual leaders, like Charles Malik, who helped write the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Michel Chiha, one of the authors of Lebanon’s 1926 Constitution. In the wake of Lebanon’s independence in 1943, the Christian vision was to build a sovereign state that would bring political and cultural modernity to the country and, eventually, to the broader Middle East.

That project stalled for a number of reasons. First, there was the relative demographic decline of the Christians in the post-independence period, due to the accelerated birth rates of Sunnis and Shiites. The French authorities that oversaw Lebanon during the mandate period created a power-sharing agreement that allotted Christians 50 percent of the parliament—the other 50 percent was split between Shia and Sunnis—and this struck Lebanon’s growing Muslim population as unfair. Most significantly, in addition to these domestic problems, the Christians were unable to protect Lebanon from the region’s furies, which culminated in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) that pitted a number of different domestic players, as well as regional and international actors, against one another.

One of the main causes of that 15-year conflagration was the support of Lebanese Sunnis for the Palestinian cause, which attached these Sunnis to a larger Arab regional identity with a shared goal of eradicating Israel. The Sunni community’s political, diplomatic, and financial support of the Palestinians set them squarely against the Maronites, who resisted turning Lebanon into a forward operating base for the P.L.O. They sought to preserve their vision of a Lebanon free from the region’s destructive political currents and to avoid the Israeli reprisals they rightly feared.

What’s instructive is that the Christians fought in the war. “In 1975, mothers sent their kids to fight the Palestinians,” says Fawaz. “They had a vision for Lebanon.”

That changed when political calculation and greed shifted Christians’ focus from their war against the P.L.O. and Yasser Arafat’s allies to each other. The Christians split into different factions that faced off during the civil war. Two decades after the end of the war, the Christians are still plagued by this fissure, and they are still represented by the same political leaders who took them to war against one another more than 20 years ago. The result, says Fawaz, “is that today the Christians have no vision. They are definitely a numerical minority and acting like one—reactive and fearful.”

The Christian community here is suffering from a number of symptoms of minority psychosis. Consider that the head of the Maronite church has spoken out in defense of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Patriarch Beshara Butros Rai called Assad “open-minded” in a September interview. “I am hoping Assad will be given more chances to implement the reforms he already launched,” Rai added. An unfortunately all-too-typical Christian fear and hatred of Sunnis has convinced many Lebanese Christians—as well as Syrian ones—that only Damascus’ Alawite minority regime can protect the region’s Christians from Sunni Islamists.

Obviously, a regime that has slaughtered protesters for almost a year hardly embodies the sort of values promoted in the gospel, or warrants the faith of a cleric. But more to the point: This is the same Syrian regime that waged an open-ended campaign of terror against Lebanon’s Christians starting in 2005. Christian politicians and journalists were assassinated; bombs detonated in Christian regions of the country. And the official head of Lebanon’s Christian community is now appealing to Assad for protection?

The Maronites had always distinguished themselves as among the region’s most stubbornly independent of confessional sects. But fear, resentment, and short-sighted political calculation have led them today to seek protection and patronage from the Middle East’s most dangerous and retrograde elements: Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah. Recently, Fawaz explains, senior church officials came out in favor of the arms of Hezbollah’s Islamic resistance. “The Maronite church,” Fawaz says, “has taken a position defending the party that stands accused of killing the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri.” Fear has compelled the Christians to abandon logic as well as moral scruple.

In the aftermath of the February 2005 assassination of Hariri, Damascus withdrew its troops from Lebanon after almost 30 years. That represented a golden opportunity for the country’s Christians. “They’d been resisting Syrian hegemony in order to regain a free and independent Lebanon,” Fawaz says. “With Syria out, the Christians had what they always said they wanted: Sunni leadership that had a Lebanon-first policy.” Some Christian parties did ally themselves with the largest Sunni party, led by the late Hariri’s son Saad. But the majority, under the leadership of Michel Aoun, the former head of the Lebanese army, partnered with Hezbollah instead.

In other words, today’s Christians seem less motivated by their vision of an independent Lebanon than by their hatred of the Sunnis. It’s true that Lebanese Christians, like other minority groups here, including the Shiites, suffered terrible persecution at the hands of the Sunnis, who for centuries treated them as second-class citizens (at best). But Lebanon’s current Sunni leaders are not Ottomans, never mind jihadists. Like the Christians themselves, the Sunni leadership here promotes liberal values and a liberalized economy.

By openly siding against the Sunnis and allying with Hezbollah—and by extension Iran—the Christians have let identity politics and ideology, rather than interests and values, drive policy. The Sunnis are the regional majority, and no matter what sort of revolutionary project Iran has in store for the Middle East, the Sunnis aren’t going anywhere.

The question for the Christians is how to respond to the upheavals that have reshaped the region over the last year. Lebanon’s Christian population has the power to set the agenda for the rest of their regional co-religionists. Either they can identify and work with those Sunnis who share their same vision for Lebanon and the rest of the region, or they can let ancient wounds dictate a strategy of resentment that will ensure their demise.

Those inclined to discount the possibility of a Christian-free Middle East would do well to remember that Jews, in the recent past, had a significant place in the Ottoman Empire and Iran. Were it not for the birth of a sovereign Jewish state that took in Jewish refugees thrown out by countries that turned against them, this regional minority might well have disappeared half a century ago. Without an Israel of their own, if the Christians don’t get it right their era in the Middle East may be coming to an end.

For this, as the New York Times’ Ethan Bronner explains, is really all about Jordan. King Abdullah II is on his fourth prime minister since the Arab Spring began, because he faces the dual threats of a native Islamist movement (kin to Hamas and Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood) and the majority of his subjects who are Palestinian (he is Hashemite). (Nicolas Pelham published an excellent primer on Abdullah II’s situation last month.) The king wants to be seen as central and important now that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who usually hosted such talks, is out of the picture; wants to empower the more moderate P.A. as compared to Hamas, whose success threatens him both insofar as it emboldens his homegrown Islamist movement and as it increases the chance of a Hamas-run West Bank sharing 60 miles of Jordan’s border; and wishes to advance a Palestinian state in the territories lest the notion that majority-Palestinian Jordan absorb all the Palestinians become more enticing.

So that’s Jordan. You could argue that Israel faces incentives to make this meeting lead to talks, on the theory that a re-elected President Obama will push it as never before, but more likely Prime Minister Netanyahu will wait to see if Obama is re-elected before considering new initiatives. For the same reason, the U.S. is likely to make small statements and take few new risks. The P.A. typically looks for big concessions—the thinking is that these would persuade the Palestinian people that its moderate path is more effective than Hamas’. But right now, the P.A. is also pursuing a more confrontational path, both by trying to establish a unity government with Hamas and, reportedly, going to the U.N. Security Council with complaints about Israeli settlements (it did this last year, too, and a resolution was vetoed by the U.S., as one certainly would be again) and referring Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza to the International Criminal Court. In fact, the P.A. had better not come away with anything big, as its rival and potential partner, Hamas, has called for a boycott of the talks. And Hamas has its own patrons: not only a prospective future democratically elected Egyptian government, which would have a heavy Muslim Brotherhood element, but also Prime Minister Erdogan’s Turkey, which over the weekend hosted the head of Hamas’ government in Gaza, who was able to tour the Mavi Marmara.

So, to sum up: all of the relevant players are hemmed in by their own domestic constituencies in ways that all but guarantee no real results and a continuation of the status quo. It must be the new year!

Palestinians and Israelis Will Talk This Week [NYT]
Erekat: Peace Talks Require Settlement Halt [Haaretz/Forward]
Palestinians Plan Diplomatic Steps to Put Israel Under ‘International Siege’ [Haaretz]
Erdogan to Haniyeh: Talks Must Include Hamas [Ynet]
Related: Jordan Starts to Shake [NY Books]
Earlier: Reconciliation 2.0

• Speaking of: the Israelis and the Palestinians meet today in Amman. Keep expectations very low. More later. [NYT]

• Amid the latest tensions in Israel, ultra-Orthodox protesters marched in striped prison uniforms and yellow stars. And would you believe some folks found this tasteless? [NYT]

• Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which won a plurality of votes in two rounds of parliamentary voting and is the most popular of the Islamic parties that won majorities, said it will not recognize Israel and will try to cancel the peace treaty. [JPost]

• Hamas and Turkey grew closer as the head of Hamas’ Gaza government visited Istanbul. [NYT]

• Ilan Grapel, the Israeli-American law student, writes for the first time about his detention this summer in Egypt, and defends his trip. [WP]

• The Obama administration has approved a $30 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Israel tends to be leery about such things, although the two countries share an enemy in Iran. [NYT]

• “It is incredible that a Republican candidate for president in the year 2012, supported by white supremacists, Jew haters and gay bashers, is a frontrunner in the upcoming Iowa caucus.” –Hizzoner Ed Koch. [Capital]

• Egyptian security services raided the offices of several NGOs yesterday, prompting U.S. condemnation. [Yahoo! The Envoy]

• Low-level rocket-firing and retaliation between Gaza and Israel continues. One man was killed in an airstrike this morning as he prepared to launch a missile into Israel. [Haaretz]

• The imam behind the Ground Zero Islamic center has a plan for a new holy month in which hostilities are suspended and Jews, Christians, and Muslims make pilgrimages to the Holy Land. This idea will probably have as much success as the Islamic center. [Haaretz]

• The U.S. has released $40 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority—it’s economic and humanitarian assistance, not security. [AP/JTA]

• Mazel tov to the Philadelphia students who had 687 dreidels (at least!) spinning simultaneously, tentatively setting a new world record. [JTA]

Happy new year!

• The United States is trying to articulate exactly which “red lines” would prompt a U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons program, in an effort to dissuade Israel from acting on its own. [The Daily Beast]

• A prominent Syrian activist in exile has called for humanitarian intervention. His request won’t be the last. [Yahoo! The Envoy]

• Photographer Lynsey Addario, who while pregnant was harassed at a Gaza checkpoint, gave birth this morning. [Twitter]

• Now we have the head of Iran’s navy mentioning that it would be really easy to close the Strait of Hormuz. Gulp. [AP/WP]

• In Brooklyn’s Hasidic enclaves, the Beit Shemesh conflict with the anti-women ultra-Orthodox is seen primarily as a shanda fur die Goyim. [Haaretz]

• The prominent Abstract Expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler died at 83. [NYT]

• Hamas and Fatah are best friends again, unless you want to celebrate Fatah’s anniversary in Gaza, and then Hamas won’t let you. [JPost]

• A Tunisian-French Jew lobbies for Yad Vashem to include her savior as the first “righteous” person who is Arab. [NYT]

• Paul Berger continues his reporting on George Washington’s letter to the Rhode Island synagogue with a profile of the document’s reclusive owner, Richard Morgenstern. [Forward]

• Former yeshiva kid Brett Ratner led Hanukkah services for all the rich celebrities on St. Barts. [Page Six]

Maybe the most cogent explanation Matisyahu has offered yet for his sudden, recent change from being Hasidic. Hint: still a little confusing.

Unsurprisingly, Gingrich’s comments set off a firestorm. Some thought his observations were refreshingly honest, others argued they were needlessly provocative and extremely counterproductive. But as many commentators have noted, the Palestinians are one of many peoples whose nationhood is “invented.” In the Middle East alone, invented nations include Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, and even Turkey. Like the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza, these, too, were all once part of the Ottoman Empire. None existed before World War I, after which these jerry-built states united various, and often competing, sectarian, ethnic, and tribal identities.

The real question, then, is not whether Palestinian nationalism is “authentic,” but whether this particular national fiction is useful. Gingrich’s proposed alternative identity for the Palestinians—linking these Arabic-speaking, non-Jewish residents of the territories to the rest of the “the Arab people”—is bad for the region, the United States, and Israel.

The problem is that current Palestinian nationalism is not strong enough. If it were, Yasser Arafat and, later, Mahmoud Abbas might have been more inclined to accept the peace deals offered by Israeli prime ministers and American presidents. If Palestinian leadership were more like the early champions of Zionism, who wanted a state for the Jews no matter its size, then the conflict might have been resolved at any point over the last seven decades.

Maybe the Palestinians are still waiting for a better deal. Perhaps, as some argue, the Palestinians really believe that they’ll eventually manage to drive the Jews into the sea. In any case, one of the major problems is that the decision has never been entirely in the hands of the Palestinians. Even before the United Nations partition plan of 1947, there have always been external regional forces trying to prevent a resolution to the Palestinian problem, since prolonging the conflict enhances their prestige and bargaining position.

From the 1930s to the present, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Iran have wrestled over the Palestinian file. Those states’ rationale for interfering in the domestic affairs of a foreign people is based on the presumption of a shared pan-Arab or pan-Islamic sensibility. But even assuming that all Arabs and Muslims really do care an awful lot about the Palestinians—though the status of Palestinian refugees in neighboring Arab states and as the paltry financial aid provided by oil-producing Muslim states strongly suggest otherwise—the notion that U.S. policy should accommodate regional forces because they claim to share a common identity with Palestinians is dangerous.

A region-wide contest to represent the Palestinians not only sets regional powers against each other, but it also channels their often destructive energies against Western interlocutors, primarily the United States. Through 1973, the Saudis fought for their role with their weapon of choice: oil. The Islamic Republic of Iran and Syria’s Assad regime use terrorism, just as Gamal abd el-Nasser did when he ruled Egypt. Therefore, a key goal of American policy-making has been to de-link the Palestinian file from other regional issues and to have the Palestinians represented by one agent: themselves.

Gingrich’s vague formulation cuts directly against the grain of the U.S. regional strategy. If the Palestinians aren’t a nation, which is the Arab nation that American officials are supposed to deal with regarding the Palestinians? Or, more vaguely yet, who is the representative of the “Arab people”? Is Gingrich referring to that entity imagined by the ideologues of Arab nationalism, a single and unified Arab nation?

It should be clear to even the most casual observer of the Middle East that the Arabs are anything but unified. Iraq’s conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, as we now understand, was only the tip of the iceberg in a region where civil war is not an exception but the norm. The Bahraini and Syrian uprisings are effectively sectarian revolutions against the established, and repressive, orders. Even in Egypt, Muslim violence against the Coptic Christian community reveals the true sectarian nature of the region.

The theorists behind 20th-century Arab nationalism recognized the region’s sectarianism and tribalism—which is why they proposed an identity based not on sect or tribe but rather on shared attributes, like language. The inhabitants of the region, from Western North Africa to the Persian Gulf, all spoke some variation of Arabic, thus they were Arabs. Their particularities, whether ethnic (Kurdish, for instance) or sectarian (Christian, Shia, etc.) were insignificant in comparison to their Arab identity. According to ideologues like Sati’ al-Husri, they were Arabs whether they liked it or not.

Accordingly, Arab nationalism has been a coercive and repressive doctrine. Even though it was an idea intended to forestall the civil strife that arises from competing identities, in reality enforcing Arab nationalism has led to bloodshed throughout the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Under Saddam Hussein, Arab nationalism meant Sunni supremacism and the violent suppression of Kurds and Shiites. In Syria, the minority Alawite regime has used the doctrine to keep the Sunnis as well as the Kurds in line. In Lebanon, Hezbollah waves the banner of Arab nationalism in its fight against the Zionist entity, in order to intimidate and rule over other Lebanese sects. Violence and repression are key components of Arab nationalism, because as a totalitarian ideology like Communism and Nazism, it can brook no differences, no particularity.

Respecting that particularity is not only good for the inhabitants of the region but also for the interests of the United States and Israel. The United States has bilateral relations with other nation-states and political institutions like the Palestinian Authority. But this country is ill-equipped to deal with large amorphous bodies like the “Arab people” or, alternatively, the “Muslim world.”

The latter was the intended recipient of Obama’s Cairo speech in June 2009. Unfortunately, it seems not to have occurred to the president that the Muslim-majority Middle East comprises various Muslim sects often at odds, plus non-Muslims as well. By employing this particular fiction, the “Muslim world,” the Cairo speech happened to comport perfectly with the belief of Islamists who hold that non-Muslims and even Shiite Muslims are second-class subjects in the Sunni-majority Middle East, rather than individuals deserving of equal rights.

The “Arab people,” like the “Muslim world,” is an invention—and neither of them should hold much appeal for U.S. policy-makers. Given the nature of our own polity, Americans should take the lead promoting particular identities, even if some of them are formed more recently than others, like that of the Palestinians. This makes them no less worthy of the rights and respect due to other Middle Eastern identities, some of them ancient, like Egypt’s Christian community, or the region’s Jewish minority, which after being ruled by the Ottomans and other regional empires and powers, now enjoys its own state in Israel.

Abbas and Meshal will meet next week to further hash out details—most germane are the holding of joint parliamentary and then presidential elections—and, as they have throughout this iteration of reconciliation and as they did earlier this year when they actually struck a deal, the meeting will be in Cairo, which post-Mubarak is newly hospitable to Hamas and generally to bolstering the Palestinian cause. However, I can’t help but wonder if the most logical meeting-place isn’t Cairo but … Ankara?

Hamas Prime Minsiter Ismail Haniyeh may soon visit Turkey as well as Qatar (to which Hamas, which is based in Damascus, is thought to be considering a move) and several other Arab states, which would be unprecedented. Somebody noted that on Twitter, Turkey’s ministry of foreign affairs referred to “Mahmoud Abbas, President of State of Palestine,” who was on a “working visit” to Turkey yesterday. “State,” eh? And what was he “working” on?

Isn’t this a move that makes sense for all sides? Erdogan’s Turkey continues to bolster its status as the prime regional power broker and stick its finger in Israel’s eye. Hamas and the P.A., together, receive the imprimatur not—or not only—of the shaky Cairo regime, with its divide between popularly elected Islamists and ruling military holdouts, but of an actually robust and actually Muslim democracy, which is also a major U.S. ally. Hamas uses the association as credibility with the European Union and others that it has indeed moderated; the P.A. is shielded from Washington’s wrath by Turkey’s friendship with Washington. How is this not the logical next step?

‘Meshal Agreed to Non-Violence, Pre-’67 Borders’ [JPost]
Hamas Moves Away from Violence in Deal With Palestinian Authority [Guardian]
Palestinian Parties Walk Out of Unity Talks in Cairo [JPost]

• The Egyptian Salafi party—which is even more radical than the Muslim Brotherhood and has received strong support in elections—vowed to respect the Israeli-Egptian peace treaty. [Haaretz]

• The rabidly anti-Israel Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warned that Iran could develop a nuclear weapon in less than a year and pledged the United States “will take whatever steps [are] necessary to stop it.” [Ynet]

• Syria will reluctantly allow Arab League observers in to see that the regional peace deal is being carried out. [LAT]

• A new book is getting attention for rigorously arguing that a major obstacle to Mideast peace is the wide discrepancy between what Palestinian leaders tell their own people and what they sugarcoat and soften up for world consumption. [NYT]

• The Egyptian economy looks to be in poor shape, which isn’t great when you are trying to tamp down unrest. [WP]

We are young, liberal Egyptian activists who have dedicated our lives to bettering our country. But from the moment in January the crowds took over Tahrir Square calling for President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster, we urged observers, particularly Western idealists already hailing the triumph of the new Egypt, to be cautious. We reminded them of Edmund Burke’s truism: Bringing down a tyrant is far, far easier than forming a free government.

It would be difficult to form such a government, we reasoned, in a society where the elite, with near unanimity, had just explained a series shark attacks in the Sinai as part of a Mossad-coordinated ploy to damage tourism. A free government must be based on universal rights, not least the right to freedom of conscience for all its citizens, and yet a Pew poll from December 2010 showed that 84 percent of the sampled Egyptian Muslims endorsed the death penalty as the appropriate punishment for Muslim apostates. For an entire country to change in one month, we argued throughout February, you need nothing short of magic.

Pessimists, naysayers, wet blankets, Mubarak cronies, apologists for the regime—we were called all these names, despite the fact that we’ve spent our adult lives within the opposition. Here was a new generation armed with iPhones and Twitter accounts that would ensure the success of liberal democracy in the region’s largest state, the enthusiasts promised. When Mubarak finally bowed to the pressure of the protesters in the streets, commentators wrote fairy-tale endings to the Egypt story, rushing off to cover the next blossoming flower of the Arab Spring. In the months that followed, no matter how far the Egyptian economy plummeted, how badly the security situation on the border with Israel deteriorated, or how many were killed in criminal, sectarian, or political violence, the narrative was maintained: Though painful, these were the necessary labor pangs of democracy.

Last week, the moment of truth finally came—or so we hope—with the results of the first phase of parliamentary elections. The Islamist parties won big: 40 percent of the electorate voted for the Muslim Brotherhood, and another 25 percent went for the Salafists, hard-line Islamists. Though forced by law to nominate at least one woman on their party lists, the Salafists had the photos of their female candidates replaced by a pictures of flowers in campaign ads, because they believe a woman’s face should not be shown publicly. The closest runner-up was the self-styled “liberal” Egyptian Bloc, which got 15 percent of the vote only because it secured the support of the Coptic minority. (The bloc’s founder is a famous Christian businessman.) The Islamist parties will likely win even bigger in the next two phases of the election, scheduled to take place in the coming few weeks, because these votes will be held almost entirely in the countryside, where political Islam dominates. (The first phase also included urban districts, where non-Islamists perform better.)

***

For us, nothing is more painful than being correct. Our vindication comes at the price of our country’s potential collapse into Islamist totalitarianism, or, even worse, total chaos. We desperately need a combination of sobriety, urgency, and prudence to prevent that from happening.

We must begin by deconstructing the Tahrir mythology. Namely: The Mubarak regime was pure evil; that it was brought down by “liberal” nonviolent activists; and that the Islamists had nothing to do with the revolution and emerged—suddenly—only to hijack it.

The Mubarak regime was no liberal democracy, but it also wasn’t the Gulag. It was an aging authoritarian regime that had opted for a path of economic reform when Ahmed Nazif took over as prime minister in 2004, but miserably failed to cope with the changes economic reform had on the political level. Moderately freer markets meant more media, which meant that while the political repression and corruption of the regime were less heinous than in the past, they were getting more exposure than ever. This, along with Mubarak’s senility and nepotism, created an ever-increasing sense of outrage among Egypt’s growing middle class.

While living standards were improving substantially, Egyptians not only had higher expectations of the government, but they also were falling prey to an obsessed belief that corruption is the root of all evil. Corruption has always been present in the modern Egyptian state, as anyone who has read Tawfik El Hakim’s 1932 novel The Diary of a Prosecutor Among Peasants knows. But with the help of many of the country’s journalists, this obsession was translated into outright hostility to free-market policies. Terms like “businessman” or “privatization” became almost libelous. This marked the rise of a Jacobin discourse on “social justice” (adala Igtima’iya), creating a lot of buzz around labor movements and Occupy Wall Street-type leftist groups. It escaped Western observers that in a country with the lowest price of bread in the world—the result of enormous government subsidies—the loudest chant in Tahrir Square was “Bread, Freedom, Social Justice.”

The early Tahrir Square crowd was comprised of leftists and various other groups that were in it for different reasons. Consider, for example, the fanatic soccer fans known as the Ultras. Known for engaging in fights with security forces after every Egyptian soccer game, the Ultras would not waste a chance to get back at the police in a much less controlled environment than the Stadium. At Tahrir, they had a major role in attacking the police and destroying the police stations. In the revolution’s aftermath, the Ultras led the mob in the rampage of the Israeli Embassy.

Other than the fact that a few dozen human-rights activists were present in Tahrir, there was nothing remotely liberal about the uprising. But that didn’t stop Western journalists from applying the term: Every Egyptian male without a beard was a John Stuart Mill, every female without a veil a Mary Wollstonecraft. Suddenly, Trotskyites were liberals, and hooligans nonviolent protesters.

The idea that there were no Islamists involved in the revolution is pure nonsense. The Muslim Brotherhood officially declared its decision to join the protests on Jan. 23, and its members were instrumental in the success of the revolution in the subsequent days and weeks. What’s more, over the past decade Islamist groups, particularly the Salafists, have been taking advantage of Egypt’s increasing media and Internet freedom to further influence the political discussion. Wondering where the all these Salafists came from? Go to YouTube, type in any possible Arabic term, from financial investment to marriage counseling, and see the sheer number of results that show a Salafist leader preaching, most often in a clip from the religious satellite channel. The message is always the same: A return to a purer form of Islam guarantees salvation in this life and the next.

These two tendencies—the Jacobin and the Islamist—are not mutually exclusive in Egypt. The average Egyptian easily bought into both arguments, believing that the reason for all their ills was the Mubarak regime’s economic program, and that the only solution was a return to the golden age of Islam. Though institutionally immunized against Islamism through a strict system of surveillance, the military completely internalized the popular anti-capitalist discourse, hence its ultimate decision to offer its services to the revolutionaries, abandoning Mubarak in his time of need.

Into that mix comes anti-Semitism. Egyptian anti-Semitism is not simply a form of bigotry: It is the glue binding the otherwise incoherent ideological blend, the common denominator among disparate parties. The Zionist conspiracy theory was not merely a diversion applied by the Mubarak regime, as some suggest. It is a well-established social belief in Egypt, even among self-proclaimed liberals. Consider, for example, Yehya El-Gamal, a leading expert on constitutional law and chairman of the Democratic Front Party who was appointed deputy prime minister after the revolution. Though a staunch opponent of the Islamists, El-Gamal told Al-Ahram, the leading state-owned newspaper, that “Israel and the U.S. are behind flaming the sectarian conflict in Egypt” in the wake of the deadly clashes between Coptic demonstrators and military forces last October.

***

These facts, though hard to swallow, were clear well before the revolution. This is why, when we joined the Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth in 2009, we decided to focus our energy on a long-term program to build a genuine liberal movement from scratch. We realized early on that activism without serious, concrete ideas capable of winning the hearts and minds of our fellow Egyptians would be meaningless. Thus, we designed a platform of legal, economic, and social programs tackling all aspects of life in Egypt, from taxes to anti-Semitism. Our plan comprises research, lobbying, campaigning, and an effort to translate the great books of Western classical liberalism into Arabic. If Egypt was going to have any hope of becoming a liberal democracy, we had to face—and battle—the destructive totalitarian ideals that have taken hold of Egyptian society.

To begin a serious discussion on what can be done in our country, Egyptians must acknowledge that the Tahrir uprising was no liberal revolution. Western observers must realize that this is not a stark morality play, but political decision-making between alternatives that are all bad. As the government borders on bankruptcy and the security situation deteriorates (the natural-gas pipe line to Israel and Jordan was bombed nine times since February), the first priority should be defending the very existence of the Egyptian state, now solely represented by the military. This is certainly an awkward position for advocates of limited government, as we are. But if the military falls, nothing will stand between the Egyptians and absolute anarchy.

Western policy-makers and Egyptians who care about the country’s future should not push too hard for a total face-off between the military and the Islamists, which may develop into a civil war, nor should they seek to weaken the military to the extent that it is totally subdued by the Islamists. Finally, as the Islamists try to transform the legal and economic infrastructure of the country to their benefit, true liberals must be prepared to tackle them on every move, with detailed and convincing programs, not merely rhetorical speeches and empty polemics on talk shows. Islamism offers a coherent worldview; if liberalism cannot rise up to the same level, it will always be doomed to fail.

The gravest danger is for us to fall prey to complacency and believe that an Islamist government will either moderate or fail to deliver, and that the Egyptians will vote for someone else in the next elections. The very possibility of next elections is dependent on our capacity to avoid the total anarchy scenario. And the Islamists are not going to moderate. No matter how pragmatic the Muslim Brotherhood is, they will face a constant challenge by Salafists from the right to adhere a strict standard of religious purity. If the Islamists, now hugely popular, do fail to deliver, genuine liberals must be at the ready to offer voters a clear alternative. The Mubarak regime was remarkably successful in steering the economy in its latter years, but its inability to justify its existence politically led to its demise. There is no reason why the exact opposite—a failing economy but successful politics—cannot come to the service of the Islamists.

• After a first round of elections that handed big victories to Islamists, the Egyptian military is insisting that it will continue to handle constitutional and other big questions for some time. [NYT]

• Nicholas Kristof finds that support for and the agenda of the most popular Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, is driven mainly by the desire for basic services. [NYT]

• David Ignatius reports on the growing and actually useful alliance between the United States and Turkey, predicated above all on a wide array of mutual interests. [WP]

• The comments of Howard Gutman, the ambassador to Belgium, have been like manna for Republicans looking to paint the administration as anti-Israel. It’s almost as though they should have fired him by now. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Hamas set a condition on participation in a unity government: elections in East Jerusalem, which it is allowed to contest. The demand is in part intended to force Israel to deny the request and thereby be seen as torpedoing reconciliation. Nicely done. [Haaretz]

It seems clear that the Brotherhood ran on, and was elected on, a platform that had more to do with providing basic governmental functions. “The reality is that most Egyptians want guarantees that basic needs will be met,” reports Yasmine El Rashidi from Cairo.

They want to put their children through school, they want decent jobs, they want food each day, and they want affordable and reliable health care. The Muslim Brotherhood are, in many ways, the only organized, and as well the largest, faction who in the past have offered people what they seek; for years they have been offering social services to their communities where the government has failed, and in recent months, they are the only ones who have spoken the language of the street.

And the last thing the Brotherhood wants to discuss is imposing Sharia: “We represent a moderate and fair party,” one of the group’s leaders, Essam El-Erian, said immediately after last weekend’s big win was announced.

In addition to knowing that it was elected primarily on the basis of its credibility as a provider, the Brotherhood does not want ideology too much in the picture because it knows the parties to its right—which together received something like a quarter of the vote—very much do want to talk Islam and Sharia in a way that might sap support from and discredit the Brotherhood. The Salafis, largely Saudi-funded, were not expected to do quite so well, and they are going to demand changes of the religious kind that 80 years under secular dictators has taught the Brotherhood are likely to result in further repression. One analyst has analogized their success to that of the Tea Party: “Down the road, the Salafi competition could … drag the rest of the political spectrum rightwards.” Gulp. And also gulp-worthy is the meager 15 percent that the liberal party got. The liberal youth who drove the initial Tahrir Square revolution, according to onetime presidential candidate Mohammed ElBaradei, were “decimated” in the elections.

The elections are far from over. This round will determine about one third of the composition of the new parliament; the remaining two rounds are scheduled to end in January. And the presidential election is slated for June. The two wild cards here would be the military, still very much in charge and apparently very much resistant to giving up too much power, and … the economy? Noting the perfect storm—sluggish tourism, old businessmen caught up in Mubarak-era corruption scandals, new leaders unsure of how to cultivate good business—columnist Gideon Rachman warns, “The real danger is more subtle. It is that an economic crisis and an unstable international environment will undermine a new government’s initial moderation—and allow more radical elements within the Islamist movement to come to the fore.” That’s worth another gulp.

Islamist Bloc Wins 60% of Votes in Egypt Elections [Haaretz]
Egypt’s Vote Puts Emphasis on Split Over Religious Rule [NYT]
Choosing Egypt’s Future [NYRB]
Egypt Brotherhood Says Won’t Impose Islamic Values [Ynet]
Western Dreams and Egypt’s Reality [FT]

Here is some of what Grapel told us (a few dozen gathered in the fourth-floor library, including his mother, Irene Breslaw, who plays viola in the New York Philharmonic) about his capture and imprisonment. Contrary to Egyptian media, which reported he had been staying at a four-star hotel, on June 12 he was taken from his $9/night open-door hostel near Tahrir Square—“worse than my jail cell”—by plainclothes security officers who asked him his nationality and told him the handcuffs, the black van, and the blindfold were standard (given that he spent his time taking testimony from Darfur refugees, he suspected otherwise, and was terrified). The first charge mentioned was “participation in the January 25 revolution,” which he initially felt happy of pleading guilty to, thinking this a good thing, until it was explained to him that it was decidedly a bad thing, the first of much evidence that “the claims of the accomplishments of the revolution are non-existent.” When he told them he was an Emory Law student, they asked, “What’s Emory?” He began to cite the famous Emory faculty member Salman Rushdie, but then thought better of it; he instead mentioned the law school dean, only to remember that he is Baha’i and so that that, too, probably shouldn’t come up.

The key, according to Grapel, was to avoid an indictment: once one was handed down, Egypt’s desire to maintain the illusion of judicial independence (as well as the military’s presumed insistence that Grapel be convicted of any alleged crimes) would likely have doomed him. Duly, the U.S. and Israel focused on avoiding one, instead hoping either that they could free him before six months—the length of time during which you may be held sans indictment in Egypt—was up or that, after six months, the political situation would be such that the authorities could free him without being concerned about the popular response.

Of course, the political situation did not cooperate, as the other panelist, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven A. Cook, explained. In August and September, tensions between Egypt and Israel were heightened as perhaps never before: the Sinai pipeline continued to be sabotaged; six Egyptian policemen were killed in a crossborder raid after Israel retaliated for terrorist attacks that originated in Gaza; and the Israeli embassy was stormed. Without knowing these specifics, Grapel said he sensed he was in the greatest danger in August and September—and he was right.

By October, with things calmed down and the Shalit deal going through, the Egyptians could make a deal. Certainly they did not believe they had a Mossad operative: Egyptian-Israeli intelligence cooperation has continued to be strong, according to Cook, so they would have known; and anyway, as the prosecutor told Grapel, “if you’re a spy, you’re the worst spy in the world.” So while Grapel was accused of spying, and of storming the embassy, and of sabotaging the pipeline, and of seducing Egyptian women (“and when you get these girls, do you convince them to drink blood for Passover?” he was apparently asked), no indictment ever came down, making the prisoner swap relatively easy.

Grapel was not physically abused, though it sounded as though solitary confinement and being mostly denied access to books was tortuous enough (he actually requested law school casebooks, he said, on the theory that they were limiting his number of books so he may as well get really long ones). He was interrogated for his first and final two weeks, but otherwise had little contacts with anyone, apart from his biweekly meetings with the U.S. consul. He ate well, and indeed one of the few things that prompted threats from the Egyptians of torture was the prospect of him going on a hunger strike. He can never go back to Egypt or, really, anywhere in the Arab world (he wants to spend time in Latin America; apparently, Prime Minister Netanyahu told him to avoid Cuba and Cook urged, “There’s lots of Hezbollah in South America—what about northern Europe? Denmark?”).

Introducing Grapel, Buchsbaum noted that Grapel’s summer activity of working for a non-governmental organization in Cairo “gave new meaning to the word ‘internship.’” It was so-not-funny-it-was-funny line, but it hinted at the $64,000 question: you’re a half-Israeli Jew; you served in the IDF; you want to work in civil society—why go to Cairo, where you know you’ll be a target? This is the common line against Grapel in Israel, and it apparently led some right-wing politicians to try to block the swap.

Grapel rejected charges of naïveté—he understood the risks going in, he said: “I was well aware I was a target.” Foolhardy idealism, perhaps? I’ll mark that against him, but that derives as much out of my admiration for him, and my wish that I had a bit more of his admittedly somewhat reckless abandon. “I was helping refugees flee genocide in Darfur,” he said, “and the people who rescued my grandfather from genocide were called heroes.” What a young-person thing to say! Grapel is 28—“I had my birthday in prison.” Shalit is 25. And, as Buchsbaum reminded us all at the beginning of the night, the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi was 26 when he lit himself on fire.

• Particularly in the wake of the storming of the British embassy Tuesday, the European Union is clamoring for fresh sanctions against Iran. Meanwhile, Iran simply released the 11 “students” detained for doing so. [WSJ/AP/WP]

• German prosecutors allege an Iranian plot to attack U.S. bases there. [Haaretz/Forward]

• Turkey is upping sanctions against Syria, and the conflict looks like it’s spilling over into Lebanon. [NYT/NYT]

• Under Quartet guidelines, President Abbas offered a proposal for going forward with peace talks. No reply from Prime Minister Netanyahu. [Haaretz]

• At a Jewish Manhattan fundraiser, President Obama told donors that Israel was the country’s most important ally. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• Iranian students (“students”?) have stormed the British embassy in Tehran. [WP]

• This comes following an official downgrading of ties with Britain, which came after further sanctions aimed at Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. [NYT]

• In Egypt, the news is that the first day of elections went down relatively smoothly and peacefully. [NYT]

• Now that he has held out a month and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is no longer threatening to break up the coalition over it, Prime Minister Netanyahu will likely unfreeze the $100 million in Palestinian Authority tax revenue. [Haaretz]

• Stalin’s daughter died at 85 in Wisconsin (!). Her first two loves were Jewish men; in neither case did her father approve. [NYT]

“Israel and Egypt have an interest to preserve peace and stability,” said Prime Minister Netanyahu in response. He added that “nothing would be better for prosperity, for security, for peace,” than for Egypt to be democratic. Which is of course dubious! A democratic Egypt is very likely an Egypt run by the Brotherhood—indeed, the unrest of recent days has if anything strengthened the hand of the country’s oldest and most organized political party. Already, the Brotherhood has been able to throw its newfound weight around: through Egypt and Jordan (whose monarch is scared of his own revolt), it has blocked the demolition of a bridge in the Old City of Jerusalem. The point isn’t whether you agree that the bridge should not be removed (some allege the project is intended to ease settlers’ access to the Temple Mount). It’s that already popular Islamist movements in the Arab world have been able to affect Israeli policy.

Regionally, this has wider implications. The New York Times’ indefatigable Anthony Shadid published an essay yesterday taking stock of the region and noting that the Islamist complication, among others, means that the Arab Spring, which at various times over the past year has seemed so neatly tied up, is going to go through several more messy stages yet. Elections held Friday in Morocco saw the Islamist Justice and Development (yes, that is also the name of Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s party) win the plurality of parliamentary seats. In Egypt, there are a number of ways this could all play out. The military council offered to immediately form a new government with one ex-prime minister; protesters rejected this and instead proposed a National Salvation Government to be helmed by Mohammed ElBaradei, the once and perhaps future presidential candidate.

Notably, the National Salvation suggestion was put forth by a coalition of Islamist and secular protesters, a sign that Egypt could at the least be moving toward a Turkey-style model of official but comparatively moderate and tolerant Islamism. (Still not great for Israel, if Turkey is any indication, but given that the alternative is something closer to the government of Gaza … .) Another promising notion is the truism that the surest way for an ideological movement to lose support is for it to gain power and be summarily introduced to the compromises that power necessitates. So far, Egypt’s Brotherhood has maintained a deliberate ambiguity about what exactly their vision of politically realized Islamism is—they know the second they are forced to articulate it, many of their supporters will disagree. Which is a good reminder of why democracy is indeed the worst form of government except for all the others.

Egypt’s Turmoil Shadows First Post-Mubarak Vote [NYT]
Analysis: Islamists Strong Ahead of Egypt Poll [Reuters/JPost]
Egypt’s Activists Unite Against Military [WSJ]
Post-Uprising, a New Battle [NYT]
Netanyahu Delays Demolition of Jerusalem Bridge Over Egypt, Jordan Warning [Haaretz]
Political Islam at a Crossroads [LAT]

• At last night’s debate, Republican candidates argued over Iran and Syria. The most important moment at the national security-focused event, however, concerned illegal immigration—illustrating, perhaps, that foreign affairs will play a minimal role in the campaign. [NYT]

• Hamas may never have had it so good as right now. [NYT]

• An Israeli minister and retired general warned that the Egyptian unrest will likely empower elements that oppose the peace with Israel. [WP/AP]

• Speaking of, Egypt’s leaders’ concessions appeared not to alleviate the Tahrir crowds’ dissatisfaction. [NYT]

• Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Israel to unfreeze the $100 million or so in tax revenue that it is withholding from the Palestinian Authority due to its new UNESCO membership. [AP/WP]

• A J Street founder and board member allegedly met with Hamas officials while reporting on smuggling operations in Gaza. [Washington Jewish Week]

• In 1980, Richard Brody ran into Woody Allen at Mott Street restaurant Sam Wo’s. Absurdity ensued. [New Yorker]

• In other Allen-family news, 23-year-old Ronan Farrow—child of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow—won a Rhodes Scholarship to study international development at Oxford. Another winner was Princeton senior Miriam Rosenbaum, who will study bioethics at Oxford. [Jewish Journal]

• The Times takes a bike tour through Tel Aviv. [NYT]

• Marvin Hamlisch sold his Park Avenue apartment and moved out of New York City. [Observer]

For months, the transitional military leadership has hewed awfully close to the style and even personnel of the ancien régime—some of the same folks have stuck around (de facto leader Field Marshal Tantawi has been a top-ranked military officer for a very long time, if you catch my drift). It has at times raised questions about how operative the word “transitional” is. And now the Obama administration, which for most of the year has turned a blind eye to these problems, is taking a harder line with Egypt’s government, insisting that it take democracy, including the parliamentary elections later this month, seriously. “If, over time, the most powerful political force in Egypt remains a roomful of unelected officials,” Secretary of State Clinton declared last week, “they will have planted the seeds for future unrest, and Egyptians will have missed a historic opportunity.” As the New York Times notes, the administration’s rhetoric is intended at least as much to mollify the Egyptian people as it is to sway Egypt’s leaders.

The bitter irony is that the will of the Egyptian people is frequently at odds with U.S. interests, particularly when it comes to the U.S. desire to see the Egyptian-Israeli peace maintained and generally that Egypt be kept in its sphere of influence. The tolerance of violent protests at the Israeli Embassy in Cairo; the detention of Israeli-American Ilan Grapel on dubious espionage charges; and the cultivating of closer ties with Hamas and Iran are all things Egypt’s leaders have done—likely in large part with a nod to popular will—that have rubbed the U.S. the wrong way.

To that list, you may add the country’s recent efforts to protect Syria’s Assad regime from what is becoming an extraordinarily broad movement to isolate it. European countries are pushing a U.N. General Assembly resolution to strongly condemn human rights abuses, France has recalled its ambassador, and even the Arab League—whose imprimatur was crucial to the NATO intervention in Libya earlier this year—has suspended Syria and threatened economic sanctions. But Egypt—unlike Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Sunni-ruled nations with which it usually aligns—is resisting the U.N. move and, as Foreign Policy’s Colum Lynch reports, seems to be acting as something like Bashar Assad’s surrogate.

Then again, earlier this week, Egyptian security arrested the Islamists it said were responsible for the deadly attack in southern Israel in August. If Egypt’s leaders’ first principle is self-preservation, and if you buy the line that the Egyptian-Israeli peace exists not just because of U.S. bribery but because of actual, deep-seated, structural common interests, then you actually can feel a little confident. It’s a final, less bitter irony.

U.S. Hones Warnings to Egypt as Military Stalls Transition [NYT]
Arab League Gives Syria 3 Days to End ‘Bloody Repression’ [LAT]
Is Egypt Carrying Water for the Syrians Again? [FP Turtle Bay]

• President Ahmadinejad apparently used the word “iota” when describing the distance his country wouldn’t retreat from its current path. [AP/WP]

• Like Israel, the United States isn’t saying much. [NYT]

• The Palestinian Authority’s foreign minister admitted that they won’t get the nine votes they need in the Security Council for full U.N. membership. [AP/WP]

• David Ignatius reports from Cairo, where the Coptic Christian community worries for its future and he worries for all minorities in the post-Arab Spring region. [WP]

• Some morning vlogging from senior writer Allison Hoffman?

Take a look at the map. In last week’s Tunisian elections, the Islamist al-Nahda Party, once outlawed, won 90 out of 217 seats. As goes Tunisia, so goes the Arab Spring. In Libya, several Islamist figures, some of them reportedly aligned with al-Qaida, seem likely to fill the vacuum left by Muammar Qaddafi’s death. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, the region’s oldest Islamist movement, is prepared to compete for 50 percent of the country’s parliamentary seats in elections scheduled for later this month. The exact strength of the Islamist element in the ongoing Syrian uprising remains to be seen, but the contours of this new crescent are already becoming clear.

An Islamist alliance drawn from the region’s Sunni majority spells a kind of long-term trouble for U.S. and Israeli interests that may be equally or even more dangerous than a Shia crescent—even if Iran gets a nuclear bomb. After all, the Shia crescent is sectarian by definition, which means that its transnational character actually enfeebles it. As most analysts recognize, if the clerical regime in Tehran comes tumbling down then all its regional assets will also be weakened, if not destroyed.

That’s not true of a Muslim Brotherhood crescent, where the relative strength or weakness of Tunisian Islamists, for instance, has little bearing on the political power of Egypt’s Islamist movement. As University of Virginia professor Ahmed al-Rahim explains in a forthcoming issue of The Historical Review, “the Muslim Brotherhoods—from Morocco to Egypt to Iraq—have operated in practice as national Islamist organizations.” That is to say, the Muslim Brotherhood crescent is powerful because it both draws on the political aspirations of the regional Sunni majority and is deeply rooted in national sympathies.

Parts of the West perceive this dangerous situation with a good deal of sangfroid. France, for instance, though it backed Tunisia’s former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali when the uprising against him first began last January, now welcomes the Islamist triumph in its former colony. The election results are “tremendously good news,” said French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé. “After decades of disputable and disputed elections,” Juppé continued, “the ballot went ahead under excellent conditions: no notable incidents, and very high turnout by Tunisian voters.” So long as hundreds of thousands of Tunisian refugees don’t wash up on French shores, Paris would settle for Osama Bin Laden’s ghost as the country’s ruler.

Washington’s position is a bit more complex. Even before the Arab Spring, the Obama Administration correctly believed that the Islamist movement was fast becoming one of the major powers in the region. The president’s advisers, including counterterrorism czar John Brennan, can be blamed for their enthusiasm in reaching out to outfits like Hezbollah, whose political program and intentions they misunderstood. But it was actually the Bush White House that set the precedent for reaching out to Islamists.

In order to keep the peace in Iraq, the Bush Administration was compelled to make peace with—and buy off—local Sunni Islamists that shared the U.S. interest in defeating al-Qaida in Mesopotamia. Moreover, the Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is from the Dawa party, a Shia Islamist organization co-founded by Hussein Fadlallah, the late spiritual leader of Hezbollah. Perhaps most significantly, despite the warnings of our Israeli and Palestinian allies, the Bush White House pushed for the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2005 that brought Hamas to power.

All the Obama Administration did was read the writing on the wall: Given a choice in free and fair elections, Arab electorates will invariably put Islamists in power. It is for this reason that the present White House has privileged its relationship with Turkey, and to a lesser extent Qatar, while it has downplayed its alliance with Israel. If the Islamists are riding a wave, the administration’s logic goes, then it is useful to have an Islamist as a go-between, like Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He is reportedly the world leader with whom Obama speaks most often after British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Some argue that in spite of its anti-Israel and anti-Western rhetoric, Erdogan’s Freedom and Justice Party really is a model moderate Islamist organization. After all, there’s no ban on alcohol in Istanbul bars, and Turkish women aren’t compelled to wear the headscarf. Unfortunately, these domestic issues have virtually no bearing on vital U.S. interests. What should matter to U.S. policymakers is that Erdogan is the architect of an adventurist foreign policy and has promised to send warships to protect future aid flotillas. Erdogan, who uses anti-Israel rhetoric to stir the passions of the Arab masses, is no moderate, but a demagogue who has patterned his career after the modern Middle East’s most famous radical, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Indeed, “moderate” is a word that gets thrown around recklessly when it comes to the Islamist groups that comprise this new Muslim Brotherhood crescent. Consider the leader of al-Nahda, Rashid Ghannoushi, who, after many years of exile, may well be Tunisia’s next prime minister. He is routinely described as a moderate, even though he has praised the mothers of suicide bombers and believes that the “region will get rid of the germ of Israel.”

Perhaps to better understand the term “moderate” we might consider Islamist parties in the context of how they exercise power in their local environments. Where Osama Bin Laden spoke of a revived caliphate that would unite the umma, Islamists like Ghannoushi, Erdogan, and the Muslim Brotherhood are focused on their own national projects. Extremist Islamist outfits like Bin Laden’s original al-Qaida live in caves and rely on the support of Middle Eastern governments in order to accomplish operations like blowing up planes. So-called moderate Islamist parties, on the other hand, win electoral contests that leave them in charge of Middle Eastern governments, security services, and militaries with artillery, tanks, air forces, and navies.

Despite their name, the moderates are more dangerous than the extremists by a matter of magnitude. It’s no wonder the Obama Administration seeks to appease them by keeping Israel at arm’s length.

• Republican opposition to a motion that would prevent a London-based company with ties to Iran from having a stake in an American mining company raises questions about the Republican position on sanctions against Iran. [Washington Jewish Week]

• Poland has reopened investigations, abandoned while the country was under Communist rule, into crimes committed at Auschwitz during World War II. [AP]

• An investigation by the pro-choice organization NARAL into “crisis pregnancy centers”—which are not medical facilities—reveals, among other things, that a Jewish woman who visited five different centers was encouraged by volunteers at each center to convert to Christianity. [Think Progress]

• Oprah visited Crown Heights, Borough Park, and Brooklyn Heights for her new show. Her visit to Brooklyn Heights included a tour of a mikvah. [Chabad]

• Photos (with recipes!) of the most intricate bite-size reproductions of Jewish deli food you’ve ever seen, ever. Borscht bite, anyone? [The Polymath Chronicles]

Yesterday Israel approved a deal, seemingly hastened by the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap, which will free Grapel in exchange for 25 Egyptian prisoners. And if all goes according to plan, Grapel will be released Thursday. Some former U.S. intelligence officials believe Grapel may really have been an Israeli spy, but Israeli soldiers, never mind the Jewish state’s clandestine agents, are seldom returned alive. The Egyptians know he’s not a spy, but he’s a valuable card anyway, which is why they captured him. It is logic and behavior befitting a terrorist organization.

If Hamas and Hezbollah can get the Zionist entity to release their associates, the thinking goes, why can’t Egypt’s interim ruling body, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, do the same for Egyptian prisoners? The problem in the Middle East, then, isn’t that the Islamists are on the verge of taking over and thereby transforming Arab societies. The problem is that these societies are already governed by the passions that make the Islamists so popular.

Longtime U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak, the former president of Egypt, would not have dreamed of taking an American citizen hostage. It’s true that things have changed in Egypt, but let’s not overstate the case: Grapel’s arrest is not a sign that the Supreme Council of Armed Forces is joining hands with Iranian-backed terror organizations. The purpose of the exchange, from Cairo’s perspective, is to placate the mobs that have already laid siege to the Israeli embassy, burned Coptic churches, and may in time cause even worse problems for the ruling military council. The way to calm the situation, they believe, is to show that Egypt’s problems are manufactured by the West, and that Cairo’s ever-competent rulers managed to unearth a plot before the foreigners could once again unleash their mayhem.

Why Cairo chose Grapel as its test case seems to be merely a matter of convenience. Yes, the Queens native served in the Israeli Defense Forces in the 2006 war, where he was injured fighting Hezbollah. Yet the fact that Grapel, a law student at Emory University in Atlanta, had taken a job in Cairo in May with St. Andrew’s Refugee Services, a Christian organization that mostly provides legal aid for Sudanese refugees, is perhaps what first attracted the attention of Egyptian authorities. African refugees—Christians and Muslims—are a sensitive issue for the Egyptians, not least because their mistreatment in Egypt has caused many of them to flee to friendlier vistas across the border in Israel.

While some believe the Shalit deal set the precedent for the Grapel exchange, it’s a mistake to see the two cases in the same light. For Israel, the point of freeing a thousand prisoners in exchange for one is not merely a moral calculation, but also a form of strategic communication intended to dishearten Israel’s foes. The message it sends is not only that Israel values life above all, but that the Jewish state can afford to put its enemies back on the street because in the end, no matter how numerous, those enemies have no chance of winning.

The Grapel deal is something else—straight-up extortion with domestic political benefits. For Egypt, getting prisoners released for Grapel is more like Libya winning intelligence agent Abdelbasset al-Megrahi’s freedom from the Scottish government as part of an oil deal in 2009, or Iran’s kidnapping three American hikers and accusing them of espionage two years ago. Here the point is to face down the West publicly, and generate popular support at home. The message is: Western actors are trying to sabotage the people of the Middle East, but the ruling authorities are proud heroes of resistance who have exposed the designs of the imperialist or Zionist oppressors and have made them publicly pay for their crimes.

The Egyptian army probably didn’t want to get into this game of political extortion, but with Mubarak’s downfall it became necessary to win the affections of a very demanding audience: Egypt’s middle-class urban youth, a constituency to whom Mubarak never paid much attention, which is precisely what led to his demise. The Obama Administration believed that Mubarak’s exit would have little effect on an Egyptian political system still dominated by an army dependent on $1.3 billion in American military aid each year, but the problem should now be as obvious to the White House as it was to the Egyptian military from the outset. As angry as the army was at Mubarak for trying to install his son in the presidential palace, it also understood it was dangerous to give the mob a de facto veto that would allow it to shape the Egyptian political system however it saw fit.

That vision, unfortunately, is very popular in the Muslim-majority Middle East. It’s generally anti-Israeli and anti-American, to be sure, but Israel and the United States are details in a larger architecture of resentment of the West.

Hatred of the West, and of its local proxies, has been a central part of political Islam’s program from the outset. The Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1928 in the midst of Great Britain’s 72-year-old occupation of Egypt. But long before London took an active role in Egyptian politics, 18th- and 19th-century Muslim intellectuals and activists counseled the masses to be suspicious of the West. Take their science and technology, they advised, but forgo the West’s secular values, which undermine you and your faith.

Today, those who advocate for engagement with Islamists argue that groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Nahda Party have matured and are now willing to play by the rules and act like democrats. The Islamists may not like the West, but they have no choice but to uphold agreements and partake in the international system. On the other side of the debate, skeptics fear that the Islamists are talking out of both sides of their mouth, and once in office they’ll never willingly forsake power. But both of these arguments miss the point.

Yes, Islamism is already turning out to be the most powerful political current across the region. But the attraction of Islamism is not simply that it appeals to conservative and traditional Muslim societies, but that it draws freely on the sources of resentment that have been part of the political language of the region for more than two centuries. It was not Egypt’s Islamists who led the charge against the Israeli embassy in September, but young and nominally secular Egyptians. And it is that mob, potentially in the many millions, with whom Egypt’s ruling body was currying favor when it arrested Grapel.

• The death of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi energized the Syrian people to demand that President Assad be next to go. [WSJ]

• Meanwhile, U.S. ambassador Robert Ford, who has received wide plaudits for his bravery and effectiveness, was quietly pulled out of Syria due to “credible threats” to his personal safety. [JPost]

• Natural gas is flowing from Egypt to Israel once again, and will continue to do so until the Sinai pipeline is inevitably sabotaged for the seventh time this year. [JPost]

• The U.N. gambit could lead to automatic U.S. defunding of every organization the Palestinian Authority joins, starting with UNESCO. [NYT]

• Former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon—still alive—responds to some stimulus through his six-year-long coma, according to his son. [NYT]

And quite a plan: Haaretz reports there will be 11 phases, a series of preordained moves in which the several sides (the Israelis, Hamas, the Egyptians) take various steps to reassure the others that they will follow through on their ends of a bargain that will ultimately see over 1,000 prisoners go free. For example, Israel releases a few dozen female prisoners; then Shalit is transferred, via the Rafah crossing, from Gaza to Egypt, only at which point will Israel begin releasing some of its male prisoners. (Upon transfer from Egypt to Israel, Shalit “will be given his old cell phone in order to telephone his mother.”) Prime Minister Netanyahu is playing an extensive, symbolic role in the latter part of the proceedings. After all, this was his decision, and his to own—for better and for worse. He was reportedly difficult to persuade throughout, right back to when chief negotiator (and former Mossad official) David Meidan first made informal contacts with Hamas.

It was not hard to see why Netanyahu, or any Israeli, might hesitate to make this deal, and the disclosure of the names of nearly 500—almost half—of the Palestinian prisoners whom Israel will release makes it even less hard. “These are not just prisoners with ‘blood on their hands,’” Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff (who wrote about the Shalit situation for Tablet Magazine) report. “Rather, the list includes some of the founders of the Hamas military wing, such as Zaher Jabarin and Yihya Sanawar, and prisoners involved in some of the most ignoble terror attacks in Israel, including the 1989 attack on bus 405 and the 1994 abduction of Israel Defense Forces soldier Nachshon Wachsman.” And the people behind the 2001 Tel Aviv night club attack. And the 2001 bombing of the Jerusalem Sbarro. And the Passover massacre at Netanya in 2002 (for me, the always-remember-where-I-was moment of the Second Intifada). More names, and the crimes they committed, are listed here.

It is therefore unsurprising that the deal has not been greeted with unanimous approval. Three cabinet members—Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the Yisrael Beiteinu head; Uzi Landau, the infrastructure minister, also of YB; and Moshe Ya’alon, of Netanyahu’s own Likud—voted against the deal outright. Interior Minister Eli Yishai, head of Shas, suggested freeing certain Jewish terrorists as part of the deal for the sake of “balances.” And speaking of: one entrepreneurial soul, an Israeli Jew who claimed he was related to terrorist victims, vandalized Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s grave in protest (click for ugly, important picture). Victims’ families have the opportunity to petition the High Court to overturn releases, but the court is expected to stare the government’s decisis on this one. In a touching article, the Times’ Ethan Bronner reports on two families of victims of prisoners who will be released—one of which opposes the deal, the other of which supports it. Two Jews, two opinions. (A new poll suggests that 79 percent of Israelis support the exchange.)

Is it a gift to terrorists? Plainly. Is it massively, just gargantuan-like, lopsided? Inarguably. The only consolation to be taken is that some of the terrorists Hamas has wanted these past five-plus years were not included (and nor is Marwan Barghouti, although he is a special case: it is far too complicated to try to parse whether Israel should truly wish him jailed, or Hamas truly wish him freed). It’s not even clear that Hamas will honor elements of the deal barring the return to the territories of some prisoners, who are being deported upon their releases. Is it going to lead to further kidnappings of Israeli soldiers in exchange for further prisoners? Well, why wouldn’t it? This is what happens when you literally negotiate with terrorists.

Meanwhile, is Israel getting much in return besides Shalit? Freeing Israeli-American Ilan Grapel will require more Israeli prisoners released. Turkey claims it aided the mediation, but Egypt disputes it, and certainly the deal is not suddenly going to repair Israeli-Turkish relations. Aaron David Miller is quite correct when he notes that this will have no effect on the peace process—in fact, in empowering Hamas and marginalizing the Palestinian Authority, it’s pretty sure to hurt it (further).

If the deal seems totally bewildering to non-Israeli readers, well, maybe it’s simply bewildering. Or maybe we don’t understand what it means to live in a society where one soldier can be everyone’s son, and everyone’s son can provide a reason for staying together, and engineering a major strategic defeat is worth it so that none of your citizens can claim they were never alive at a time that Gilad Shalit was a free man.

Shalit Swap: The Step-by-Step Guide [Haaretz]
Behind the Scenes of the Shalit Deal [Ynet]
Israel Releases Names of 477 Prisoners to be Freed in Trade [NYT]
In Shalit Deal, Israel Crossed Its Own Red Lines [Haaretz]
A Yearning for Solidarity Tangles Public Life [NYT]
Related: News of a Kidnapping [Tablet Magazine]
Everyone’s Son [Tablet Magazine]

There is something fishy going on here. And it involves an American citizen.

Grapel has been detained for nearly four months. Because he entered Egypt with his American passport (he has dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship; his father is Israeli), he is under U.S. jurisdiction and is the United States’ responsibility. Duly, he was able to meet with U.S. diplomats. And only last week, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta (previously head of the Mossad’s U.S. counterpart, the CIA) visited Cairo in part for the express purpose of seeking Grapel’s freedom.

Here is where it gets interesting. Panetta failed, but he was in Cairo—we now know—either at the same time or mere days before Israeli negotiator David Meidan—a former Mossad senior officer (who therefore must have worked with Panetta before) who was Israel’s Shalit pointman—and Hamas officials were also in Cairo. They were negotiating not with the usual German mediation but with Egyptian mediation. Flash forward to yesterday morning, when reports appeared that Egypt was now raising the stakes vis-à-vis Grapel: extending his prison stay yet again and still without an indictment, accusing him of throwing fire bombs at Egypt’s Interior Ministry building, and—wait for it—demanding the release of 78 Egyptian prisoners in Israeli jails in exchange for his freedom. That was yesterday morning; by yesterday evening, Grapel was quietly freed under the backdrop of the Shalit deal.

This is all speculation, but doesn’t it seem possible that Grapel was held by Hamas and Egypt as a further bargaining chip, one who, all importantly, caught the attention not only of the Israelis but of the Americans? Actually, we almost know for a fact that Grapel was part of the bargaining, because otherwise there would be little reason to let Grapel go as part of the Shalit deal (the other explanation could be that Egypt wanted to bury the news of the release to save themselves the embarrassment, but that is a pretty contrived explanation). This would also explain the sudden burst of activity on the Grapel front yesterday morning, followed by the reversal yesterday evening: it could have been the Egyptians upping their leverage on the Americans so that the Americans would push the Israelis to strike a deal.

If Panetta were involved in the negotiating, then who else got what? The United States would like to see Hamas turn away from its alliance with Iran, which has never been less convenient seeing as it exists through Syria, where Hamas is headquartered, and Syria may well fundamentally change in the coming months. The United States might also be more eager than usual to see Hamas score this victory over its main rival, the Palestinian Authority (securing the release of one thousand Palestinians), given the recent goings-on at the United Nations.

If Grapel were a part of the deal, it would also suggest that Hamas got a far better deal than they would have gotten without Grapel, because they were able to exert additional bargaining power by appealing to the Americans. This seems plausible, too. We do know that previous negotiations put the number of prisoners exchanged in the 250-350 range, not the over 1,000 that will be released under this deal; on the other hand, in the earlier talks, many prominent figures who won’t be released, such as Marwan Barghouti, were on the table. Getting a look at the prisoners being released may tell us more. Are any of them based in Egypt rather than the Palestinian territories? Do any of them pledge allegiance more to the Brotherhood?

This entire episode occured, of course, in the context of the close ties Hamas has enjoyed with the post-Mubarak Egyptian government, which earlier this year helped negotiate the (failed) Hamas-Fatah reconciliation and which has been sympathetic to Hamas’ cousin organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. Did negotiations fail for almost five years and then succeed after only a few months not because of Shalit but because of Grapel? (Grapel was arrested about two weeks before the fifth anniversary of Shalit’s kidnapping.) Was Egypt less a mediator then merely a part of Hamas’ side?

Finally, this line of inquiry leads to a yet more tantalizing (if less consequential) one. Namely: is Grapel a spy? He has always seemed less Mossad and more particularly dumb Hitchcock protagonist, an idealistic bro who put photos of himself in Tahrir Square on his Facebook page and suddenly found himself caught up in intrigue he had nothing to do with (“he had a satellite phone like I’m an astronaut,” his father memorably put it). At the same time, if you are Egypt, why hold him so long? We may have our answer: according to Meidan, the top-secret negotiations have been ongoing for several months—which is to say, likely since before Grapel’s June arrest. Egypt may have arrested him and quickly realized that he was perfect leverage: someone they could both semi-plausibly accuse of spying for Israel (he had been an IDF paratrooper and had lied about being a journalist upon entry) and use to get the Americans involved. This is maybe what happened—probably, even.

But there is only one thing I feel I can state with confidence, and that is that there is something we have not yet been told.

Israel, Hamas Reach Gilad Shalit Prisoner Exchange Deal, Officials Say [Haaretz]
U.S. Defense Secretary Fails to Secure Egypt Release of Accused Israeli Spy [AP/Haaretz]
Earlier: Deal for Shalit Signed
Israeli-U.S. Law Student Detained in Egypt

Palm fronds are like Douglas firs: crops that have value only when marketed to a particular group of people at a particular time of year. Known as lulavs, palm fronds are as important to observant Jews during Sukkot, which begins tonight at sunset, as Christmas trees are to Christians in December. The tightly furled spears of immature fronds are one of the four species traditionally shaken during the holiday, a mimic of ancient rituals performed by priests in the Temple.

Egypt, as it happens, is the largest supplier of lulavs in the world, shipping as many as 700,000 fronds to Israel and about as many to the United States and Europe every fall. So, the threat of a potentially holiday-wrecking shortfall sent distributors—and politicians—into a frenzy. “Let my lulavs go!” exclaimed a press release sent out by Rep. Howard Berman, a Los Angeles Democrat, who is facing a tight re-election battle in a newly drawn—and heavily Jewish—district.

This isn’t the first time Sukkot observers have had to cope with lulav drama. The last big scare was in 2005, when Egyptian authorities curtailed palm-frond exports over concerns for the country’s date crop. The result was a run on lulavs in New York’s Orthodox precincts, where prices for the lowest-end fronds shot up from $2 to $10. (And that was after Egypt agreed to release about 450,000 fronds to Israel and another 100,000 to the United States, once aggressive lobbying from Jewish officials prompted the State Department to get involved.) But earlier panics featured villains closer to home: In 1999, Israeli authorities filed a complaint against an Arab-Jewish cartel suspected of cornering the market on Egyptian output, driving the price up. In 1986, American Jews were stymied by U.S. regulators who impounded a crucial 90,000-frond shipment from Tunisia, leaving them to rot in a warehouse for want of a proper certificate of origin.

This year’s episode has struck many as evidence of a structural problem in the lulav market that can’t be ignored any longer. “Why would anyone rely on a single source of anything?” asked David Wiseman, a Dallas-based distributor of Sukkot sets known as arba minim, which include an etrog, or citron, and myrtle and willow branches alongside palm fronds. “It’s crazy.”

The trouble for buyers like Wiseman is figuring out where else to go. Egypt is the world’s leading producer of dates, followed by Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan—all unlikely suppliers of lulavs for anyone looking to diversify. Israel ranks No. 17, producing a mere 22,000 metric tons to Egypt’s 1.3 million. Jordan, which helps boost Israel’s supply, doesn’t even rate in the top 20, according to the most recent U.N. statistics. Kosher lulavs, which must be straight and have unsplit green leaves, can only be obtained from particular varieties of palms that, today, are under relatively limited cultivation. And American demand, by all accounts, is steadily rising, from an estimated 270,000 fronds in the mid-1980s to at least 500,000 today. “The market has exploded,” said Yitzchok Summers, the rabbi at Anshe Emes, an Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles. “When I was growing up here, there were a couple of places you went to get your lulav and etrog, but last year when you went down Pico Boulevard there were kids sitting outside the Judaica stores who would do drive-up service.”

Israeli officials announced last week that they expected to satisfy domestic demand for about 650,000 lulavs, in part thanks to new preservatives that allow for a longer harvest window in Israeli date groves. Jordan provided a buffer shipment of about 110,000 palm fronds—including, traders told Ha’aretz, some contraband Egyptian lulavs. Special import licenses were also granted to Spanish growers, though Hamas nixed efforts to open up imports of 50,000 fronds from Gaza.

But everyone seems to agree that Israel’s patchwork solution has strained global supply—leaving American Jews to figure out their own plan for replacing the high-quality, low-price lulavs from the Sinai. The obvious solution, according to Summers and Wiseman, is to buy domestic— specifically, from California and Arizona, the top two date-producing states. Late last week, Wiseman said he was still waiting on a cut of the Egyptian supply, but he’s posted a notice on his website announcing that he is only selling California lulavs this year and for the foreseeable future. “As far as we know,” the announcement read, “we are the first major dealer to make this decision, and we have received the overwhelming support of our customers.”

The majority of dates produced in the United States are deglet noor or medjool, whose fronds tend to be too weak to meet halakhic standards. But Wiseman estimates there are enough trees of sturdier varieties in California—including the dayri palm, whose tight fronds command premium prices—to produce as many as 40,000 lulavs each year. “I got California ones last year because I wanted to wean people off Egyptian lulavs,” Wiseman told me. “But there is no infrastructure. The trees can produce, but you need a system of cutting them, packing them, sorting them, and distributing them.”

Calls to growers in the Coachella Valley, in the desert east of Los Angeles, suggested the first hurdle is actually explaining to growers what a lulav is. (“Are you sure? Palm fronds are really big,” said a woman who answered the phone at Brown Date Garden, when she heard about the ritual lulav-shaking.) Even among those who know about Sukkot, there is hesitation about getting into the lulav business. “We’ve been approached in the past and have never engaged,” said Albert Keck, the president of Hadley Farms, one of the best-known growers in Southern California. “I cringe at cutting off the central terminal of a young palm.”

That hasn’t stopped smaller growers from getting into the market. Arthur Futterman, a small grower in Indio, Calif., who was raised in a Reform Jewish household but is now an evangelical Christian, has worked for the past six years with dealers from the anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidic community, which does not buy Israeli products. “At first I was helping them locate farmers around the desert who had dayris and helping them do their packing and shipping,” Futterman explained this week. It was slow work: Each grower who agreed to participate had fewer than a dozen of the high-end dayri palms. Futterman said most growers limit cuttings to four fronds per tree. “It’s like cutting your fingernail to the quick,” he said. “You can do it a little, but not too much.”

Now Futterman has leased several acres to brothers Shulem and Schmiel Ekstein, Satmar dealers who have planted several dozen dayri palms exclusively for Sukkot. Those trees, however, won’t mature for several years. In the meantime, Futterman said, there is an opportunity for people with less exacting interpretations of halakha. “The minutiae the Eksteins want are not present in most varieties—they will look at the last little leaf to make sure it’s sealed closed,” Futterman said. “But in my mind, you can take any center frond that’s not opened up, like a rosebud.” And, he went on, “if that’s your understanding of closed, then there are thousands here.”

Which is how Rabbi Summers of Anshe Emes has managed to satisfy his congregation’s needs this year. “I work through someone who said there was a big problem because of Egypt, but he was able to secure lulavim from Palm Springs,” Summers said last week. Still, Summers had a Plan B: “I have two date palms in front of my house, and you can see the lulav in the middle. It’s kind of high up, but I was thinking, this year, if I’m really stuck, I can always just get a ladder.”

But in Egypt, illusions rarely die quickly—especially when the government doesn’t let them. And from the moment that the violence broke out on Sunday evening, Egypt’s transitional government has mounted a tireless campaign to manage the public’s response and keep it firmly on the government’s side.

The government’s propaganda effort began on Sunday evening, when, according to reports, Information Minister Osama Heikal ordered state-run media to cover the clashes “wisely.” State-run television obliged, reporting that protesters were attacking soldiers and calling Egyptians into the streets to defend the military. As if on cue, thugs showed up in full force. Shouting “Islamiya! Islamiya” and “the people want the fall of the Christians,” they beat protesters, looted Christian-owned shops, and even attacked a Coptic hospital where victims were being treated. Meanwhile, soldiers raided the U.S.-funded Alhurra satellite channel and the privately owned Channel 25, both of which were broadcasting the ongoing violence. (According to reports, at the Channel 25 studio the soldiers asked for employees’ ID cards and then proceeded to beat those identified as Christian.) When a number of state-television producers began criticizing the government’s coverage of the violence on Twitter, Heikal appeared on state television and announced that anyone who “spreads rumors” about the state-run media would be tried.

While the state-run media has been forced to walk back some its initial propaganda— such as its false claim that three soldiers had been killed during the fighting when, in fact, none had died—the transitional government has promoted a series of conspiracy theories that firmly absolve the military. The most predictable of these was uttered immediately following the violence on Sunday night, when Prime Minister Essam Sharaf addressed the nation and warned of “the external fingers that stir conspiracies.” Translation from Egyptian: The United States and Israel are to blame.

Another conspiracy theory peddled by the government is that the anti-Coptic violence was entirely the work of thugs from the previous regime. Tourism Minister Mounir Fakhry Abdelnour, a Coptic billionaire who served in parliament from 2000 to 2005, repeated this line to me over the phone. What about the videos showing military vehicles running roughshod over protesters? “I saw the vehicles running into protesters,” he acknowledged. “But I didn’t see who was driving those cars. And it is very possible that the same attackers who shot gunfire or threw stones or threw Molotov cocktails took the cars and rode them.”

In a way, the government’s conspiracy-theorizing been useful because it has highlighted its alliance with Islamists, who have overwhelmingly echoed the official story. Former Muslim Brotherhood leader and presidential candidate Abdel Moneim Abouel-Fotouh—a “liberal Islamist” according to the New York Times—said that the attacks on Coptic protesters had the “foreign and Zionist aim to foment sedition in Egypt.” The Muslim Brotherhood also sought to absolve the military. “We need a fact-finding committee to see who started it, and how people who dared to attack the army,” Essam el-Erian, a leader in the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, told me. “The army is not in conflict with the people because the army is only guarding the high institutions, like television and others.”

That’s not how many Copts see things. “Our media is inciting hatred, because they said that the army needs protection,” Sally Moore, a member of the Coalition of Revolutionary Youth, told me. “As if the Christians are stronger than the army, and as if it’s a Muslim army—it’s an Egyptian army.” While Pope Shenouda, the Coptic patriarch, has called for a three-day fast and urged restraint, many Copts are demanding further action. At funerals held for those killed in Sunday’s violence, worshipers called for the downfall of the transitional government.

Egypt’s pro-democratic youth activists, however, are taking a more conservative approach. They fear that the government’s misinformation campaign has won over the broader public—and that they will lose the battle of ideas if they push against the government too directly. “People are being influenced by this. I feel it on the streets,” Shadi El-Ghazali Harb, a leading activist in the Coalition of Revolutionary Youth, told me over the phone as he stood outside of a Coptic hospital awaiting autopsy results. “There is a widespread belief that it was not the military’s fault.” So, in the short run, the activists seem inclined to direct their protests against Egypt’s less popular transitional government, rather than denouncing the military leadership directly.

To some extent, the public outrage that the youth activists have helped channel against the transitional government is already paying off. On Tuesday, Finance Minister Hazem el-Beblawi tendered his resignation to protest the government’s handling of the clashes. Though the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces ultimately rejected his resignation, it represented an important setback for the military junta, and rumors that Prime Minister Sharaf has resigned are further undermining it. Meanwhile, the transitional government has moved quickly to pass new legislation that Copts have long demanded, including laws that ban discrimination, legalize churches that were built before licensing became available in the 1900s, and ease church construction. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces still has to approve these laws, however, and many Copts remain skeptical. “If the law is issued, what’s the guarantee that it will be applied practically?” asked Coptic human-rights lawyer Naguib Gobrail, who was injured in Sunday’s attacks.

The deep divide in the way that the Copts and Egypt’s pro-democratic activists on one hand and the broader Egyptian public on the other view Sunday’s violence is potentially explosive. The rage within Egypt’s Coptic community—the understandable reaction to the violence against them before and after Mubarak’s toppling—will only intensify as Egypt’s state-run media continues to dismiss their anger.

Some are predicting that Copts will be inclined to leave the country in the face of this state-sponsored brutality. Gobrail, the human-rights lawyer, noted sadly that two of his sons are pharmacists in Australia and Canada. Moore, however, rejects this notion out of hand. “Copts are ethnically part of this country,” she said. “We’re not building a new Israel somewhere else.”

• Iran’s official news agency denied its alleged link to the planned terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., revealed today. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• After a formal probe, Defense Minister Barak formally apologized to Egypt for the deaths of several policemen which Israel mistakenly believed to be terrorists. [Ynet]

• Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, head of the Democratic National Committee, praised Occupy Wall Street in Boston today. [Boston Globe The Angle]

• Michael Douglas as Liberace, directed by Steven Soderbergh. [NYT ArtsBeat]

• Some lady is suing Drive for being anti-Semitic (the gangsters, one of them played by Albert Brooks, are Jewish) and for false advertising. Her lawsuit complains, that there is “very little driving in the motion picture,” which, in addition to being a ludicrous thing to sue somebody over, isn’t even true. [JTA]

Today is National Coming Out Day. And in not-actually-related news, Liza Minelli is visiting Israel next month to attend a premiere of Cabaret.

Liza Minnelli – Cabaret – Maybe This Time by xilegay

UPDATE (7:15): New reports say Marwan Barghouti will not be a part of the deal, which is said to involve more than 1000 prisoners.

UPDATE (4:45): You can read Prime Minister Netanyahu’s remarks to his cabinet, in which he invokes the principle of tikkun olam, here. Speaking of saving one life versus saving the world entire, already a Committee of Rabbis for the Salvation of Israel is opposing the deal on the grounds that the prisoners it will free will end up killing Jews.

UPDATE (4:12): President Abbas announced his support for the Shalit deal (if the train is leaving the station, you may as well get on board). Also, Shmuel Rosner reports that the religious Shas party, unlike Yisrael Beiteinu, is backing it.

UPDATE (4:00): “In the coming days we will return Gilad to the bosom of his parents, Aviva and Noam, to his brother Yoel, his sister Hadas, his grandfather Tzvi and the entire people of Israel,” said Prime Minister Netanyahu. Hamas leader Khamed Meshaal claims 1000 prisoners will be released. Meanwhile, speculation continues to swirl about why both Netanyahu and Hamas would desire Barghouti’s freedom: he is at the very least an ex-terrorist likely to sharply challenge President Abbas’ leadership but also strengthen Fatah against Hamas.

UPDATE (3:35): Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office tweets, “I especially thank the #Egyptian government and its security services for their role in mediation & concluding of the deal #Shalit.” Shmuel Rosner reports that a few ministers, including Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, voted agains the deal. Haaretz reports that the deal has been several days in the making, with Israel’s and Hamas’ chief negotiators in Cairo for the past several days and with Netanyahu holding a meeting of a special committee, the existence of which was placed under a gag order.

UPDATE (3:10): According to the Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Twitter feed, Shalit “will be coming home in the next few days.” Also: “the agreement to release #Shalit was signed in initials last Thursday and today was signed formally by the two parties.” Much speculation is centering around the identities of the hundreds of prisoners which Israel would be releasing, and most of all whether Marwan Barghouti, the extremely popular Palestinian leader who was jailed for his alleged role in the Second Intifada, will be included. What’s interesting about this is that Barghouti is seen as a rival to Hamas.

(UPDATE 2:55: Israel Radio says the deal has been reached.) It might be happening. The Israeli cabinet is meeting in an emergency session over a prisoner swap deal (well into the hundreds) with Hamas, apparently brokered by Egypt (and not by the German mediator who had been handling things).

If approved, Shalit could be returned as early as November, or roughly 65 months after his capture.

Meanwhile, ABC News reports that U.S. authorities disrupted an Iran-backed “significant terrorist attack in the United States” targeting Israeli and Saudi diplomats and embassies. The Saudi embassy is in Foggy Bottom, in Washington, D.C., across the street from the Watergate complex, yards from the Kennedy Center, and a couple blocks from the State Department; the Israeli embassy is in sleepier upper northwest, a few blocks from my synagogue and a few more from my high school. In other words, the Iranians are kind of assholes.

Possible Deal Near to Free Captive Israeli Soldier [NYT]
U.S. Says Iran-Tied Terror Plot in Washington D.C. Disrupted [ABC News]

Meanwhile, up north, Israel is ever more anxious about the Sinai, due to both the half-dozen sabotage attempts on the natural gas pipeline and the August attack in southern Israel that was launched from the Egyptian peninsula. So, for the not first time this year, on Monday it granted Egypt the right to station yet more troops there, even though, under the Israeli-Egyptian peace, the area, which Israel captured during 1967’s Six Day War and returned as part of the peace deal, is supposed to be demilitarized.

Finally, the violence against the Copts has raised talk in the United States of slowing or cutting military aid to Egypt. Remember that that aid, as things stand now anyway, comes in tandem with Israeli aid; Egypt is the second-largest recipient of annual U.S. military aid, Israel the first.

Turns out toppling a dictator can get messy!

Copts Denounce Egyptian Government Over Killings [NYT]
Israel Permits More Egyptian Soldiers to Enter Sinai, Issues New Travel Warning [AP/WP]
Leahy: No ‘Blank Check’ for Egyptian Army [Ben Smith]

• Israel issued a staunch Sinai travel warning due to Egypt’s instability. [Haaretz]

• By a wide margin, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s cabinet approved the so-called Trajtenberg Plan, a progressive social justice program prompted by this summer’s tent protests. [NYT]

• New information emerges on the fascinating, brilliant, and more than occasionally underhanded tactics the Jewish Agency deployed in 1947 when the United Nations sent diplomats to report back on the wisdom of partitioning Mandatory Palestine. [NYT Mag]

• After further “price tag” attacks, including vandalized Christian and Muslim cemeteries in Jaffa, Netanyahu condemned the burgeoning epidemic and protesters gathered to condemn it. [Haaretz]

• Deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon pushes back against charges that Israel has increased its isolation. [JPost]

• Countries ranging from the United States to European nations to Turkey berated Russia and China for vetoing the U.N. Security Council resolution on Syria this week. [AP/WP/AP/WP]

• Field Marshal Tantawi, Egypt’s de facto ruler, announced that the governing military would not field a presidential candidate in the forthcoming elections. [NYT]

• Following a report that he had pushed for clemency for Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard only to be rejected by President Obama, Vice President Biden agreed to meet with Jewish-American leaders on the issue. [JTA]

• Nick Kristof apportions a significant amount of the blame for Israel’s current woes to Prime Minister Netanyahu. [NYT]

• Apple impresario and inventor Steve Jobs died at 56. He was inspired to work in personal computing after reading a 1971 article by Tablet Magazine contributor Ron Rosenbaum. [NYT]

• Egypt’s de facto ruler asserted, “The security situation in the Sinai is 100 percent safe.” It’s true, they’ve gone almost two weeks without an attack on the pipeline. [Ynet]

• “The start of the General Assembly each year is the Super Bowl of the U.N. spy games.” Oh, so much fun. [AP/MSNBC]

• The new, optimistic issue of Text/Context, a joint venture between New York Jewish Week and Nextbook Inc., has dropped. [Text/Context]

• A U.S. diplomatic delegation in the West Bank was angrily accosted by an organized group protesting the aid freeze. [AP/WP]

• Faced with Medicaid shortages, some states want to cut (sigh) circumcision funding. Bad idea, say doctors. [Live Science/MSNBC]

Contributing editor Ben Greenman reflects on Bob Dylan’s career of pilfering. He hints at this in his headline, but one of the staunchest examples to me is “Boots of Spanish Leather,” a pretty clear rip-off of his own “Girl of the North Country,” in turn a rip-off of English folk standards.

Meanwhile, the uncertainty surrounding Israel’s energy sources to the south put pressure on its energy sources to the west, the massive natural gas fields discovered in its maritime territory under the Mediterranean. As Robin M. Mills explained in an excellent article, the fields have the potential to turn Israel not merely self-sufficient but into a net energy exporter. The lack of a definite Egyptian source makes developing these fields all the more important, which in turn makes the (basically trumped-up) territorial dispute with Lebanon over the field—which has also drawn in Cyprus, which means it’s also drawn in Turkey … —that much more fraught. Much as Egypt’s leaders are less concerned about the gas itself and more with the appearance of doing relations with the Jewish state, Lebanon’s Hezbollah-controlled government is less concerned with how much of the milkshake it gets to drink and more with continuing the resistance to the Zionist regime. Once again in the region, deep and lasting material interests are overlooked as ideology reigns.

Blast Destroys Egypt Gas Pipeline to Israel, Jordan [JTA/Jewish Journal]
The Land of Gas and Honey [Foreign Policy]
Saving Egypt’s Elections [FP Middle East Channel]
Egypt to Markedly Raise Gas Prices in New Deal With Israel [Reuters/JPost]
In Egypt, Concessions by Military on Politics [NYT]
Earlier: For Israel, Gas to Come Less Naturally
Israel-Lebanon Sea Border Dispute Heats Up