• The appointment of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as prime minister of the interim government, following the unity agreement between Hamas and Fatah, has drawn criticism from Palestinians. [Jerusalem Post]

• Shoah director Claude Lanzmann was detained at Ben Gurion airport after a female security worker filed a complaint that he hugged and kissed her against her will. He was released and boarded a flight to France. [Haaretz]

• One of the emails leaked from Assad’s office after the group Anonymous hacked the mail server offers tips in advance of Assad’s December interview with Barbara Walters. [Haaretz]

• Mossad agents codenamed Eichmann “Dybbuk,” and other things you’ll learn at the Eichmann exhibit in Tel Aviv. [AP]

• Middle-finger giving singer M.I.A. has split from her fiancee Benjamin Bronfman (son of philanthropists Sherry and Edgar Bronfman), with whom she has a two-year-old child. [NY Daily News]

A bit of news from the Washington Times‘ Ben Birnbaum confirms the Assad regime’s importance to Iran and as a corollary the blow that the fall of Assad would represent to the Islamic Republic. He reports that Iran tried to bribe Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood into backing Assad by offering it four posts in the Syrian government. Which reveals not only Iran’s interest in maintaining Assad’s power and other actors’ support for it, but also its influence in Syria, as captured by its ability to guarantee government posts in what is, after all, ostensibly another sovereign country.

Iran Sought to Broker Syrian Deal Between Assad, Muslim Brotherhood [Washington Times]
Earlier: For Hezbollah, Keys Open Doors
Hamas Smartly Departing Damascus

A federal indictment earlier this week blew open links between the Iran-backed Shia paramilitary organization that effectively runs Lebanon and the brutal Latin American cocaine trade, in particular the vicious Mexican cartel Los Zetas. If you haven’t read top investigative reporter Jo Becker’s exhaustive following-of-the-money—which includes five continents, untold numbers of used cars, and 85 tons of cocaine—now’s the time. The short of it is that Hezbollah benefits, at times directly, from the Latin American drug trade by laundering money via various means (including those used cars) to Beirut’s Lebanese Canadian Bank. The money quote comes from a U.S. investigator: “They operate like the Gambinos on steroids.”

It’s important for law enforcement to understand exactly how it works. It’s important for the rest of the world, however, to understand that Hezbollah feeds itself with the blood of horrific drug-related violence. This might not surprise those already predisposed to not liking Hezbollah, but in fact this is just one piece of the group’s much larger hypocrisy, which should be leveraged as effective PR in the Arab and Muslim world.

Larbi Sadiki pointed to another Hezbollah hypocrisy earlier this week: its continued support of Bashar Assad’s murderous regime in neighboring Syria—support that isn’t merely passive, but actually includes party head Hassan Nasrallah denying Assad’s atrocities. “When such a wildly popular resistance movement abandons the ideal, much less the practice, of liberation in support of tyranny, it loses credibility with the public,” he wrote. “Fighting Israel as a Syrian proxy is one thing, but opposing the Syrian people’s desire for democratic change is something else entirely.” Elias Muhanna reports that Hezbollah feels more vulnerable with its Syrian patron waning, and “recent polls also show that Hezbollah’s reputation has taken a considerable hit in the Arab world because of its alliance with the Assad regime.” (Contrast all this with Hamas, which has practiced “quiet dissidence,” according to Sadiki, and which is looking to decamp from its current headquarters, in Damascus, for greener pastures in Cairo or even Qatar. This is one advantage of being a Sunni rather than a Shiite group and thus able to forge strong alliances with countries besides Shiite-ruled Syria and Iran.)

So, Hezbollah backs a tyrant who kills his own people (and predominantly Sunnis) and makes its money from the tragedy of other poor oppressed people half a world away. Sounds like a pretty good pitch for Hezbollah’s enemies, including Israel, to make in the region.

(Headline from.)

Government Says Hezbollah Profits From U.S. Cocaine Market Via Link to Mexican Cartel [ProPublica]
Beirut Bank Seen as a Hub of Hezbollah’s Financing [NYT]
Hezbollah’s Hypocritical Resistance [NYT]
Nasrallah’s Fighting Words [NYT Latitudes]
A New Home for Hamas? [FP]

This is only the agency’s latest setback at the hands of a terrorist organization. In December 2009, an al-Qaida suicide bomber killed seven CIA officers at an American compound in Afghanistan. In April 1983, a Hezbollah car bomb destroyed the U.S. embassy in Beirut, killing 60 people, including 17 Americans, eight of whom were CIA employees. Given the agency’s track record, very few intelligence and Middle East experts were surprised by last week’s revelation that the CIA had been handed another loss in the region.

But the analysts have gotten it wrong on the bottom line. Though most experts and commentators are making this out to be bad for the CIA—and many current and former U.S. officials believe it is—it’s actually Hezbollah that comes out the big loser.

Hezbollah’s entire prestige is built on the idea that it is a highly disciplined organization that is nearly impossible to infiltrate. Indeed, Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah’s June speech announcing that Hezbollah had rolled up CIA assets was the party’s first public admission that it’d been compromised by hostile services. Hezbollah, said Nasrallah, had the “courage to confront the truth.”

The truth is that no matter how many American spies Hezbollah ultimately captured, being infiltrated by a hostile clandestine service is evidence of weakness. Moreover, as the Cold War showed, uncovering moles may result in tighter security measures, but the fact that they went unnoticed in the first place almost invariably demoralizes any organization built on loyalty and secrecy. In the 1960s and ’70s, paranoia crippled the CIA’s head of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton, after he became convinced that the agency had been penetrated by Soviet agents. In Hezbollah’s case, the damage will likely be worse, because this incident exposes the utter falsehood of the party of God’s divinely fashioned self-mythology.

Nonetheless, Hezbollah officials are putting up a good front. “The resistance blinded American intelligence eyes,” one Hezbollah member of Lebanese parliament said last week. Perhaps he’s right—even as there are plenty of good reasons for the American intelligence community to encourage Hezbollah to think it bested the CIA. But contrary to its reputation, Hezbollah may be more vulnerable to hostile clandestine services than any organization in the history of espionage. Hassan Nasrallah certainly thinks so. Unique among world leaders, Nasrallah lives in hiding. He has spent the last five years since the end of the party’s 2006 war with Israel bunkered underground because he fears his organization is so porous that the Israelis have a good shot at assassinating him.

Other recent intelligence triumphs against Hezbollah include Israel destroying most of the party’s long- and medium-range missiles within the first few hours of the 2006 war. Perhaps most spectacularly, Hezbollah’s legendary commander, Imad Mugniyeh, was assassinated in February 2008 in the middle of Damascus. Then there was an Israeli spy ring that penetrated Hezbollah. And even though more than 100 people have been detained by Hezbollah and arrested by Lebanese security forces for espionage since April 2009, things keep blowing up—literally—in Hezbollah strongholds. Maybe the blast last week at a Hezbollah arms depot in Tyre was just an accident. Or perhaps it was a timely reminder that there are plenty of hostile assets still operating successfully in some of Hezbollah’s most sensitive areas.

It is best, then, to treat Hezbollah’s Spartan reputation with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, many Western experts legitimize the party’s propaganda. For instance, Hezbollah leadership denied for many years that Mughniyeh had any official relationship to the organization. It was bad enough that researchers and journalists swallowed the party’s line. But even after Hezbollah buried Mughniyeh with full honors—not merely as a Hezbollah martyr, but as a pillar of the party’s revered leadership—regional experts never stopped to wonder: If Hezbollah lied about that, maybe they were lying about other things as well.

Obviously Hezbollah, like all security and intelligence institutions, dissimulates. What’s different about Hezbollah is that its fictions are the foundation of a self-image that touches not only on earthly matters, but on heavenly ones as well. The CIA is the intelligence service of a regular state; it is designed and ruled by human beings and therefore imperfect in its very nature. Hezbollah, however, is not a regular political organization, but the party of God. The arms of the resistance are sacred, entrusted with the duty of liberating Jerusalem, and its victories, like the 2006 war, are divine. But as it turns out, Hezbollah is not divine. It’s in fact quite flawed. And so the CIA story comes as another blow in a series of shocks to the Islamic resistance’s prestige.

Only credulous Western media sources believe that Hezbollah won a “divine victory” over Israel in 2006. The Shiite community in southern Lebanon knows better, which is why tens of thousands of them tried to flee when a rocket was fired from their area during the middle of Cast Lead in 2008-09. Even Hezbollah knows it is deterred, which is why the border with Israel has been relatively quiet since then.

On the domestic front, Hezbollah isn’t faring much better. In 2009, a financier close to the party and nicknamed the Lebanese Madoff was found to have stolen more than half a billion dollars from the Shiite community. Hezbollah’s May 2008 attack on Sunni neighborhoods in Beirut and on Druze regions in the mountains sullied the resistance—through the use of weapons that, according to Hezbollah mythology, are only to be used against the Zionist invaders, not fellow Lebanese.

Even more significantly, Hezbollah has been named in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. In August, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon indicted four Hezbollah operatives, including two of Mughniyeh’s brothers-in-law, for their role in the killing. In other words, the party of God stands accused of murdering one of the Middle East’s major Sunni leaders, which puts Hezbollah in a dangerous position with its Sunni neighbors inside Lebanon and around the region. It certainly doesn’t help the party’s reputation that its Syrian patron, President Bashar al-Assad, has been slaughtering members of the Sunni-majority uprising in neighboring Syria.

Without Assad, Hezbollah will lose its supply lines. Even with Assad fighting to survive, circumstances are trying for Hezbollah. In the eyes of the regional Sunni majority, the regime in Damascus and Hezbollah are no longer Arabs at war with Israel—they are minorities, killing fellow Arabs on behalf of the Iranians.

It’s true the CIA has made plenty of mistakes in Beirut over the last several decades, and the U.S. intelligence community may have blundered badly in this instance, too. And yet no one knows exactly the parameters of the game now under way in Lebanon, where a number of regional and international actors—including, among others, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, France, Israel, and the United States—all have a stake in the outcome. All we know for certain is that the timing is bad for Hezbollah, divine no more.

then the eastern Mediterranean is seething. There, claims to huge natural-gas reserves off the coast of Cyprus and Lebanon have raised tensions with Turkey, which occupies half of Cyprus, as well as with Israel. Cyprus and Israel are drilling for gas, angering Turkey. The militant Islamic group Hezbollah, in Lebanon, has threatened to attack Israeli gas rigs.

Further complicating this is the bitter rift between Turkey and Israel after the deadly Israeli commando interception of a Turkish flotilla trying to transport aid to Palestinians in Gaza last year.

“Part of it,” adds a regional expert, “is just the greater assertiveness of Turkey’s foreign policy everywhere.” similarly with Hezbollah—for which the mammoth offshore gas field Leviathan could be, as Tablet Magazine Mideast columnist Lee Smith put it, a new Sheba Farms. The pretext is kind of the whole point.

Meanwhile, the article notes that global warming has unfrozen parts of the Arctic Sea, leading to disputes over energy sources and shipping lanes. Israel has no polar ice caps to melt, but it does have disappearing water: In some places, the Dead Sea’s coastline has receded by as much as one-third of a mile. Less water means more land; and around the Jordan River, more land axiomatically means more conflict. The northern section of the sea is in the West Bank. Is the new land the military’s? Israel’s? The Palestinians’? (They didn’t have this issue the last time the Dead Sea lost water, about 120 millennia ago.)

Meanwhile, while the Dead Sea had made the Final Fourteen in voting for something called the New 7 Wonders of Nature, it failed to make the last cut. Part of the problem is that Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Jordan all ran separate campaigns. The absence of peace claims one more casualty.

A New Era of Gunboat Diplomacy [NYT]
New Israeli-Palestinian Land Dispute Rises as Dead Sea Water Level Drops [Haaretz]
Dead Sea’s Bid As a New Wonder Is Dead [JTA]
Earlier: Israel-Lebanon Sea Border Dispute Heats Up

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.

Relatively speaking, the past month has been fairly quiet on the Syrian front. Earlier this week, the heroic U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford—in her new book, by the way, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice regrets pulling the Syrian ambassador in 2005—temporarily departed due to “credible threats” against him. Yesterday, a prominent opposition group requested international protection from an impending crackdown. Hezbollah recently insisted Assad has left the revolutionary “danger zone” behind. Compared to the past months, which have involved mass sieges of major cities and thousands of protesters killed in the streets, it seems pacific.

But a new poll finds that in Arab countries support for Assad versus the opposition groups ranges from 17 percent to 0 percent (ups to Jordan!), which is nothing short of incredible and inspiring. So, here’s another reason for Israel to root for Assad’s downfall: It will put it on the right side of the Arab Spring. And the dramatic death of Muammar Qaddafi is reportedly revivifying protests. “The focus of the world will now turn to Syria,” said the opposition Syrian National Council’s leader after the former Libyan dictator was executed. “It’s Syria’s turn to receive attention.”

Ouster of Syria’s Assad Would Be ‘Opportunity’ for Israel [CSM]
Poll: Arab Support for Assad at Historic Low [JPost]
Related: State of the Union [Tablet Magazine]

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.

I tried not to think of Gilad because I felt guilty. Not only was I doing nothing to help the campaign to free him, I opposed its implicit demand that the Israeli government release as many terrorists as it takes to bring him home. Israel has no death penalty, and now we would lose the deterrence of prison: If the deal went through, any potential terrorist would know it was just a matter of time before he’d be freed in the next deal for the next kidnapped Israeli.

But the argument could never be so neatly resolved. Each side was affirming a profound Jewish value: ransom the kidnapped, resist blackmail. And so any position one took was undermined by angst. What would you do, campaign activists challenged opponents, if he were your son? “He’s everyone’s son,” sang rocker Aviv Gefen.

One day I passed a rally for Gilad in a park in downtown Jerusalem. Several counter-demonstrators were holding signs opposing surrender to terrorism. “I happen to agree with you,” I said to one of them. “But don’t you feel uneasy protesting against the Shalit family?”

“We’re not protesting against the Shalit family,” he replied. “We’re protesting to save future victims of freed terrorists. Those victims don’t have names yet. But they could be my son or your son.”

Every debate over Gilad ended at the same point: your son.

We never referred to him as “Shalit,” always “Gilad.” The Gilad dilemma set our parental responsibilities against our responsibilities as Israelis—one protective instinct against another. The prime minister’s job is to resist emotional pressure and ensure the nation’s security; a father’s job is to try to save his son, regardless of the consequences.

And so I tried, too, not to think of Gilad’s extraordinary parents, Noam and Aviva. Even when denouncing the government they spoke quietly, incapable of indignity. The best of Israel, as we say here, reminding ourselves that the best of Israel is the best of anywhere.

For more than a year the Shalits have lived in a tent near the prime minister’s office. When I walked nearby I would avoid the protest encampment, ashamed to be opposing the campaign. This past Israeli Independence Day, though, I saw a crowd gathered around the tent, and wandered over. “GILAD IS STILL ALIVE,” banners reminded: It’s not too late to save him. Inside the tent, Noam and Aviva were sitting with family and friends, singing the old Zionist songs. I wanted to shake Noam’s hand, tell him to be strong, but I resisted the urge. I didn’t deserve the privilege of comforting him.

I wanted to tell Noam what we shared. As it happens, my son served in the same tank unit as Gilad, two years after he was kidnapped. I wanted to tell Noam that that was the real reason I couldn’t bear thinking about his family. That in opposing the mass release of terrorists for Gilad, it was my son I was betraying.

Now, inevitably, the government has given in to the emotional pressure. Inevitably, because we all knew it would—must—end this way. A few months ago, as part of its psychological war against the Israeli public, Hamas released an animated film depicting Gilad as an elderly gray-haired man, still a prisoner in Gaza. No image tormented us more.

Still, there are few celebrations here today. Even those who supported the campaign to free Gilad must be sobered by the erosion of Israeli deterrence. And those who opposed the campaign are grieving for Gilad’s lost years. All of us share the same unspoken fear: In what condition will he be returned to us? What have these years done to him?

Hamas leaders are boasting of victory. If so, it is a victory of shame. Hamas is celebrating the release of symbols of “resistance,” not of human beings. Hamas’ victory is an expression of the Arab crisis. The Arab world’s challenge is to shift from a culture that sanctifies honor to a culture that sanctifies dignity. Honor is about pride; dignity is about human value. Hamas may have upheld its honor; but Israel affirmed the dignity of a solitary human life.

In recent months the campaign to free Gilad demanded that the government worsen conditions for convicted terrorists in Israeli jails, to psychologically pressure the Palestinian public. So long as Gilad was being held incommunicado, activists argued, Palestinian families should be barred from visiting their imprisoned sons. While Gilad’s youth was wasting away, terrorists shouldn’t be allowed to study for college degrees.

The government promised to oblige. But as it turned out, there were legal complications. A newspaper article the other day noted the results of the government’s get-tough policy: Imprisoned terrorists would no longer be provided with the Middle Eastern delicacy of stuffed vegetables.

How is it possible, Israelis ask themselves, that so-called progressives around the world champion Hamas and Hezbollah against the Jewish state? Perhaps it’s because we’re too complicated, too messy: a democracy that is also an occupier, a consumerist society living under a permanent death sentence. Perhaps those pure progressives fear a contagion of Israeli ambivalence.

For all my anxieties about the deal, I feel no ambivalence at this moment, only gratitude and relief. Gratitude that I live in a country whose hard leaders cannot resist the emotional pressure of a soldier’s parents. And relief that I no longer have to choose between the well-being of my country and the well-being of my son.

Rather than follow the same script as scores of anxious parents before them, Aviva and Noam Shalit refused to assume a passive role and let the government’s leaders negotiate for Gilad’s freedom. Instead, they camped across the street from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s house, drawing streams of supporters and publicly questioning the government’s every move. Led by Shalit’s parents, the movement organized marches and demonstrations that drew previously unprecedented crowds, convinced some of the country’s top musical artists to record songs demanding Shalit’s release, and distributed symbolic yellow ribbons that soon became ubiquitous. Considering the contentious political assertion at the heart of their campaign—the demand to free hundreds of Palestinian militiamen, some guilty of murder, in return for Shalit, a moral dilemma that had traditionally divided Israelis—their success is nothing short of astonishing.

Nothing about the smiling, scrawny young man in the pictures hanging across Israel suggests a particularly powerful symbolic presence. Which, perhaps, is the whole point of Gilad Shalit. For the most part, previous Israeli prisoners of war belonged to several distinct categories. Some, like Ron Arad—the air force navigator who was captured in Lebanon in 1986—were career soldiers, the sort of men for whom captivity, presumably, was an occupational hazard. Others, like Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, whose capture by Hezbollah in 2006 sparked the Second Lebanon War, were reservists, older men with families and careers. Others still were captured en masse. But Shalit was very young and all alone, an ordinary boy who was nabbed by the enemy less than a year after putting on uniform. He was, in other words, an everyman.

As such, there was no end to the energy Israelis were ready to invest in seeing Shalit return home. Unlike, say, Natan Sharansky, another famed ideological prisoner who became a symbol in Israel, Shalit represented nothing but himself, which is to say an ordinary Israeli living under extremely difficult conditions and wanting nothing more than a quiet, peaceful, dignified life. Few Israelis could imagine life under Soviet repression, but every Israeli who had ever served in the army—the vast majority of Israelis—could imagine the nightmarish scenario of a patrol gone horribly wrong, ending in years of imprisonment. This is what led virtually every renowned Israeli musician to participate in a project organized by an Israeli newspaper to record songs in Shalit’s honor, and this is what brought massive crowds to a tribute concert in Jerusalem in July 2010. In addition to its stated goal, the movement for Shalit’s release had always had a potent subtext, a cri de coeur of beleaguered citizens rallying against a government they perceived as corrupt, uncaring, and out of touch.

Exactly a year after that Jerusalem concert, the activists who initiated the social justice demonstrations were moved by many of the same reasons. Shalit’s portrait was largely missing from the tent encampments in Tel Aviv and elsewhere, but had it not been for the success of the Shalit marches and the bold refusal of activists on his behalf to trust Netanyahu and his Cabinet to do the right thing, the socio-political climate in Israel, arguably, wouldn’t have been ripe for a mass movement of any kind.

When Shalit—slated to be released soon in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners—returns home, Israelis are likely to feel a rare moment of joy. When the celebrations die down, they will have time to reflect on the other, equally significant achievement of the Free Shalit movement: In a nation accustomed to experiencing grief and bereavement collectively, the majority of the population transcended the ideological debate, ignored the severe advice of retired generals who warned that releasing prisoners would only incite more kidnappings, and focused instead on the intensely private fate of one utterly ordinary young man. There’s no better example of true social justice.

• Lebanon joined Syria in rebuking the Arab League’s call last week for the Assad regime to end violence against protesters. Probably because Lebanon is run by Hezbollah now. [DPA/Haaretz]

• A new bill in Congress would halt U.S. funding for any U.N. entity that supports Palestinian statehood. The administration opposes the bill on the grounds that it will decrease the United States’ ability to influence policy there. [Haaretz]

• The IDF is reinforcing its border defenses and forces in the south in anticipation of another terrorist attack emanating from Gaza and/or Sinai. [Haaretz]

• Rep. Michelle Bachmann kibitzed with several Orthodox rabbis in New York yesterday. [NY Post/Forward]

• Gaza residents with scholarships to study abroad are prevented—by Hamas—from leaving. [Al-Jazeera]

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

When I first heard in the mid-1990s about the dreams of some jihadis and Islamists to have the green flag of Islam waving over the White House and the queen of England wearing a burka, I, like so many other Western liberals, thought that these were ludicrous fantasies. But as a student of apocalyptic millennialism, I understood that however silly such beliefs might sound to outsiders, they can have devastating consequences.

Millennialists, from stone-age cargo cults to the Pharaoh Akhenaten’s monotheistic revolution in Egypt around 1350 BCE to modern secular movements including the French Revolution, Marxism, Communism, and Nazism, all imagine that in the future the world will transform from a society in which evil, corruption, and oppression flourish and the good suffer into a world without suffering and pain. The term “apocalyptic” refers to the experiences and behavior of those who believe that this millennial transformation is imminent. In my new book, Heaven on Earth, I focus on two major developments in apocalyptic movements: The first concerns those rare moments when a previously low-volume apocalyptic discourse successfully enters the public sphere and, despite its outlandish claims, wins zealous, open, converts, and the second concerns the inevitable disappointment that greets all such movements, including those that succeed in taking power and implementing their plans for perfecting the world. Of the most dangerous such movements to jell are those I call “active cataclysmic” ones that believe that only vast destruction can pave the way to the new world, and that they are the agents of that violence. Such movements have killed tens of millions of people (often their own people) before their raging fires burned out.

Two key laws of apocalyptic dynamics became relevant in assessing Muslim apocalyptic expectations, even the most curious ones attached to the advent of the year 2000: First, one person’s messiah is another’s antichrist; and, second, wrong does not mean inconsequential. Muslims observing messianic Christians and Jews who wanted to rebuild the Temple where the Dome of the Rock stands in the year 2000 predicted the Dajjal, the Muslim version of the antichrist, for that year. And given the active cataclysmic fantasy involved—“We, Allah’s agents, must destroy much of the word to save it”—I understood how devastating it might be if this movement spread, no matter how wrong it might seem to secular people in the West.

When I first began to familiarize myself with this phenomenon, I was primarily worried that organizations like al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other jihadi and mujahedin movements might gain support in the Muslim world and cause damage both to fellow Muslims and to “infidels” around the world. But I did not for a moment imagine that these hateful and paranoid apocalyptic tropes—the very opposite of the notions of peace, equality, openness, and tolerance that Western progressives prized—would win supporters and allies among even the most progressive elements of the Western public sphere. Neither I nor, I suspect, the men who wrote Hamas’ genocidal charter in 1988 expected Western infidels to march in European capitals with Hamas’ flag, shouting “We are Hamas,” as protesters did in London, Athens, Paris, and Madrid in 2009.

In the course of the last decade, the Western public sphere has seen two major developments that systematically increased the strength of global jihad: on the one hand the adoption of some of the most vicious jihadi discourse—in particular the new anti-Semitism in the guise of anti-Zionism—and on the other, the equally strident attacks, often by non-Muslims, on those who try to identify the Islamic sources of the problem as hate-mongering Islamophobes. The result has been an undreamed-of success for jihadis over the past decade in a cognitive war that Westerners scarcely recognize.

***

Most Westerners greet the news of a global jihad against the West with derision. The vast asymmetry between Muslim and Western military forces makes any such ambition seem like a bad joke. Thus when Osama Bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1998, the Western news media scarcely mentioned it, and few even noticed. And if we outsiders ignored the battlefield jihad, we also failed to note that the jihadis were aware of their disadvantage on the battlefield and had chosen to conduct their major campaign against the West in a very different theater of war.

Cognitive warfare aims to paralyze the will of the enemy to resist attack, to maneuver that enemy into adopting vulnerable positions, and eventually to get him to give up in a conflict. In cognitive warfare, real violence (such as terror attacks) are adjuncts to the mental conflict, and the targets of such warfare are large audiences both among populations at home (recruitment and mobilization) and, still more significantly, among the enemy (paralysis). The advent of television, for example, with its highly emotive power, played a key role in the cognitive war the Vietcong successfully conducted against the United States in Vietnam.

Of course, such a line of action seems almost as unlikely to succeed as the military option. Jihadi Islam embraces values that by the normal standards of the Western public sphere are simply grotesque—misogyny, oppressive theocracy, homophobia, hate-mongering, and genocide. Yet as a collection of civil polities that prize peaceful conditions and positive-sum relations, in which public opinion has a great deal of influence on political decisions, the West is particularly vulnerable to a campaign based on appealing to our commitment to human rights, justice, and peace and against prejudice, racism, and intolerance. If jihadis can convince us—their target population—that by our standards we are in the wrong, that to think ill of them is a form or racism, or Islamophobia, then they can drain us of the will to resist and the awareness that we need to resist something.

One the most important dimensions of their cognitive war is to get infidels, even without being conquered, to behave according to the restrictions of Islam. Among the most important impositions we have seen of this phenomenon—one whose violation immediately removes any protection from harm from the head of the blasphemer—is the absolute prohibition on criticizing Allah or his prophet. Thus, a major battlefield of the cognitive war between jihadis and the West concerns tolerance for criticism of the other. Here, as elsewhere, the jihadis strive for asymmetry: Even as they criticize us virulently, how dare we criticize them?

Normally, the West would have won this fight hands down. Tolerance applies to all, and for freedom of expression and public criticism to exist one must develop a thick skin and renounce honor violence—shedding someone’s blood for the sake of saving face.

Continue reading: the case of Muhammad al Durah and anti-Semitism via anti-Zionism. Or view as a single page.

But we shouldn’t forget who else does not want U.N. statehood: those maximalists who insist that the Palestinian state ought to consist of all the land between the river and the sea, and that accepting anything less is a treacherous compromise. Hamas, which rules part of that land right now, blew up its reconciliation with the P.A. primarily because it could not get on the P.A.’s statehood train. And today in Lebanon, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah declared, “As far as we are concerned, Palestine is from the ocean to the river, and no one has any right to give up one grain of its land or one drop of its water.” Awkward.

There is an additional snag: A new report suggests that an upgrade of the P.A. at the U.N. would actually have logistical (in addition to political) negative ramifications on the peace process, in that it would weaken the standing of the Fatah-dominated Palestine Liberation Organization, which is currently the sole representative of the Palestinians at the U.N. and the sole group authorized to formally negotiate with Israel. The consequence of this would be to deny all Palestinians outside of the Palestinian territories—who are actually a crucial part of the Palestinians’ claim for a “right of return,” and are invariably (and correctly) counted as among those who were or who are the descendants of those who had to flee their homes during the Israeli War of Independence—any U.N. representation.

So a P.A. move at the U.N. will result in nothing binding; if it accomplishes anything, will lead to the loss of crucial U.S. money and also renewed hostility from its Iran-backed rivals; and in addition might provoke the legitimate ire of only further dispossessed diaspora Palestinians who otherwise might be inclined to support it.

U.S. Envoy: We Will Stop Aid to Palestinians if U.N. Bid Proceeds [DPA/Haaretz]
Fatah-Hamas Reconciliation Stalls over Palestinian Statehood Bid [AP/Haaretz]
Nasrallah: Palestinians Must Not Give Up on ‘Grain of Sand or Drop of Water’ in Fight for State [Haaretz]
U.N. Bid May Erode PLO’s Status: Palestinian Report [Xinhua]

• Israel is blaming Popular Resistance Committees, a Gaza-based group with ties to Hamas and Hezbollah, for yesterday’s attacks. [The Envoy]

• In Iran, is Supreme Leader Khamanei gearing up to arrest his underling President Ahmadinejad? [Frontline]

• Despite prior statements that they would, Sen. Joe Lieberman and Rep. Eric Cantor will not attend Glenn Beck’s rally next week in Israel. [Washington Jewish Week]

• Former Sen. Russ Feingold, Democrat from Wisconsin, won’t run for president, senator, or governor. [Ben Smith]

• Bar Refaeli has shot a new bikini catalogue. Yes, Virginia, there is a photo gallery. [Page Six]

• This Ed Koch robo-call in that Queens/Brooklyn race has to be read (and ideally heard) to be believed. [PolitickerNY]

• Half-black Jewish songsters unite: Drake is featured on a new Lenny Kravitz track. [The Fader]

• A Forward editorial notes all the “Rich Jews for Tax Hikes,” and rightfully schleps naches from them. [Forward]

• The woman in That Black-and-White Photo You’ve Seen in Italian Restaurants speaks out. But the photographer was Ruth Orkin, a Jew! [MSNBC]

• Hebrew U. is 57th. [Haaretz]

• Frequent Vox Tablet contributor Jon Kalish has a podcast on contemporary musicians covering old pioneer songs. [iTunes]

Contributing editor Mark Oppenheimer gets frequently insightful, frequently infuriating critic Lee Siegel exactly right: he’s an intellectual tummler. As opposed to a tumbler, born under punches (I’m so thin).

Tablet Magazine contributor Bruce Riedel, a former intelligence analyst and regional expert, argues that Saudi Arabia senses opportunity to reassert Sunni dominance against Shiite Iran and its Shiite proxies in that corner of the region, the Syrian regime and Hezbollah. (Syria has long been ruled by Alawites, members of an eccentric Shiite sect.) Assad’s regime, Riedel notes, is a crucial connector between Hezbollah, the group that essentially controls Lebanon, and its sponsor in Tehran; likely orchestrated the 2005 assassination of the pro-Saudi Lebanese prime minister; and has (foolishly) been seen “wrapping itself in the flag of Hezbollah,” to quote one Saudi paper, during its brutal crackdown on popular protests. In other words, this is all part of King Abdullah’s plan to cut off the head of the snake. Reports Riedel:

Riyadh worries that Assad will be replaced by chaos, but it has now come to the conclusion the risk is worth the price. If the Assad regime is destroyed, so too will Syrian support for Hezbollah be destroyed. If a new regime emerges that reflects the will of Syria’s majority-Sunni population, it can become a base for destabilizing the Hezbollah-dominated government in Beirut. The power balance in the Levant could be tilted decisively against Hezbollah and undercut Iranian regional influence.

This is why, say, you have four Sunni countries, including Saudi Arabia and Jordan, enthusiastically backing the referral of Syria to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

The weakening of the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah hegemon would also, of course, represent good news for Israel, which went to war with Hezbollah in 2006, is no friend of Syria’s, and considers Iran its prime national security threat. Indeed, for more than two months Israel has repudiated the notion that it prefers the cold stability of the current regime and has explicitly hoped for Assad’s ouster (“Allied with Iran, Mr. Assad has helped supply 55,000 rockets to Hezbollah and 10,000 to Hamas, very likely established a clandestine nuclear arms program and profoundly destabilized the region,” Ambassador Michael Oren has argued. “The violence he has unleashed on his own people demonstrating for freedoms confirms Israel’s fears that the devil we know in Syria is worse than the devil we don’t.”) It’s all another reminder that Israel’s interests are frequently aligned with its Sunni neighbors’ against Iran and its proxies.

Engagement With Syria: Time For Reassessment? [Washington Jewish Week]
Saudi Arabia Moves to Take Down Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah [The National Interest]
Israel Prefers the End of the Assad Regime to Its Continuance [WSJ]
Arab Countries Back Emergency U.N. Session on Syria [JPost]
Related: Storm Over Syria [NYRB]
Earlier: Reform Is Not a Watchword in This Administration
U.S. Re-Upping Syrian Ambassador
Iran Is Better Armed Than We Thought
Cut Off the Head of the Snake!

• Trouble at the American Jewish Committee, with executive director David Harris forced to repudiate its director on anti-Semitism and extremism’s statement that use of federal law to combat anti-Israel activism on campuses is wrong. [Jewish Journal/JTA]

• Hamas leader Khaled Meshal met yesterday in Cairo with officials from the Palestinian Authority and Egyptian intelligence. Is Gilad Shalit involved? [Haaretz]

• Iran expressed openness to a Russian proposal to restart nuclear negotiations through a series of small concessions on each side. [AP/NYT]

• Syria is using diplomats to harass and intimidate anti-regime protesters in other countries, including the United States, because they are charming that way. [WSJ]

• A bill proposed by Sen. Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, could withhold U.S. funding from certain Israeli military units if they are found to engage in human rights violations. [Ben Smith]

• Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, accused Israel of trying to steal Lebanon’s offshore natural resources and vowed to respond to any Israeli provocation. (For more, see Lee Smith’s column today.) [AP/WP]

• The race to replace Rep. Anthony Weiner, whose district was in Queens and Brooklyn and about a quarter Jewish, is becoming a referendum on President Obama’s Israel policies (even as the Democrat is a modern Orthodox staunch supporter of the Jewish state). [NYT]

• Israeli ambassador Michael Oren met with convicted (but controversially held) Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in his prison in North Carolina. [Ynet]

• Swimming for peace. [NYT]

• Israeli forces raided the Jenin Freedom Theatre, which had been lead by the late Juliano Mer-Khamis, and arrested two last night. [+972]

The Tamar field, discovered in 2009 roughly 50 miles off Haifa, is estimated to contain 9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, while the Leviathan field, discovered further west in June 2010, is double that at 18 trillion cubic feet, one of the largest offshore finds in the last decade. And yet much more important, a former Royal Dutch Shell chief scientist who’s now chief scientist for Israel Energy Initiatives “has devised an ambitious plan that would, if successful, turn Israel into one of the world’s leading oil producers,” according to an Energy Tribune report earlier this year. It turns out that the oil-shale deposits in Israel’s Shfela Basin, 30 miles southwest of Jerusalem, hold some 250 billion barrels of oil—roughly equal to Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves. In other words, Israel may well become a player in the highly competitive field of energy-producing nations, which includes Hezbollah’s patron, Iran.

Israel argues that the maritime border should begin at a 90-degree angle from the coastline, while Lebanon says that it should continue in the same direction as the land border. But if Lebanon were to insist on that principle across the board, says David Wurmser, a former consultant to Noble Energy, a Houston-based firm with a large stake in the Tamar and Leviathan fields, “it would lose a lot of its territorial water to Syria. It’s clear who’s calling the shots here.”

The twist is that even as the Lebanese government gussies up phony challenges to Israel’s maritime borders, the map it submitted to the United Nations does not actually challenge Israel’s claims to the biggest prize that the Eastern Mediterranean has ever had to offer. If Syria has its own reasons for interfering with Lebanon’s border issues, so does Iran, it seems, which is using its Lebanese asset to keep a potential industrial rival in check. That is, the dispute is not personal: It’s not about Zionism, or liberating Jerusalem. This is not ideological, but strictly about business.

Doubtless, many in the Middle East believe the ideologies to which they’ve sworn their lives. And yet that same part of the Arab world that produced Wahabbism—the Persian Gulf—is also most in favor of normalization of relations with Israel. Indeed, the Saudis themselves have reportedly cooperated with Jerusalem on security issues regarding Iran—because what really matters to Arab rulers is holding on to their rule.

The lesson here is that ideology is useful in the Middle East only insofar as it is an instrument for managing power, and even Hezbollah might not be as ideological as we assume. In addition to the cash the Party of God is given by its Iranian sponsor, it also earns plenty through its own enterprises, some of them illegal. The money is used to buy weapons for the resistance, but the other side, usually forgotten by analysts, is that Hezbollah’s arms are there to protect Hezbollah’s money. Lebanon is a very competitive place, and more often than not the highest bidder gets what he wants, regardless of ideology or other loyalties. For instance, as Hussain Abdul-Hussain, the Washington correspondent for the Kuwaiti daily Al-Rai, told me, the same smuggling networks that move weapons through the Bekaa Valley from Syria to Hezbollah are now being used to provide satellite phones to the Syrian opposition determined to topple Hezbollah’s patron, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

That’s not to say that everyone can be bought off all the time. But too often we forget that the real interests driving Middle Eastern politics are often about power and money, not ideology. Hussain notes that what might decide Assad’s fate is the Sunni merchant class of Damascus. “If the merchants start holding on to foreign currency, especially dollars, that will devalue the Syrian lira,” he told me last week. “This will make it impossible for the regime to meet the payroll for the security services who are putting down the uprising. That will mean the merchants are betting against the regime.”

By reading the border dispute as an exercise in Iranian power politics, the weirdness of the map that the Lebanese submitted to the United Nations actually starts to make sense. Iran’s interests are clear: Hold the Israelis down while also crippling the independence of the Lebanese state. If Lebanon were to develop its own natural gas fields that might encourage the country to free itself from Iranian and Syrian tutelage.

Accordingly, Iran last week signed a memorandum of understanding with Lebanon’s Hezbollah-led Cabinet to help explore for gas and oil. That’s bad for Lebanon, but it’s not so great for Iran either. Imagine a Lebanese energy sector entirely dominated by Iran; were Hezbollah to target Israeli rigs or other machinery or installations off the coast, Jerusalem would retaliate not only against Lebanon but the Iranians as well. Israel, with a booming tech sector and one of the few economies to weather the financial crisis, could handle an attack on its energy industry.

Iran, however, would be brought to its knees. The country has no economy outside of the energy sector, which is one reason why it must guard its access to vulnerable markets, like Europe. And if Israel were capable of fulfilling Europe’s energy needs for even a decade (though some estimates suggest more like 20 years), that would change Europe’s diplomatic and political position. European intellectuals can scream about Israeli checkpoints as much as they want, but no European leader whose poll numbers might someday depend on affordable energy coming from Israel will be likely to cross Jerusalem. Iran will not only have less leverage over Europe if and when Israel can develop its field, but the Islamic republic will even lose the little advantage it has over Israel.

The claim that Israel is fighting the clock has two components: diplomacy and demographics. Israel’s diplomatic isolation will corner the Jewish state while fast-breeding Arabs will overwhelm the population balance between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, goes the argument. On both counts, though, the facts speak against the notion that time is running out for Israel. Time, on the contrary, seems to be on Israel’s side.

The Palestinian Authority’s much-feared march toward a United Nations vote for statehood has become something of an embarrassment. A vote for statehood in the General Assembly has no legal implications, and the United States will always veto the measure in the Security Council. Some Palestinian leaders think that token support in the General Assembly will do more harm than good; Palestine Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki last week offered to withdraw the U.N. vote if negotiations with Israel restarted before September. And even the Kingdom of Jordan might vote against Palestinian statehood, according to the Middle East Research Center’s Alexander Bligh.

Arab rhetoric in support of Palestinian statehood, moreover, isn’t matched by real support. Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister, complained last week that Arab donors have paid out only a third of their pledges to his government, leaving the Palestinian Authority without enough cash to pay public employees’ salaries. “The Palestinians cannot count on the friends cheering them on rhetorically to step up financially if the going gets rough post-September,” warned Michael Singh, an associate fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in a blog post on Foreign Policy’s website.

Israel hardly seems as isolated as it did before Greece blocked another Gaza flotilla earlier this month, and the IHH—the Hamas-linked Turkish “charity” that sponsored the Mavi Marmara flotilla last year—dropped out of the exercise. Israeli diplomacy seemed quite effective. “The decision [for IHH to drop out] was taken for no other reason than that the Turkish government has made restoring its previously excellent relationship with Israel a priority,” reported Stephen Pollard in the Guardian. “The very last thing the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, wants is another pointless conflict. Having been re-elected for a third term he no longer needs to play to the gallery and paint Israel as a pantomime villain—his stock message since Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in 2009. With Syrian troops on his southern border, Erdogan has been keen to move on from the Mavi Marmara incident and return to good relations and military co-operation with Israel.”

Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Muslim countries—including Turkey—have shifted their rhetoric away from Israel and toward the risk of rising Iranian influence. Only a few months ago, conventional wisdom stated that the United States needed a Middle East peace deal to steer the Arab Spring in a pro-American direction. But as it turned out, the Arab Spring had little to do with the Palestine issue, and as the political chaos in the Arab world became less tractable, Israel’s position improved.

Israel is less isolated because Syria is isolated—except for Iran’s continued sponsorship—and because civil wars in Yemen and Libya and renewed political unrest in Egypt have validated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim before the U.S. Congress in May that “Israel is the one anchor of stability” in “an unstable Middle East.” Until the Syrian government provoked attacks on the American and French embassies in Damascus, the U.S. administration and other Western governments made it clear that they preferred to keep President Bashar al-Assad in power there, based on the commonplace notion that no comprehensive peace agreement is possible without Syria and no partial agreement is likely, given the dependence of Hezbollah and Hamas on his regime. It is hard to pressure Israel to negotiate a peace deal when a pivotal player is absent, and the recent meeting of the Middle East Quartet (the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations) in Washington ended without a public statement.

Even if the Arab revolt and its consequences have eased Israel’s diplomatic isolation and undercut the pressure for a settlement with the Palestinians, that does not serve Israel’s interests, according to President Barack Obama. “The number of Palestinians living west of the Jordan River is growing rapidly and fundamentally reshaping the demographic realities of both Israel and the Palestinian territories,” he told the America-Israel Political Action Committee in May.

Whether the proportion of Arabs in Judea and Samaria as well as in Israel itself is growing may be the most politicized demographic question in the world. Yet the Israeli Jewish fertility rate has risen to three children per female while the Arab fertility rate has fallen to the point where the two trend lines have converged and perhaps even crossed. A 2006 study by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies claims that the West Bank and Gaza population in 2004 was only 2.5 million, rather than the 3.8 million claimed by the Palestinian authorities. Presumably the numbers were inflated to increase foreign aid and exaggerate the importance of the Palestinian population.

Most of the phantom population, the report argues, comes from births that never occurred:

[The Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics] projected that the number of births in the Territories would total almost 908,000 for the seven-year period from 1997 to 2003. Yet, the actual number of births documented by the PA Ministry of Health for the same period was significantly lower at 699,000, or 238,000 fewer births than had been forecast by the PCBS. … The size of the discrepancy accelerated over time. Whereas the PCBS predicted there would be over 143,000 births in 2003, the PA Ministry of Health reported only 102,000 births, which pointed to a PCBS forecast 40% beyond actual results.

Palestinian fertility on the West Bank has already fallen to the Israeli fertility rate of three children per woman, if we believe the Palestine Ministry of Health numbers rather than the highly suspect Central Bureau of Statistics data. The Begin-Sadat estimates were disputed by other Israeli demographers, notably Sergio DellaPergola of the Jewish People Policy Institute. Yet the idea that economic and cultural modernization leads to falling birthrates is a commonplace among demographers who study the developing world. In 1963, Israeli Arab women had eight or nine children; today they have three, about the same as Israeli Jews. Education explains most of the fertility decline among Arabs, and it is likely that Arab fertility behind the Green Line as well as in Judea and Samaria will continue to fall.

More recent data also show that the Israeli Jewish birth rate has risen faster than predicted. Jewish births rose from 96,000 in the year 2000 to 125,000 in 2010, while Arab births fell slightly over the same period—from about 40,781 to 40,750, according to a new study by Yaakov Faitelson at the Institute for Zionist Strategies. The proportion of Jewish pupils in Israel’s elementary schools is increasing, Faitelson reports:

The percentage of students in the Arab educational system out of all Israel’s total first grade student body will decrease from 29.1% in 2007 to only 24.3% in 2016 and 22.5% in 2020. At the same time the percentage of students in the Jewish educational system out of the total first grade student body will reach 75.7% by 2016 and 77.5% by 2020.

While Israel’s ultra-Orthodox minority contributes disproportionately to Jewish population growth,  most of the increase in Jewish births comes from the secular and non-Orthodox religious categories, which average 2.6 children per woman. Faitelson notes that the ultra-Orthodox fertility rate fell over the past decade, while the fertility of the general Jewish population rose.

If present trends continue, the proportion of Jews in Israel and the West Bank will remain roughly constant; it may even rise. Muslim fertility is falling faster than anywhere in the world, with some Muslim countries—notably Iran, Turkey, Algeria, and Tunisia—reaching levels well below replacement. “In most of the Islamic world it’s amazing, the decline in fertility that has happened,’’ Hania Zlotnik, head of the United Nations’ population research branch, told a 2009 conference. Within every Muslim country and across the Muslim world, one variable explains most of the fertility air-pocket, namely education. Once Muslim women leave the cocoon of traditional society for secondary or university education, their fertility drops quickly to levels below replacement.

If Israel’s total fertility rate holds at three, its population will reach 24 million by the end of this century, the United Nations’ population model predicts. And if the low fertility rates prevailing elsewhere hold steady, Israel will have more people under the age of 25 than Turkey, Iran, or even Germany. It will be able to field the largest army in the Middle East. And it will have a thriving high-tech economy, enormous energy resources, and a reliable supply of desalinated water. Israel has a near-optimal mix of economics and demographics, while time is running out for Arab countries that have failed over and over again to rise to the demands of the modern world.

There is just one remaining argument that the clock is ticking against Israel, namely “linkage” between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran’s strategic threat to Israel. Gen. David Petraeus, the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency, made this assertion in congressional testimony in March 2010. “Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations,” Petraeus argued. “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas.” I argued at the time that Petraeus was outrageously wrong and that Jewish conservatives were misguided to hail Petraeus as a hero.

Iran’s nuclear program and its support for Hezbollah and Hamas are significant threats to the Jewish state. Yet it is hard to find a policy analyst of any stripe today who will defend the idea that an Israeli-Palestine agreement, even if such a thing were possible in the present environment, might meaningfully reduce the Iranian threat. In the uncertain aftermath of Arab revolts, Petraeus’ “linkage” argument has quietly faded into the inoperative list of embarrassing past policy statements. The commonplace argument that time is not on Israel’s side looks like it will be next.

• A lone ship from the original, thwarted flotilla—a vessel called the Dignity al-Karama carrying French, Swedish, and German citizens, as well as Arab and Israeli journalists—has left Greece and could reach Gaza today. [AP/WP]

• There is increasing willingness in the IDF and Justice Ministry to offer an actual apology to Turkey in order to resolve Israeli-Turkish enmity. [Haaretz]

• Although Prime Minister Netanyahu opposes it and it will (therefore) likely fail, supporters of a bill that would investigate left-wing human rights groups will try to push it through the Knesset this week. [Haaretz]

• Secretary of State Clinton chastised Turkey following reports that it has regressed on human rights and secularism. [AP/WP]

• A May bombing in Istanbul attributed to a Kurdish terrorist group was in fact, according to a new report, a Hezbollah attack directed against an Israeli envoy. [Haaretz]

The Arab Spring surely has something to do with Obama’s new approach, but it is hardly the sole or even the main cause of a shift that has turned U.S. Middle East policy on its head. So, what is?

Even before pro-U.S. regimes in Tunis and Cairo were toppled, Obama had said that he opposed the existing U.S.-backed order in the Middle East, which has rested on close military and diplomatic alliances with Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, and a substantial American military presence in the Persian Gulf. Most observers assumed that the president was indulging in rhetorical flights of fancy when he said that the status quo was unsustainable. But now we see he meant every word of it.

The existing political order in the Middle East has cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives over the past 60 years. In some cases, such as Israel, our alliances have been built on cultural affinity, military necessity, and domestic political considerations. In other cases, such as Saudi Arabia, our considerations have been more commercial. The larger point of U.S. engagement in the region has been to ensure the freedom of crucial shipping lanes and the flow of oil—without which the global economy that sustains billions of people around the world would grind to a halt.

Given the strong Wilsonian streak in U.S. politics, one might imagine that Obama is a staunch idealist—a man who, like Woodrow Wilson, Jimmy Carter, or George W. Bush, is disgusted by dictators. But Obama’s shameful record as a protector of human rights in the Middle East hardly bears out this theory: Iran’s Green Revolutionaries begged Obama for support for weeks, only to be greeted first with silence while being shot, tortured, and maimed by the mullahs and their goons, and then by lukewarm support, and now again with silence. Syria’s authoritarian rulers shoot their own people in the streets and bombard civilian neighborhoods with tanks and helicopter gunships, but the White House is virtually mum.

So, Obama is clearly not being driven by an obsession with human rights. Perhaps he is a wily master of realpolitik? A leader of this kind—like, say, Richard Nixon—would support the United States’ powerful friends, like Saudi Arabia and Israel, while seeking to constrain the power of its enemies, like Syria and Iran. Yet Obama has so significantly alienated the Saudis that they have embarked on their own cash-heavy royalist-oriented foreign policy, seeking to woo American allies like Jordan and Bahrain and even Pakistan into a new alliance devoted in large part to blocking Obama’s destabilizing policies in the region. Obama picks fights with Israel and then suddenly demands the Jewish state return to its 1967 borders as a condition for negotiating a peace agreement with the Palestinians—and is publicly rebuked by the Israeli prime minister, with the support of the U.S. Congress. Losing the trust and support of both Saudi Arabia and Israel in the space of a few months is hardly the move of a leader driven by realpolitik.

Perhaps, as some right-wing critics claim, Obama’s policy is the product of something worse, or more sinister, like a blueprint to weaken America on behalf of its enemies? Except this doesn’t fly either. Obama’s no Manchurian candidate, brainwashed by U.S. enemies during his schooldays in Indonesia to ruin the country. Instead, what all these theories miss is that Obama is simply a representative man of the post-World War II American Ivy League intelligentsia, which came to see the United States in a context shaped by the collapse of the European colonial empires under the weight of greed and barbarity.

***

It was the furies of Europe—its anti-Semitism and racism, its need to dominate and destroy—that drove its people to war twice in the last century while inflicting a series of revolting indignities on the so-called “lesser races” whose lands they colonized and plundered. Americans believed they were different, both at home and abroad, because they were anti-colonial from birth, and with the 20th-century advent of the decolonization movement they instinctively if sometimes cautiously sided with the new nations of the world against their former European overlords. The American sympathy for decolonization began with Woodrow Wilson and was passionately held by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and most of his top aides and by their successors in the U.S. foreign policy establishment of the 1950s, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen, head of the CIA, none of whom can be dismissed as left-wing academics.

Anti-colonialism was the motor driving the Middle East policy of the American warrior who won Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose administration wished to make friends in the region by distinguishing itself from the great European powers and showing that Washington had no colonial ambitions. Ike put that premise into practice when he demanded England, France, and Israel stand down after invading Egypt in the Suez Crisis of 1956. Obama seems to understand the world similarly—the established order is wrong for us and wrong for the people of the region, morally and politically.

Obama may also reasonably believe that a United States in the grips of a financial crisis simply doesn’t have the money to meddle in the Middle East anymore. This country gets less than 25 percent of its energy resources from the Persian Gulf, so why should it be up to us to make sure that affordable oil transits the region? Let China, India, and Europe share the burden. Combine a bad U.S. economy, American exhaustion with our post-Sept. 11 commitments in the Middle East, and the nostalgic logic of decolonization and you can, finally, understand the origins of Obama’s regional policy.

But then you must tackle its consequences. The problem with this philosophy is that anti-colonialism is not a response to the realities of the Middle East but rather an exercise in self-congratulatory and often delusional nostalgia—and the results in practice have been awful. Eisenhower called his stance on Suez the worst foreign policy mistake of his tenure, and the results of Obama’s updated version of Ike’s policies have also been poor. After all the early enthusiasm for Mubarak’s ouster, Egypt is in deep trouble and spinning out of the U.S. orbit. If the Muslim Brotherhood isn’t rushing in to fill the vacuum, perhaps it’s just because they’re too savvy to want to claim ownership of a country that may be on the verge of bankruptcy and famine, as some analysts argue.

Pushing out Mubarak has made both the Israelis and Saudis wary of Obama—a move that has proven bad not only for Washington but for Riyadh and Jerusalem as well. The notion that several thousand libertine and/or fundamentalist Saudi princes are capable of formulating a coherent regional strategy is more fantastical than a J.K. Rowling novel. The Saudis on their own are a danger to themselves, the Middle East at large, and the world’s largest known reserves of oil. Leaving them to their own devices is easily the worst option among an array of bad choices.

With Israel, the administration may be on the verge of accomplishing the previously unthinkable—forcing the Jewish state to find other allies who will maintain the continuing supply of high-tech weapons to ensure its qualitative military advantage over its rivals. Perhaps Russia, India, and even China are interested in Israeli technology—military and civilian—and its newly discovered energy resources. By driving Israel away, the United States risks losing the leverage it has historically enjoyed with the Arabs by being able to broker deals with the Israelis, who will care a lot less about what Washington thinks once they can produce their own high-tech fighter planes, satellites, and missile systems.

Without U.S. leadership, the Middle East is less stable and less secure than it has been at any point since the 1973 war, for both U.S. allies and adversaries alike. The Iranian-led resistance bloc has also been hurt by the Arab Spring, even as the Obama Administration has failed to capitalize on Tehran’s setbacks. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is fighting for the survival of his regime, a fight that no one, not even Washington, expects him to win. Hezbollah has also been wounded and may suffer further with four of its members indicted for the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

The result of the political insecurity that Obama has fostered has been a plunge in the standard of living for ordinary people throughout the region and increasing instability there. In the absence of strong U.S. leadership, Turkey now fancies itself as the second coming of the Ottoman empire and creates international incidents by dispatching flotillas to Gaza and making nice with Iran and Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah, further rattling the political and security architecture that the United States built, and now wishes to abandon.

Obama has locked in Washington’s losses in the Middle East while ignoring opportunities to hurt U.S. adversaries like Syria and Iran. But sooner or later he will have to act there, too. It cost Obama nothing to ditch Mubarak, alienate the Israelis and the Saudis, or even wage a thoughtless war against Qadaffi. But if he crosses the line with the Iranians, as they rush to build a nuclear bomb, they have the power to retaliate by causing regional havoc and raising the price of oil to $150 a barrel—making the current global economic mess seem like a profitable holiday season and ensuring a Republican victory in 2012. The fact is that letting the Iranians get the bomb is a much worse outcome. Even if it has little effect on the president’s re-election chances, Iranian hegemony in the Persian Gulf would spell long-term disaster and shape Obama’s historical legacy. The lesson that the president needs to learn from his mistakes is that the status quo is worth preserving because change is dangerous in the Middle East, where things can always get worse. So far, that’s exactly what has been happening.

Actually, though, to my admittedly untrained eye, it seems as though Lebanon already did (for a detailed discussion of the maritime borders, see here). The Times reports that Lebanon’s proposed line conflicts both with a line that Israel and Cyprus have agreed to as well as indeed with a line (also with Cyprus) that Lebanon itself agreed to in 2007—you know, before everyone knew there was gaseous gold under the sea. “We signed an agreement with Cyprus that is in keeping with its agreement with Lebanon,” explained Israeli minister of strategic affairs Moshe Ya’alon. “They decided to sketch a new border south of the line that was agreed to in talks between Lebanon and Cyprus, and basically entered our territory. It was done with premeditation in order to create conflict with us, just like the Sheba Farms.”

Well, hopefully it was done because Lebanon just wanted a piece of the natural gas pie, and if giving them said piece, however much it may rightfully belong to Israel, satisfied it, then a pragmatic supporter of Israel would feel inclined to see it as a small price to pay to forestall war. The problem is that Lebanon is not run by Lebanon, but rather by the Iranian proxy Hezbollah. Maybe it wants its border so that it can get in on the natural gas; but maybe it also wants, as Ya’alon suggests, to create a border dispute that can serve as a pretext for a war that Iran wants anyway.

Rival Claims to Sea Territory Made by Israel and Lebanon [NYT]
Lebanon Accuses Israel of ‘Aggression’ in Its Proposed Sea Boundary Near Huge Gas Fields [AP/WP]
Lebanon: We Won’t Forfeit Maritime Rights [Ynet]
Related: The Next Lebanon War [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Lebanon Passes Oil Law

All of the above? Yeah, that was January. Just January.

Since then, in the Territories, Hamas and the P.A. cracked down fiercely on popular protests in favor of unity. Then, suddenly, they agreed to unity, even though it was always doubtful it would actually work. But they stayed together long enough to mount the most threatening Nakba Day protests in years if not decades, and to threaten even worse come September—if they seek unilateral statehood.

Substantively, the most consequential thing President Obama did vis-à-vis Israel was veto a Security Council resolution condemning settlements. In a speech in May, Obama pledged similar opposition to the statehood gambit, condemned Hamas and the P.A.’s deal with it, sharply criticized Iran, and committed the U.S. to totally standing up for Israel’s security and right to exist. And he mentioned what the previous two presidents had assumed: That a two-state solution depended on land-swaps based on the ’67 borders. So, naturally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded angrily, creating a huge diplomatic mess that has yet to be fully untangled, and which could have implications on the 2012 U.S. presidential contest.

The Fogel massacre. The Hamas rocket attacks. The Jerusalem bus stop explosion. Israeli responses claimed lives, including of innocents.

On the Iranian front, first we were given ample reason to believe that its purported nuclear program was substantially delayed. But then we learned that Stuxnet, while helpful, was no panacea. And then we learned that Iran has made significant progress on weaponization technology.

Egypt continues to move tentatively toward democracy.

In Lebanon, the sealed U.N. indictment for the 2005 assassination of the former prime minister (and father of the also-former prime minister, who had to resign when Hezbollah pulled its support) was only last week partially unsealed; expect things to continue to get hotter there.

It was weird that the Syrian regime was brutally cracking down on internal dissent, and barely anyone was saying anything. And that was half-a-half-a-year ago.

Former White House chief-of-staff Rahm Emanuel, who once harbored dreams of being the first Jewish Speaker of the House, instead decided to run for mayor of Chicago; was briefly declared ineligible, then not; then won.

We were there as Rabbi Gershom Sizoumu ran for and lost a seat in Uganda’s parliament. We observed the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Ellen Weiss, an NPR honcho and wife of the enormously influential Rabbi David Saperstein, was forced to resign. Rep. Peter King held hearings on the American Muslim community, attracting the opposition of the American Jewish community. The Reform movement picked a new head.

Jimmy Carter was sued by people who bought and hated his book. Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder sued Washington City Paper, and even got the Simon Wiesenthal Center to endorse his ludicrous accusation of anti-Semitism—maybe his buddy Tom Cruise helped? Jon Demjanjuk was convicted of helping carry out the Holocaust, and then set free.

Quote of the Half-Year (paraphrased): “Oops!” — Richard Goldstone.

Western countries invaded Libya, possibly out of Holocaust guilt. A crazy guy tried to blow up a Santa Monica Chabad house. Benjamin Netanyahu and Justin Bieber were plausibly mentioned in the same sentence. A glass ceiling was shattered when Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was picked to be the first woman to run either the Democratic or Republican National Committee. The Prince of Wales had the least Jewish wedding ever. Controversy swirled about playwright Tony Kushner. Jill Abramson was named the first woman editor of the New York Times. Dolph Schayes rooted for the Dallas Mavericks to win the NBA championship, and lo, it came to pass.

Eva Braun in blackface. Eva Braun speaking to the Tenafly JCC.

On the home front, Nextbook Press author Hillel Halkin was honored, and Rush Limbaugh said we were a “radical left-wing” outfit. We rolled out a welcome mat for Goldblog. And the American Society of Magazine Editors confirmed that it enjoys The Scroll.

We said several goodbyes, most of them sad: Elizabeth Taylor; Chris Hondros (whose photograph adorns the top of this post); Juliano Mer-Khamis; and Debbie Friedman, whose death I managed to turn into a controversy, though I swear I mourn for her as well. I don’t, however, mourn for one of the most important U.S. neo-Nazis, who was killed by his own son. There were many other sad goodbyes. Meanwhile, Sen. Joseph Lieberman announced he would retire after four terms. John Galliano’s career ended, or at least lulled, on less favorable terms. So did Rep. Anthony Weiner’s. Oh, and a final goodbye: Enjoy your virgins, Osama. Hamas will enjoy them with you. (Fortunately or not, Noam Chomsky’s religion does not conceive of an afterlife.)

Where do we stand now? Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for rape, which is looking more questionable by the day; Israeli central banker Stanley Fischer was barred from replacing him as head of the International Monetary Fund. The most Jewish state got gay marriage thanks in part to a handful of Jewish Republicans. Israeli-American law student Ilan Grapel is still being detained by Egyptian authorities under dubious espionage accusations. Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest domestic rival may well be retired Mossad chief Meir Dagan. The Gaza flotilla remains docked.

How should you deal with all this? We suggest going the f**k to shul.

• Defense Minister Ehud Barak tried to tone down the rhetoric and his government’s response to the impending flotilla. [Haaretz]

• The U.N.-backed court has delivered four indictments in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanon Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. If they are of four of the wrong people—senior Hezbollah or Syrian officials—the country could blow up, so stay tuned. [WP/AP]

• Activists have accused Israel of sabotaging two flotilla boats. [Haaretz]

• The Syrian army moved out of Hama as well as several smaller cities, giving the anti-regime protesters breathing room and an arguable victory. [NYT]

• Iran accused the United States of using the Syrian uprisings to try to drive a wedge between Damascus and Tehran. Hey, even a paranoid person is right sometimes! [JPost]

And what they throw into sharp relief is a larger lesson: Among all the minorities of the Middle East, only the Jews have escaped this unhealthy condition, thanks to the fact that for over 60 years now they have had their own state and can defend themselves against their adversaries. Theodor Herzl asserted that Israel would allow the Jews to live like normal people, and as it turns out—contrary to what nearly all Arabs, most Europeans, and many Israelis believe—he has largely been proven right.

But to understand why he was right, we have to put aside Herzl and Europe and look at Israel in a Middle Eastern context, as a refuge for a religious minority: the Jews of the Middle East. Many people, including many Jews, still see Israel as the end product of a European ideological movement that found an awful but undeniable justification in the Holocaust. Yet, as many Arabs argue, that narrative is unconnected to the Middle East. No matter how many Arab ideologues collaborated with the Nazis or adopted Nazi ideas about Jews, there is no reason that the Palestinians should have to pay for a European crime. It makes more sense, then, to look at minorities in the Middle East generally, the Jews specifically, and to evaluate the success or failure of Zionism by the standards of the region.

***

Anyone who previously wrote off as a right-wing Zionist myth the idea that Middle Eastern minorities are oppressed by the regional Sunni majority needs only consider the situation of Coptic Christians in Egypt over the last few months. Even many observers who did acknowledge the reality in Egypt are surprised now in the aftermath of the Egyptian revolution to note the uptick in violence against Christians—the kidnappings of Coptic girls and the burning of churches, among other incidents. After all, it was commonly believed before the revolution that sectarian violence was the fault of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who, in this view, had empowered the Islamist movement and thus animosity against non-Muslim communities. But Egypt’s Muslim-Christian divide was not about Mubarak, any more than the United States was responsible for the murder of Christians in Iraq or Israel is responsible for the flight of Christians from Bethlehem and other towns in the West Bank.

Nor did sectarianism begin, as many believe it did, with the age of European colonialism, or with the Ottomans. While the French, the British, and the Ottomans hardly played constructive roles in taming the region’s sectarian furies, the problem goes back much further, at least to the Arab conquest of what we have come to call the Arabic-speaking Middle East.

The pact of Omar, named for Omar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph after Muhammad, stipulated the various laws and restrictions under which non-Muslims would be allowed to conduct their affairs. Their relative freedom, or burden, depended on the disposition of the particular caliph or the local authorities, but their legal status was never equal to that of Muslims. They were protected people, known as dhimmis.

Some regional minorities, by dint of their temperament and accidents of geography, were able to defend themselves with some success. Lebanon’s Maronite and Druze communities, for instance, made their strongholds in the mountains where they could cut intruders to ribbons. It is well known that the Druze community tends to align itself with the local power regardless of whether they’re based in Lebanon, Syria, or Israel. Historically the Maronites are somewhat more stubborn, and perhaps one of the great tragedies of the Lebanese civil war is that in its aftermath large parts of this proud community under the leadership of Gen. Michel Aoun have aligned themselves with the country’s Shia militia, Hezbollah. Part of the reason for that is the Maronites’ historical fear and hatred of the Sunnis and the wish, as Aoun has explained, to be protected against them by the Shia. This is the same reason why those Syrian-Americans in Michigan rallied in support of Assad: They feared what the Sunnis might do to their relatives.

The price of being a dhimmi is not just physical fear but intellectual confusion and moral corruption. Arab nationalism is largely the work of ideologues drawn from Middle Eastern minorities like the Syrian theorist of Baathism Michel ’Aflaq, who was Greek Orthodox. Arab identity, at least in its earliest iterations, was largely a product of the minorities’ desire to hide their sectarian identities from the Sunni majority. The minorities believed they had a better chance of blending in as part of one massive super-tribe, the Arabs, when as Christians or members of heterodox Shia sects like Alawites they were vulnerable. Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father and Syria’s former president, embraced Arab nationalism in order to legitimize his rule over Syria’s Sunni majority and protect his Alawite community. The present uprising in Syria shows that the thread is starting to become undone—sectarianism is starting to rear its head, and the minorities are terrified of the mostly Sunni opposition in the streets of Syrian cities.

It is hard not to sympathize with the regional minorities and their fear. However, it is also difficult not to be appalled by their support for a regime that is slaughtering children. One picture from the Dearborn event shows three Christian clergymen in the front row, all of them evidently supporters of Bashar al-Assad, which is unfortunately a common position among Syria’s Christian clergy, Catholics, and the Orthodox. “Definitely the Christians in Syria support Bashar al-Assad,” Yohana Ibrahim, the Syriac Orthodox Archbishop of Aleppo told Reuters last month. “They hope that this storm will not spread.” The rather inconvenient fact for the archbishop is that Assad is trying to quell that storm by torturing and murdering people. The question is: What can be the point of preserving a Christian community if its values have been so thoroughly perverted? Or how many Sunni corpses is a church worth?

It’s not just Christians and Muslim minority sects who are afflicted with this moral sickness, but Jews as well. Jack Avital, head of the Sephardic National Alliance and a leader of the Syrian-Jewish community of North America, has been in touch with Syrian officials in Damascus and in the United States and seems to think Assad is an “honest guy” who is “protecting the minute Jewish community still in place in Damascus.” Avital thinks a regime that buries its opponents in mass graves is OK because in Syria “the Jewish community is doing well.” Compare this repugnant calculation to the position of all of Israel’s senior officials, from the prime minister and president to the defense and foreign ministers, who have condemned Assad’s massacre.

How did the Middle East’s Jewish minority escape this sickness? The state of Israel. Of all the Middle Eastern states carved up in the aftermath of World War I, Israel is the sole success story—politically, economically, socially, and technologically. Moreover, it has safeguarded the lives of a regional minority with minimal oppression of and maximum participation by other groups who are also citizens of the state. By establishing a Jewish majority in Palestine, Israel distinguished itself from other regional minority groups that succeeded in gaining control of a state while remaining minorities, like the Alawites in Syria, whose record has been one of stagnation, oppression, and plunder.

So, when it comes to the Holocaust, maybe the Arabs are right: The crimes of Europe need not justify the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. There is plenty of justification to be found in the Middle East. Without Israel, the region would lose its one success story—and the Jews of the Middle East would be yet another group of fearful, oppressed, and vulnerable dhimmis.

Now the evidence is growing that at least some part of the ISI and the Pakistani army was, in fact, actively complicit in hiding Bin Laden for the past five years. The evidence laid out Friday in the New York Times and based on cell phones found in the hideout is not a smoking gun, but it is very suggestive. Bin Laden was in regular contact with the Harakat ul Mujahedin terror group, which the ISI created in the 1980s to fight India. The Harakat ul Mujahedin has loyally worked with the ISI for decades, and its members hijacked an Indian airliner in 1999 with al-Qaida and the ISI. Fazlur Rehman Khalil, head of Harakat ul Mujahedin, lives openly in an Islamabad suburb.

If Harakat helped Bin Laden, it is not hard to imagine that someone in the ISI knew that the world’s most wanted terrorist was been hidden somewhere inside Pakistan.

There is other circumstantial evidence of official Pakistani complicity in hiding Bin Laden. The commandant of the Kakul academy in 2006 was General Nadeem Taj, the right-hand man of former President Pervez Musharraf. After his service in Abbottabad, Taj became director general of the ISI in late 2007. On his watch, the ISI blew up the Indian embassy in Kabul and Benazir Bhutto was murdered by al-Qaida. The U.N. investigation of Benazir’s murder held the ISI as possibly culpable.

In September 2008, the George W. Bush Administration demanded that Taj be fired. Instead, he was promoted to corps commander. The terrorist attacks on Mumbai came a month later, and we know the ISI helped plan that. Taj had the means and access in 2006 to help Bin Laden, and he is clearly a problematic partner. Not a smoking gun by any means, but suggestive.

Pakistan is home to more terrorists than any other country, many of them harbored by the Pakistani army and the ISI. Osama Bin Laden’s deputy and now heir, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is probably somewhere nearby. Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the tactical maestro of the Sept. 11 attacks, was living in Pakistan’s military capital, Rawalpindi, when he was captured (albeit with the ISI’s help). Mullah Omar, Emir of Believers to al-Qaida and head of the Afghan Taliban, was trained by the ISI and commutes between Quetta and Karachi. Hafez Saed, head of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant Islamist group, and mastermind of the Mumbai massacre, lives and preaches openly in Lahore. Dawood Ibrahim, who killed hundreds with bombs on Mumbai’s metro in 1993, lives in Karachi. There are no secrets here—the south Asian press reports their hideouts on a regular basis.

Pakistan’s civilian government is not implicated in any of this. Nor is Pakistan al-Qaida’s patronage akin to Iran’s role with Hezbollah. Pakistan is as much a victim of terror as its sponsor. It is a maze of contradictions. Analogies to the Cold War partnerships that matched patron state to terrorist group don’t work in Pakistan. The army sponsors some groups like Harakat and Lashkar-e-Taiba, but it is at war with others like the Pakistan Taliban. In the case of other terror groups like al-Qaida, the government is infiltrated by sympathizers. These varying relationships pose unique challenges that need tailored responses.

So, what should the United States do with Pakistan? First, we should tell the Pakistani army leadership that if we learn one of their officers is involved in harboring terrorists, planning terror operations, or tipping terrorist bomb factories off to drone raids, we will make it personal. Don’t sanction the country or the ISI; sanction individuals. Hold them accountable. That officer will go on our terrorist most-wanted list, and we will seize his property if we can, arrest him if he travels, expel his kids from school here or in England, and—if he is truly dangerous enough—take direct action. We should not do this alone. We should get allies, especially the British, to help, since Pakistanis love to visit London and send their kids to school in the United Kingdom.

Second, we will need a base to stage unilateral operations into Pakistan for the foreseeable future. We can hope al-Qaida will implode soon, but we cannot count on that. The Arabian Sea is too far away. So, we need a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan so we can continue to send drones and commandos over the Pakistani border. We don’t need 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, but we do need Afghan permission to operate in that country for the long term. That is the other hard lesson of Abbottabad.

Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow in the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, is a former Central Intelligence Agency officer and the author of Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America, and the Future of the Global Jihad.

• Just how “indefensible” are the 1967 borders? (And also, does it matter, given that President Obama did not suggest a return to them?) [AP/WP]

• Hezbollah’s leader condemned Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu for their “mortal blow” to the peace process, and threatened rockets. [Haaretz]

• Jared Lee Loughner, the man who allegedly shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed several others, was judged mentally unfit to stand trial right now. [AP/The Slatest]

• Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad was released from the hospital following his heart attack earlier this week. [JTA]

• Excellent profile of the French-Jewish playwright Yasmina Reza. [NYT]

We all need someone we can bleed on.

It’s easy to forget amid the hype surrounding the big keynote speeches that the true point of AIPAC’s wonk-fest is to rally its activists for the final day of scheduled lobbying meetings, tomorrow, with members of Congress. And while all the external attention has been on the very public dialogue between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu about the terms of future peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians, AIPAC’s internal message to the volunteers who will be fanning out across Capitol Hill is focused on another issue: The Iranian nuclear threat. (The dynamic at last year’s AIPAC conference was nearly identical: The presidential-level Israel-Palestine rhetoric got all the public attention while the activists cared most about Congress and Iran.)

The Iranian issue has the advantage of being an easy bipartisan sell and of direct security concern to the United States. “Make no mistake, this is a war of wills,” AIPAC’s executive director, Howard Kohr, said in a half-hour-long address to the full plenary session this morning. “Iran sees this moment as a chance to project its power—its radical agenda—into regimes across the region.” Accordingly, Kohr went on, “Are we in the West, are we in the United States committed to stopping Iran?” And, more specifically, to pushing the administration to punish the murderous (and Iran-allied) Assad regime in Syria and to ensuring that the post-transition government in Egypt remains committed to upholding that country’s peace with Israel? “It falls to us,” Kohr added. “We must re-focus our policymakers’ attention on what Iran is doing in this time of turmoil—its efforts to cultivate fifth columns in neighboring nations to advance Iranian ends, its use of terror-by-proxy, its relentless march toward a nuclear weapon.”

During regionally-focused breakout sessions, trainers will be instructing delegates to steer the conversation during their brief Hill appointments away from the disagreements between Obama and the Israeli government and toward the subversive influence Iran exerts in the region, not just on Hamas, but on Hezbollah and in Syria as well. They will leave armed with packets detailing three talking points, ranked in the following order: Support $3 billion in assistance to Israel to combat the threat from Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah; get on board the already-circulating sanctions-focused Iran Threat Reduction Act; and vote to suspend aid to the Palestinian Authority unless Iran-backed Hamas agrees to recognize Israel.

The last point shows that even conversations about the peace process can be structured to reflect the pressing Iranian subtext. In a videotaped “lobbying minute” lesson aired just before Kohr’s speech, AIPAC’s deputy director for policy and government affairs David Gillette highlighted the need for delegates to push their congressional representatives to oppose both the unilateral Palestinian push for statehood and any peace talks that include “unreformed” members of Hamas—incidentally, an identical position to the one Obama explicitly articulated in his address yesterday (and his speech Thursday). “That’s the message you need to take to Congress,” Gillette said, by way of signing off. The audience erupted in cheers.

Earlier: At AIPAC Summit, Obama Stays His Course
AIPAC Delegates Hit the Hill

But what if it doesn’t come to an end? Last Friday more than a hundred people were killed in 18 cities and villages around Syria. Another 100 disappeared with no record of their arrest. On Saturday, snipers shot mourners trying to bury their dead. On Monday, tanks and infantry units surrounded the city of Deraa, where the uprising first broke out six weeks ago. So far, at least 400 are dead, a higher total than in Egypt, which has roughly four times the population of Syria.

So, what should Washington do next? Previously, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained that the United States intervened on behalf of the armed Libyan rebels because the regime’s forces were firing on their own people from airplanes. Presumably, then, so long as Assad continues using only tanks, snipers, and battalions of army troops against peaceful demonstrators, he is safe. There are rumors of sanctions that may target Assad’s brother, who has led some of the shock troops against protesters, but probably not the president himself. As one administration official explained, Assad “sees himself as a Westernized leader … and we think he’ll react if he believes he is being lumped in with brutal dictators.”

There is some legitimate concern about what happens if Assad falls. Who will rule Syria next? Perhaps, as Assad warns, there is a powerful Islamist current that will come to power in this Sunni majority (70 percent) country now controlled by a ruling clique drawn from the minority Alawite sect. But Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, decimated the Muslim Brotherhood during the ’70s and ’80s, culminating in the 1982 destruction of Hama, where tens of thousands of Syrians were slaughtered by the country’s security forces. Most of Syria’s Salafist groups have been penetrated by the regime and used against its adversaries in Lebanon and Iraq. So, the Islamist current in Syria is hardly as powerful or cohesive as Assad’s apologists make it out to be.

The Obama Administration’s cautious Syria policy is not pragmatic and realist; it is, rather, an ideological fantasy. The White House is worried not about what happens to U.S. interests after Assad, but about how to salvage a campaign promise that has been thwarted by reality. The Obama White House is sheltering Assad for the same reason it was slow to support Iran’s green movement when it took to the streets in June 2009. Just as Obama held out hope for talking to the Islamic Republic, he still wants to engage Syria. The Obama Administration’s entire Middle East policy is premised on getting Damascus back to the negotiating table with Israel. Accomplishing that goal, the administration believes, will not only win the United States the favor of the Arab and Muslim masses, but it will also drive a wedge between Syria and its ally Iran.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has always been pessimistic that Washington could separate Damascus and Tehran. Nonetheless, official Israel isn’t saying much these days, because no one has any idea of what follows the Assads, or if it would be better or worse for Israel. The Assads have kept the border on the Golan quiet since 1973, even as they’ve waged war against the Jewish State through proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas, built secret nuclear facilities, maintained thousands of missiles armed with chemical warheads pointed at Israeli cities, and aligned their interests with Iran. In spite of this, there are almost as many Israeli officials as there are U.S. policymakers who believe Syria wants a peace deal—Defense Minister Ehud Barak most prominent among them.

And yet over the last 30 years it is Syria more than any actor that has brought war to Israel, on its borders and within, through terrorist assets and allies. If Damascus has not itself waged direct state-to-state war on the Jewish State, it is not because it doesn’t want to but because it cannot. Nor can it make peace with Israel. Forget for a moment the strategic reasons why Syria can’t sign a deal—that if Israel returns the Golan Heights as part of a full peace agreement the Damascus regime loses a legitimacy based on its war footing, or that without war against Israel, Syria no longer gets to burnish its prestige by bargaining with Washington. Consider instead the nature of the regime: A ruling clique whose snipers shoot its own children is not going to make peace with its own people, let alone with Israel.

The other problem with the fantasy of a Syrian peace track is that the peace process no longer exists. Obama unwittingly threw it under the bus when he abandoned Egypt President Hosni Mubarak, who kept the peace with Israel for more than 30 years at some personal risk to his own life. By trashing Mubarak, the White House showed that the so-called peace process isn’t really all that important to Washington. In Egypt, winning the love of the masses meant siding with the young social media activists-cum-populists and the Muslim Brotherhood when they wanted to pull down a U.S. ally who supported the most consequential peace treaty between the Arabs and Israel.

Nonetheless, the Obama White House has no other tricks up its sleeve in the Middle East. The Palestinian track has become reduced to Washington, the one-time regional power-broker, now petitioning Abbas to refrain from unilaterally announcing statehood. The hopelessness of the Israeli-Palestinian track is one reason why the administration keeps insisting Assad live up to his billing in Washington as a “reformer.” In reality, Assad put away any thought of reform a little less than a year after he took power following his father Hafez’s death in 2000. The so-called Damascus Spring was short-lived because Assad, only 35 at the time, knew then what the 82-year-old Mubarak would only understand when it was too late—opening the door to reform gives your opponents enough leverage to push it wide open and toss you out.

In the aftermath of Mubarak’s downfall, no Arab regime has failed to observe the lesson. Hence, instead of reforming a vicious political system that permits Bahrain’s ruling Al Khalifa family to treat the country’s Shia majority as second-class citizens, the government of Bahrain called in a 4,000-strong Gulf Cooperation Council force to terrorize Shia. Instead of reforming their medieval system, the Saudi royal family merely bought off their subjects with a $93 billion bribe.

When Obama officials call Assad a reformer, they are not making excuses for Assad but for themselves. Were they to admit to themselves and others that the Syrian president is a serial murderer of his own people as well as of Americans and their allies around the region, including Iraqis, Lebanese, Israelis, and Palestinians, Washington might have to design a new Syria policy. But in place of a rational intellect and a moral center, all the White House has is an imaginary peace process, a pipe dream that requires the “reform-minded” Bashar al-Assad to come to his senses and engage with Washington.

America’s special treatment of Syria long precedes the Obama Administration, as I’ve noted. U.S. diplomats have been coloring the Assads (the son and before him the father) in favorable hues ever since the family came to power. “Hafez always keeps his word” was the favored slogan of U.S. envoys for years, even as the Syrian president’s terrorist assets killed U.S. citizens and allies. American policymakers just back from Damascus liked to describe Hafez as a tough bargainer who can talk for hours straight without permitting his interlocutors to go to the bathroom. That is to say, U.S. officials turned the degradation that Hafez served them into a gourmet meal.

In the end, concern over who follows Assad is just another way of covering for the inadequacies of Washington’s Syria policy. It doesn’t matter who rules Syria—whether it’s ruled by the country’s well-educated merchant class, the Islamists, or, while unlikely, a broad multi-sectarian coalition of liberal democrats. Maybe, as one Lebanese journalist told me recently in Beirut, no one will rule Syria for some time. One likely scenario for Syria is that it will return to its pre-Assad character, scored by coups and counter-coups, a country that is a problem only for itself and incapable of exporting its problems to its neighbors as Damascus has done for the past 40 years—with Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, as well as Israel.

Sure, things can always get worse, especially in the Middle East. But not in Syria. It can’t get any worse than the Assads’ regime, or, rather, what could be worse? A regime that actually fires those chemical warheads at Israel, or activates its secret nuclear program and builds a bomb? The only limits the regime in Damascus knows are those that have been imposed from without, and not often enough by Washington. The end of this cancer might go a long way toward healing an American policymaking community whose Syria policies have been riddled with moral sickness for almost half a century.

• Amir Mizroch lays out exactly why Israel is in deep trouble when the U.N. General Assembly rolls around in September. [Forecast Highs]

• Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit offers a biting rebuke to the Israeli left on the occasion of Juliano Mer-Khamis’s murder. [Haaretz]

• “What kind of kosher steakhouse is filled with rambunctious yahoos and hot jazz music at 1 in the morning?” “Uh … the best damn kosher steakhouse on the Upper West Side!” [Vos Iz Neias?/DNAinfo]

• Orthodox Brooklyn Rabbi Mordecai Fish became the latest to go down in the Solomon Dwek sting, pleading guilty today to knowingly laundering $900,000 of criminal proceeds. [DOJ/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Baruch S. Blumberg did not only discover Hepatitis B and show how it could lead to liver cancer—he then helped develop the vaccine. He died Tuesday at 85. [NYT]

• An interesting take on how the logistics of reporting have helped foment anti-Israel bias among the media. [Standpoint/Jewish Ideas Daily]

• A study shows that the United States could learn much from Israel’s health care system. Of course, since Israel has universal health care for its citizens, that’s probably a lost cause. [JTA]

• Roger Cohen’s column on Richard Goldstone’s mea culpa—excuse me, his “volte-face”—is weird and kind of incoherent. [NYT]

• The keynote speaker at Christians United for Israel’s annual conference in July in Washington, D.C., will be soon-to-be-ex-Fox News host Glenn Beck. [JTA]

• Though abandoned, Lifta, just north of Jerusalem, is the last intact pre-1948 Arab village in Israel. The Palestinians want it to be an open-air museum; the Israelis want to build apartments there. [LAT]

• Worth re-reading Moshe Halbertal’s masterful takedown of the Goldstone Report from late 2009 in light of the week’s events. [TNR]

The Passover story, told through Google.

Official silence over the killings in Syria is the fruit of America’s very weird love affair with one of the world’s leading state sponsors of terror. This emotional attachment, shared by U.S. policymakers, diplomats, and our intelligentsia, has been going on for decades, but it has reached a kind of apotheosis during the Obama Administration, during which officials have rushed to podiums across Washington to apologize for a regime that is picking off its own people with sniper fire.

“Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week. Caught by critics in that absurdity, Clinton tried to ameliorate her comments by explaining that she was merely relaying the opinions of others. But even then, she went back to the well of fantasy one more time. “We’re also going to continue to urge that the promise of reform will actually be turned into reality,” Clinton said.

Maybe it’s because Sen. John Kerry is a likely replacement for Clinton as secretary of State that he veered in the other direction and criticized Assad last week. Or maybe it’s just because he’s finally come to realize that he’s been made to look like a fool over the last few years by hawking a pro-Syria line. Even as recently as March 16, Kerry praised the Syrian president for the generosity he personally extended to the former Democratic presidential candidate during his half-dozen visits to Damascus over the last half-decade. And at the State Department, there’s Syria hand Fred Hof who, according to former Washington policymakers, doesn’t like hearing ill spoken of this murderous regime lest it shatter his dreams for an Israeli-Syrian peace deal—and his pet project, a “peace park” in the Golan Heights.

Still, self-delusion regarding Syria has been going on for years in Washington—regardless of which party is in office. The George W. Bush Administration spent several years trying to offer inducements to get the Syrian regime to alter its behavior, before it finally withdrew the U.S. ambassador to Damascus over Syria’s suspected involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. When Bush’s rivals wanted to take him on, Syria was one of their favorite venues. Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, for example, made a memorable shopping tour through the charmed arcades of Damascus’ markets while the Syrians were killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Even in the 1980s and ’90s, Syria occupied a privileged position in Washington—immune to rational calculations or moral revulsion about the behavior of its leaders. President Bill Clinton’s secretaries of State, Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, wore themselves out with shuttle diplomacy trying to placate then-president Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father. And George H.W. Bush’s secretary of State, James Baker, turned a blind eye to Syrian-backed terror to kick-start the Arab-Israeli peace process.

That self-abasement of U.S. diplomats in Damascus is a longstanding habit of American Middle East policy doesn’t explain why they keep behaving this way. Our government does lots of bad things in the Middle East on behalf of what it says are U.S. interests. Some of them are done intentionally, like backing the ruling regime in Bahrain even as it brutally represses a peaceful Shia majority. Some are done absent-mindedly, like when George H.W. Bush’s administration encouraged Iraqi Shia and Kurds to rebel against Saddam Hussein and then did nothing to protect them from his retaliation.

But just because Washington’s willingness to give a free pass to the Syrians can be well-documented doesn’t make it any less weird; in fact, none of the oft-cited reasons for U.S. support of the Syrian dictatorship make any sense at all. If the Assad regime is key to the Arab-Israeli peace process, then it’s not clear why the White House helped usher out Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who abided by the Camp David accords for 30 years at some personal risk. Assad, on the other hand, uses the peace process as leverage to enhance his regional position while he sponsors Hezbollah and Hamas terrorist attacks against Israel. In fact, before the protests started in Syria, Assad claimed that it was his lack of relations with Israel that made his regime safer than the former Egyptian president’s. Syria is stable, said Assad, because its policies are “very closely linked to the beliefs of the people.” In other words, if the Syrian people prefer resistance to peace, there’s no way he’s ever going to sign a deal.

Maybe Washington is protective of Syria because, as U.S. journalist Seymour Hersh is fond of claiming, Assad was once very helpful in rounding up terrorists. But, then again, the Obama Administration is looking to remove Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has waged a campaign against al-Qaida on our behalf; Damascus, in contrast, has served as a transit point for al-Qaida fighters to go into Iraq to kill American soldiers.

Maybe Washington supports Syria because it believes Assad’s admonitions that getting rid of his regime will create a vacuum that will be filled by al-Qaida or other Sunni extremists. But if that’s the case, why is the administration committing U.S. resources in Libya in order to back those rebels fighting Qaddafi, aka al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb? Washington has long feared that Assad will be replaced by a Muslim Brotherhood government, but that alibi is no longer serviceable since the Obama Administration’s trashing of Mubarak gave the Brotherhood political clout in Egypt that it never had under the tenure of our long-time ally.

Maybe it’s because under President Barack Obama’s new multilateral dispensation his administration is following the lead of our European allies on Syria, just as we are on Libya. The Europeans are scared of bringing down Assad, said one European diplomat, because in Syria “you have some extremist networks, connections with Iran, Hezbollah.” Yet those networks exist in Syria because of the regime already in place, the stated policy of which is to ally itself with Iran and Hezbollah.

When the Syrian protesters first took to the streets, they chanted, “No to Iran, No to Hezbollah,” which suggests they share an interest with the Obama Administration, which believes that separating Syria from its ally Iran will weaken Tehran. But if that’s the case, the White House ought to do all in its power to enable anti-regime forces to do their work, for if the ruling Alawite clique falls, it will be replaced by a Sunni regime that will separate itself from Iran as a matter of course.

It’s just plain illogical that Washington won’t come out against Damascus. And in the Middle East, when things are most illogical, folks point to Israel as the prime mover. Lots of Arabs think the United States won’t do anything about Syria because the Israelis are calling the shots and they’re happy with a relatively weak regime that for 40 years has kept the border on the Golan Heights one of the quietest in all of the Middle East. And yet the truth is that over the last few years the Israelis have done just about anything they could to damage the Syrian regime’s prestige. They killed hundreds of Syria’s praetorian guard in Lebanon in the 2006 war against Hezbollah. They assassinated Hezbollah legend Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus; and an Israeli sniper brought down Gen. Mohammed Suleiman, who handled many of Syria’s most sensitive portfolios, while he was vacationing in the Alawite stronghold of Lattakia. Perhaps most important, the Israelis destroyed Syria’s secret nuclear facility in Deir al-Zour in 2007—against the wishes of then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Maybe in the end the U.S. soft spot for Syria is just a matter of aesthetic preference. As Robert Kaplan documents in The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite, starting almost a century ago the State Department’s Middle East specialists swooned over Damascus’ oriental refinements, the tiled courtyards and fountains secreted behind monuments of Mamluk and Ottoman design. Perhaps our diplomatic aesthetes share a sensibility with the fashion and travel writers who venture into what the Assad regime likes to call the capital of Arab resistance. Most recently, Joan Juliet Buck traveled to Damascus to grovel at the feet of the Assads in a profile of the first lady, Asma, (photographed by James Nachtwey) for Vogue magazine. It’s not surprising a fashionista would be swept away by a woman with good taste in handbags, but that U.S. policymakers and diplomats are blind to this dark regime’s murderous style is something else again.

Because of Passover, Lee Smith will be off for the next two weeks. His next column publishes April 27.

• How Iran lies behind all of the United States’ calculations during this time of regional upheaval. [NYT]

• In Egypt, the religious radicals are very much involving themselves in the political process, and are likely to achieve success (and the grand mufti says this is all workable). [NYT]

• Ever since Hezbollah toppled Lebanon’s Western-backed government, the U.S. has halted weapons shipments. [WSJ]

• Israel will likely soon approve nearly one thousand new houses in East Jerusalem. [AP/WP]

• Israel is appealing to the U.N. to stop a planned May Gaza flotilla, like last year’s. [Reuters/NYT]

The fact that a wave of revolutions has shaken the foundations of Arab politics without the slightest apparent connection to popular outrage against Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians should be surprising to most experts and politicians in the West. For over four decades, the driving idea behind the West’s approach to the Middle East has been the supposed centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to Arab popular anger at the West and its key to ensuring the stability of the West’s favored regimes. That the price tag for this American diplomatic instrument has been thousands of dead Jews and several lost generations of Arabs has, in the upside-down world of Mideast policymakers, made the achievement of an ever-elusive peace deal seem all the more important with every passing year.

This idea was a convenient point of agreement between Washington policymakers and Arab regimes. For Washington, the peace process was a good source of photo ops and a chance to show concern for human rights in the region without interfering with the propensity of America’s Arab allies to torture and murder their political opponents. As for the regimes, they were happy to escape criticism of their own failures—rampant corruption, lack of basic human rights and freedoms, and violence against the Arabs they rule—by blaming Israel.

Now the notion that the genie of revolution in the Arab world can be put back in the bottle by blaming Israel is laughable. Even Arab populations with no special love for the Jewish state know that the regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and now Syria were not loved or hated by their people because of their adherence or opposition to the Palestinian cause. In fact, one of the most baffling things about the current wave of Arab revolutions to professional Middle East watchers must be the complete absence of any mention of the Palestinians in popular demonstrations and regime counter-propaganda alike.

However there is a clear connection between the Palestinian cause and the wave of popular discontent that has upended the foundations of Arab politics. By pushing the centrality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the past four decades, the West has helped to underwrite Arab repression at home. The rationale behind the emergency laws in places like Syria and Egypt (even now after Cairo’s “revolution”) is that because of the war with Israel, the Arab security states must be ever-vigilant and therefore forbid their people from exercising basic rights like freedom of speech—or, in the words of Gamal Abdel Nasser, “no voice louder than the cry of battle”—diktats that they enforce through torture and murder.

If the recent wave of revolutions in Arab countries has proven anything it is that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process isn’t even a convenient fiction by which Washington can make nice to the Arabs. Rather, it has been a recipe for failure on a grand scale—social, political, and economic—that has now been laid bare. While the Arab regimes are being held responsible for their failures by their fed-up populations, Washington seems to feel no need to hold itself accountable for the collapse of a set of enabling fictions that has greatly diminished our position in a region that is of crucial strategic importance for the United States both militarily and economically.

***

So, who might have an interest in the sort of disruption and realignments the Jerusalem bus bombing has caused? Maybe it was the Syrians tapping a few of their Palestinian assets to heat things up in Israel. With so many people on the streets of Syrian cities burning pictures of President Bashar al-Assad and toppling statues of his father, Hafez, from whom he inherited this authoritarian Baathist regime, the leadership in Damascus could sure use a lifeline. And the U.S. administration, always on the prowl for another go at the peace process, is happy to throw it one.

Or perhaps it was the Islamic Republic of Iran, attacking Israel through proxies in order to signal to Washington that maybe they’re ready to come to the table at last. If this turns out to be the case, it will be worth remembering that President Barack Obama failed to support the protesters who took to the streets for Iran’s Green Revolution in June 2009—because he wanted to engage an Iranian regime he thought was ready to deal on a host of Israel-related matters, such as Hezbollah and Iran’s nuclear program.

Of course even then the blame couldn’t fall exclusively on Obama. It’s all a matter of perspective, for in reality everyone plays the same vicious hand, from U.S. presidents to Arab regimes, as well as Arab “liberals,” and even the government of Israel itself.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for example, reached out to Syria when he embarked on a quiet round of negotiations with Damascus under Turkey’s supervision in 2007. Up until then, President George W. Bush’s administration had put the Syrians in isolation after their suspected involvement in the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. But Olmert was facing a domestic crisis, including charges of corruption, and he knows how the game works—as soon as the international community gets a whiff of the peace process, everything else is put aside: The Arab regimes get a free pass for killing Arabs if they say they’re willing to talk to the Jews.

Still, Olmert’s opening freed the Syrians from their separation and brought the rest of an international community back to Damascus on bended knee—with France in the forefront. So what if the Syrians tortured their own people, murdered Lebanese journalists and political figures, and helped kill U.S. soldiers and American allies in Iraq, as well as Palestinians and Israelis? Olmert needed some breathing space, and the rest of the world was happy to comply.

***

Whoever attacked Israel last week knows how the game works, too, and sure enough in short order the U.S. policy community jumped to attention. Instead of pushing to cut off the regime in Damascus as the Syrian people braved death to go the streets, American policymakers like Sen. John Kerry and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered their bona fides. “There is a different leader in Syria now,” Clinton said of the man believed responsible for ordering the murder of Hariri. “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.” Never mind that her own State department says rather that Syria is a state sponsor of terror; Washington will do nothing to help the Syrians who’ve come out against their own government, because the U.S. president is going to make good on his word to engage dictators, no matter how many Arabs have to die as he proves his point.

The pro-Israel community in the United States must also share in the blame, or at least that large segment of it that has invested its energy and money in backing the peace process. Some say peace talks have to bring in the hardliners, like Hamas and Hezbollah—even as that means empowering those who have most to gain through murder. Those who want to keep the terrorist outfits out of negotiations are less stupid than they are cynical, for they know that in truth any agreement without Hamas and Hezbollah isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Others say that the peace process is phony, but it’s a diplomatic tool that Washington uses to keep our Muslim allies off our back.

And finally there are the Arab “liberals,” those Western-educated intellectuals who fill the editorial pages of the U.S. press with pleas to push harder on the peace process lest we empower the radicals. But at this stage the peace process does nothing except empower radicals by providing them with a staging ground.

The peace process wasn’t so bad when it started. Sure, President Jimmy Carter nearly undermined the prospects for an Egyptian-Israeli treaty when he tried to bring in the Palestinians and Syrians, but Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was savvy enough to escape the American president’s grand plans. And surely Sadat’s idea of reorienting Egypt from the Soviet Union toward the United States was a good thing for the Egyptian people. There’s also a Jordanian-Israeli deal on the books. But we’re just now beginning to see how high the price is.

There are the thousands of Israelis who were killed and injured when Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Palestinian factions negotiated on behalf of Syria, Iran, and others through the use of terror. And there are the thousands of Arabs killed and injured when the Israelis responded. But this is no “meaningless” cycle of violence; rather, it is the product of a deliberate diplomatic process overseen by the world’s oldest democracy. It was the United States that kept going back to the well over and over, with U.S. policymakers telling themselves that anything was worth the chance of peace.

Suicide bombing and the attacks of Sept. 11 were the logical conclusions to a strategy that started with a fund of surplus Arab youth that the regimes could dispose of as they saw fit. It is that same disposable youth that have taken to the streets these last three months—Arab men under the age of 30 who have no prospects because their regimes turned their countries into economic basket-cases and physical torture chambers, with Washington’s blessing. What they got in return for their suffering were the other-worldly fictions of a peace process that have now been laid bare.

This week I’ll argue the other side—not just that Israel will be fine but rather that it is the rest of the Middle East that is in big trouble. Recent history and statistics show that in order to survive Arab and Muslim societies are going to have to forget about the notion of an Islamic alternative to modernity and will instead have to adopt what they have typically described as Western values but are in reality the universal values of political modernity. Learning to live like the West is not going to come through buying more Western goods—from cell-phones to tanks—or even earning more Western diplomas but by embracing those values as embodied by the one country in the region that lives them. The Arab model for success is not Iran, or Turkey, but Israel.

In its essence, Israel is the West—a culmination of its successes and a symbol of its failures, a reminder of a millennia-old madness, anti-Semitism, and the failure of the Enlightenment. Criticism of Israel is very often a reflection of the bad faith of a Western intelligentsia and political class uncomfortable with its history and unsure of its moral bearings. That Europeans frequently hold negative attitudes toward Israel while the vast majority of Americans are favorable to it can be explained in part by how each society came out of World War II.

Europe’s war, and the mass slaughter of its Jews, revealed that the continent’s great cathedrals were built upon a bedrock of pagan barbarism celebrated in different ways by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. It was left to the United States to pick up the banner of Western civilization and lead the West to victory during the Cold War after the Europeans had trashed it.

Unlike their European cousins, contemporary Americans still read the Bible and understand that the Jewish nation is a historical reality connected to a living narrative that shapes the present in a constructive and desirable way. Americans abandoned replacement theology (or the notion that Jesus’ resurrection superseded God’s covenant with the Jews) after the Holocaust in order to embrace their elder brothers—as did Pope John Paul II, who lent his moral authority to President Ronald Reagan’s conviction that America’s victory in the Cold War was a historical necessity.

That is to say, pro-Israel Americans have also tended to misunderstand Israel’s place in the world. Yes, the point of Jewish self-determination is that the Jews can protect themselves. Yet the West needs Israel to succeed, because its success is a marker of our ability and determination to defend our values and our interests, in the Middle East and elsewhere.

And the truth is that Israel has been doing a remarkably good job of it, especially in the past 20 years. Israel is an IT powerhouse with more companies listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange than any other country except the United States, and its scientists have produced more tech patents than all of Asia. Last year Israel ranked 17th out of 58 of the world’s most economically developed nations, while the country’s economy was rated the most durable in the face of crises and rated first in investments in research and development centers. The Bank of Israel was ranked first among central banks for its efficient functioning.

Contrasting Israel’s performance with that of its neighbors, most of whom still abide by the half-century-long Arab boycott of the Jewish state, throws Israel’s achievements into even sharper relief. Consider Egypt, with a literacy rate anywhere between 50 to 70 percent, and considerably lower among women. The country’s unemployment rate is believed to be twice the official level of 10 percent, and 40 percent of the population lives on less than two dollars a day. While the Syrian regime proudly supports the resistance, thousands of its own people are suffering with a drought in the eastern part of the country that has ravaged crops and livestock. Iran’s nuclear program and full-throated opposition to the United States and the Zionist entity may make it the envy of some fans of resistance in the region, but the fact is that an Iranian bomb is the Hail Mary pass of a dying society where there’s been no economic development for 30 years.

If you follow these two trend lines, it is easy to project what the fate of these two different civilizations is likely to be. Israel will enjoy the ups and navigate the downs of the global economy and, if the last two years are any indication, will weather those setbacks better than most. For the Arabs things are only going to get worse.

The college graduates who took to the streets in Cairo to protest their lack of opportunity are going to have to keep coming back because the problem was not simply the corruption of the Mubarak regime. Rather, the issue is that the Egyptian people themselves are deluded if they think bogus business degrees are going to earn them a place in a globalized economy. By and large, the Arabs are simply not prepared to compete with the rest of the world. When the oil runs out, it will crush not only the energy-exporting nations but all of the Arab countries whose economies, like Egypt’s, depend heavily on guest-worker receipts from the Arab Gulf states. As such, every weapon purchased by an Arab regime is effectively a down payment on a forthcoming Mad Max vision of the Middle East—including a series of civil wars like the one now under way in Libya.

The only way for the Arabs to avoid that scenario is for them to become more like Israel. Because Israel is the West, it is essential for Arab political, social, and economic development that the people of the region break with the past and embrace the Israelification of their societies. If not, the current popular demonstrations will end in yet another round of benighted dictatorships, as has repeatedly happened in the region, starting with the era of Arab independence in the 1940s.

The other choice—the typical choice—is to fight Israel, which is in the end little but a token of Arab despair. As the Arab uprisings have shown, the problems of Middle Eastern societies have little to do with Israel. So even if the dreams of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the other guardians of the resistance were fully realized and they were able to destroy Israel tomorrow, corruption, repression, and obscurantism would still be rotting away Middle Eastern societies.

The West and its values—what Israel stands for—will survive, no matter how many suicide bombers the Islamic resistance throws at it. That tactic, even if tied to religious concepts like jihad, has a built-in limit to its effectiveness in the face of people who are determined to defend themselves. Hassan Nasrallah mocks those who love life and boasts that the resistance loves death. But in the end, it will make little difference if Egypt eventually joins its army to the forces of the resistance bloc, adding tanks and planes to Hezbollah and Hamas’ rockets, Syria’s missiles, and Iran’s forthcoming bomb. The reality is that the party of life will fight to preserve it, while the party that cherishes death will reap what it desires in abundance.

Nonetheless, I do believe that, as I argued last week, events over the last few years have presented serious threats to the Jewish state—not least of which is a delegitimization campaign waged not in the region itself but from the capitals of Europe. It is a peculiar moment in history, to see Europe tottering on the precipice of resentment and obscurantism while the uprisings in the Middle East over the last two months have shown that the Arabs are perhaps on the verge of something new. Maybe the protests reveal not a revolution as such but a recognition.

Up until now, one of the more bizarre and widespread beliefs in the region is that Israel wants to be the only democracy in the Middle East—as if democracy were a limited resource it needed to hoard, like oil. The uprisings suggest that the Arabs may have come to recognize that, to paraphrase the late Egyptian writer Taha Hussein, liberty is free to everyone, like air and water.

I certainly hope so, for Israel is doing fine and the conclusion of my brief dialectic is that it will continue to thrive. The real concern is for the fate of the Arabs. The longer they continue to make Israel the focus of rejectionism and hatred, the more impossible it will become for them to join the West and arrest the death-spiral of their societies and economies. The inability of Western observers who claim to care about the fate of these societies and their people to make this point clearly and repeatedly has only damaged the cause of Arab social and political development. Now, in the midst of all the excitement following the Arab uprisings, is a moment that calls for such clarity.

Since the beginning of the Zionist enterprise, supporters like Winston Churchill have argued that the Jews of Israel would have a positive influence on their neighbors—that their industry and their values would rub off on the Arabs. Outside of Israel’s own Arab community, that hasn’t yet been the case. Either that will change now or it won’t. But whether the Arabs embrace Israel and the West, or decline into total economic, cultural, and military irrelevance within the next generation, Israel will survive and prosper.

• Hating myself for not linking to Rabbi Andy Bachman’s fantastic take on patrilineal descent in the Reform movement. [Forward]

• When is “ethnic cleansing” also “genocide”? For Israel and Jewish scholars, the question hits particularly close to home. [Forward]

• Garry Kasparov on Bobby Fischer. [NYRB]

• Kinda wish this article on Jews for Jesus had made it more clear that it believes that they’re, y’know, not Jews. [New Voices]

• Israel closed its Turkish embassy in Ankara and consulate in Istanbul in response to apparent threats from Hezbollah. [Haaretz]

GOODBYE, Uncle Leo. You made us laugh. (And condolences to cousin Jeffrey.)

• Prime Minister Netanyahu and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah traded bellicose barbs. This will definitely end well. [Ynet]

• A top U.S. intelligence director told a Senate committee that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood likely does not favor the Israeli peace treaty, but will be only one voice that gets to have a say as things progress. [Reuters/Haaretz]

• The politicians get involved in an Orthodox New Jersey gymnast’s ineligibility to be ranked because she wouldn’t compete on a Saturday. [Unorthodox Gymnastics]

• A profile of Yusuf al-Qaradawi—“Islam’s Spiritual ‘Dear Abby’”—is roughly as skeptical as Lee Smith’s. [Der Spiegel]

• Dershowitz joined Team Assange. [Haaretz]

A squad in a casual Jewish soccer league in London was suspended for trying to pass off non-Jewish ringers. In other news, have you seen Wayne Rooney’s game-winner for Man. U. against Man. City from last weekend?*:

* Posting of soccer clip should not be interpreted as a broader endorsement of soccer fandom. But, wow.

• Iran, Bahrain, and Yemen, inspired by Egypt’s example, experienced maybe their biggest anti-government protests yet (Iran’s biggest since 2009). [WP]

• “I find it very ironic that Iran is trying to give lessons in democracy to anybody,” said Secretary of State Clinton, referring to its government’s support for Egyptian protesters after it clamped down on its own street strife. Snap! [Laura Rozen]

• On the anniversary of father Rafik’s assassination, Saad Hariri, ousted from Lebanon’s prime ministership by Hezbollah, formally joined the opposition to the Hezbollah-backed government. [WSJ]

• An assistant to the judge who presided over (Jewish) Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s sentencing to eight years in prison on trumped-up, politically motivated charges went public with her allegation that the fix was in. [NYT]

• A Gallup poll shows Israel’s favorability rating in America remains consistently high, at 68 percent. [JTA]

According to the president, the way to empower America’s friends is to “get all the groups together in Egypt for an orderly transition and the one that is a meaningful transition.” As if Egypt’s liberal current isn’t weak enough already, Obama believes that the best way to ensure the sharks don’t come out on top is to throw a whole bunch of liberal guppies into the tank as well.

While the parallels between Iran in 1979 and Egypt in 2011 can be overdrawn, it is foolish to pretend that they are not there. Cairo doesn’t have to literally become a Sunni version of Tehran to do terrible damage to U.S. interests and prestige in the Middle East—and to the hopes and dreams of its own people. And the Egyptians already have their own prospective Khomeini: Yussuf al-Qaradawi, the Qatar-based Muslim Brotherhood preacher who exiled himself from Egypt in 1961.

***

Assertions that the Muslim Brotherhood and its leadership are too disorganized and uncharismatic to gain a hold on power in Egypt unaccountably ignore the world’s most popular and authoritative Sunni cleric—an Egyptian by birth and member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood whose son currently lives in Egypt. Where the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the Iranian revolution, made radio broadcasts in exile from Paris, Qaradawi hosts one of the region’s most famous talk-shows on Al Jazeera, Sharia and Life. Qaradawi has cultivated among some American analysts a reputation for moderation with his fatwas, permitting masturbation and condemning Sept. 11 (while supporting suicide bombers in Israel). But in the Middle East his popularity resides in his stringent criticism of Arab regimes. His public support for violence, combined with the fact that he is a principal shareholder in and adviser to the al-Qaida-associated Bank al-Taqwa in Switzerland, led to him being banned from entering the United States in 1999 and from Great Britain in 2008.

What makes Qaradawi most worth watching is the fact that the Egyptian party system is badly decayed, and no credible opposition figures have stepped up to fill the gap. Mohammed ElBaradei is entirely a creation of Western opinion leaders and has no constituency in Egypt. Amr Moussa has some popular appeal, but his job as general secretary of the Arab League is not a position that showcases an ability to get things done. Moreover, as Mubarak’s former foreign minister he has deep ties to the old regime. The local Muslim Brotherhood was slow out of the gate, and its 68-year-old leader, Muhammad Badie, is not exactly charismatic.

As a media personality with a presence on TV and the Internet—and who is far out of reach of Egyptian internal security and free from Egyptian censors—Qaradawi is perfectly positioned to play the role of Muslim Brotherhood publicist or even kingmaker over the coming months. Nor is there any particular reason to think that Qaradawi’s willingness to embrace facets of modernity while promoting violence and hatred makes him less than dangerous to the dream of a future liberal society in Egypt and to Western interests in the region. The idea that Qaradawi is a moderate because he favors a relatively liberal interpretation of the status of women within Islam, for example, disregards his belief that homosexuality is a crime that should be punished by death and his embrace of the Holocaust as a divine punishment of the Jews that will hopefully be repeated soon.

Here, for example, is Qaradawi speaking about the Holocaust to the audience of his popular Al Jazeera television show on January 30, 2009:

Throughout history, Allah has imposed upon the [Jews] people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them—even though they exaggerated this issue—he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers.

***

Of course, many foreign and Egyptian observers contend that Egyptians, a moderate people by nature, don’t want anything like the Iranian regime running their country. That may be true, but the only real evidence we have, aside from questionable polling, suggests something different. After all, supposedly secular and moderate Palestinian voters were not impressed with the regional failure of Islamist politics—they voted for Hamas, the Gaza branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Or consider Lebanon, where at least 30 percent of the Christian community has aligned itself with the Khomeinist project in their country via Christian leader Michel Aoun’s alliance with Hezbollah. Presumably Middle Eastern Christians are among the last people who want to live under an Islamist regime, but what they fear and despise most now is the country’s Sunni community. That is to say, there are many reasons that people might choose to go with an Islamist party, many—but not all of which—are irrational. Mubarak’s departure will almost inevitably leave the ruling National Democratic Party’s organizational structure in shambles, which means that the best-organized political party in Egypt will be the Brotherhood.

And it would be strange if, given free elections, the Brotherhood did not eventually rule Egypt, for it has not only been a pillar of Cairo’s political, cultural, and intellectual life since its founding in 1928; it is also the flower of Arab political modernity, which began with Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt.

Napoleon’s conquest left Muslim intellectuals and activists in a bind: If the ummah was, as the prophet of Islam said, the best of all people, then why had it been overrun so easily by the infidels? The answer, said the 19th-century Egyptian intellectual Muhammad Abduh—the one-time mufti of Egypt and rector of Al Azhar, a traditional seat of authority in Sunni Islam—is that Muslims had veered away from the true faith. By the end of the 19th century, Abduh believed, Islam had become riddled with fatalism and superstition; therefore, since Islam was the lifeblood of the Muslims, it was hardly surprising that the ummah was weak. The answer, Abduh argued, was to purge Islam of its non-Islamic excesses—particularly Sufi practices like the veneration of saints and other beliefs associated with traditional Egyptian folklore—and return Islam to the way it had been practiced by the prophet Muhammad, his companions and his earliest followers, collectively known as al-salaf, or the righteous forebears. Thus Abduh and his followers were known as the salafis, and their movement was the precursor of Islamism, or political Islam. Abduh’s biographer was Rashid Rida, the godfather of the Islamist movement, whose most famous disciple was Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who in turn inspired Yusef al-Qaradawi.

The fact is that the movement Abduh pioneered is now in the mainstream of Muslim belief, if not always practice. It was Abduh who said Muslims needed to adopt the science and technology of the West, while not abandoning their faith, as Christendom had forsaken their own beliefs for secularism. And this is precisely how the Muslim Middle East has engaged with modernity for more than a century—to take the West’s technology, arms, and consumer goods, but eschew the values, such as freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech, that made those products possible.

No one embodies this cultural schizophrenia better than Qaradawi, a media mogul who has risen to fame on the back of information technology and yet whose information is essentially medieval. Qaradawi approves of wife-beating, he defends female genital mutilation and signs off on female suicide bombers, and he attacks Shia for trying to subvert Sunni nations. To the Iranians, Qaradawi is perhaps not the ideal voice of Sunni Islamism, but insofar as he rises and the Americans suffer, Tehran will make its accommodations.

Yes, it is possible that even though Egypt gave birth to the Islamist movement that is synonymous with Muslim political modernity, maybe the Muslim Brotherhood would find itself thwarted at the polls. It’s a big decision for U.S. policymakers and the president. After all, what right do Americans have to tell the Egyptians who they can and cannot vote for? It is the height of hypocrisy for a liberal democracy to stand in the way of the freely won aspirations of another country. Egyptians have the right to choose their own government and their own future, just as we have the right to call them our friends or not on the basis of the policies that their government adopts.

However, the other argument is that it is not the job of the American president to promote the natural rights of others. Rather, it is his task to protect and preserve U.S. interests around the world, and peace in the Eastern Mediterranean is an important U.S. interest, as is preventing a larger regional war that might ensue from conflict between Egypt and its neighbor Israel. We might as well face the fact that the more political power that the Muslim Brotherhood wields will make that war much more likely—a war that would be not only bad for U.S. interests but also potentially catastrophic for our ally Israel, as well as to our ally Egypt.

The Bush White House believed that the problem with the Arabic-speaking Middle East was in the nature of repressive Arab regimes: In this view, Sept. 11 was the product of a political culture that had been strangled by its rulers, allowing their people no form of political expression except extremism. Deposing these regimes would unleash the native political energies of Arab peoples, went the argument, who would turn their attention away from anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments to the thoughtful participatory governance of their own societies. Accordingly, promoting democracy in the region was not only good for the Arabs, but also in America’s national interest. The first test for this Freedom Agenda was Iraq, followed by Lebanon and then the Palestinian Authority. Egypt is the fourth test—and the most consequential yet, for Cairo is the linchpin of Washington’s Middle East strategy.

Egypt was once commonly referred to as leader of the Arab world—an honorific denoting Egypt’s leadership in the arts, intellectual life, and media, as well as its enormous population of 80 million. And unlike other Arab states—Syria, say, or Saudi Arabia—Egypt has a real history and identity dating back thousands of years. Primarily, however, “leader of the Arab world” referred to Cairo’s political status, specifically its role in the wars against Israel.

When Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s second president, was in office, all his political capital rested on the fact that Egypt, unlike U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Jordan, clamored for war with the Zionist entity. When Anwar Sadat, his successor, brought Egypt from the Soviet to the American side after the 1973 war, it represented a Cold War victory for Washington that paid huge strategic dividends. However, it is one of the paradoxes of U.S. Middle East policy that by signing a peace treaty with Jerusalem, Sadat took Cairo out of the front-line camp and thereby weakened the regional prestige of a key American ally. Of course that treaty also put Sadat in the crosshairs of the Islamists, who killed him at Cairo stadium in 1981, with Mubarak beside him on the reviewing stand.

That peace has not only been good for the United States, securing our hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean, but also of course for Israel. It is that treaty with Cairo that allows Israel the relative luxury to worry primarily about a Persian adversary far from its borders and two terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah. The prospect of Egypt, with a large U.S.-trained and equipped army, air force, and navy, once again becoming “leader of the Arab world” is a nightmare for Israel’s leaders.

The U.S.-backed order in the Middle East is founded entirely on Cairo’s position as an ally—and on keeping the peace, as Mubarak has. If Egypt moves out of the American fold, it might well align itself with Iran. Mubarak has known well enough to fear the Islamic Republic—a street in Tehran is named after Sadat’s assassin. Or perhaps it would challenge the Iranians, in the way regional competition has worked since 1948—by seeing who can pose the greatest threat to Israel. Therefore, this fourth test of the freedom agenda could not be more important.

***

Unfortunately, after the first three runs, it’s hard to be optimistic this time. What we’ve seen so far is that the political energies unleashed by the Freedom Agenda are not democratic but tribal, sectarian, and violent. In Gaza, the Palestinian electorate voted for Hamas. In Lebanon, while the majority voted for the pro-democracy March 14 movement, Hezbollah still won power in government even as it embarked on a bloody campaign culminating last week in the party’s takeover of the state. After U.S. forces brought down Saddam Hussein, Iraqis turned on each other, fueled by more than a thousand years of a sectarian rage that was further aggravated by Saddam as Sunnis and Shiites shed blood at a clip typically associated with the grislier sectors of central Africa.

It is true that Egypt is not Iraq. And yet as many seem to have forgotten, only a month ago Islamist militants attacked a church in Alexandria, killing 23 Coptic Christians. To be sure, many Muslims rallied to defend their Christian neighbors, and today there are Christians in the street alongside the Muslim majority, but anyone who thinks sectarian tensions are simply the fault of “extremists,” or the Mubarak regime’s inability to protect Christians, is missing the point: The execution of minorities strongly suggests that a society might not be ready for democracy.

The relevant minority here are the liberals and democrats, for they do indeed exist and Egypt is the historical capital of Arab liberalism, from the novelist Taha Hussein to the journalist Farag Foda. Today there are a number of bloggers, intellectuals, and journalists, like the playwright Ali Salem and Hala Mustafa, editor of the political journal Dimoqratiya (Democracy), who keep the liberal flame alive. The former wrote a book about his trip to Israel and the latter met with the Israeli ambassador, and both were punished for it and ostracized by their colleagues. This is an indication not only of their lack of popularity but also the temperament of Egyptian intellectual culture: illiberal and populist—in other words, undemocratic.

There is some truth to the idea that Mubarak has choked off his liberal opposition, leaving only the Muslim Brotherhood to challenge him, but arguably the Egyptian liberal movement came to an end with the 1926 publication of Taha Hussein’s work on pre-Islamic poetry, which dealt with the historical and literary foundations of Islam. Under pressure from the religious authorities and death threats from Islamists, Hussein removed the passages deemed offensive, and the precedent was set: Men with guns make the rules, which liberals must abide by or be killed. Nonetheless, more than half a century later, Foda challenged the Islamists, and they reminded him how precarious liberalism is in Egypt by gunning him down in a Cairo street in 1992.

The Islamists, represented now by the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood, are one of only two political institutions that would survive Mubarak’s downfall; the other is the military. Indeed, Egypt has been run by military rulers more often than not—from the Muslim conqueror of Egypt Amr ibn al-‘As to the Albanian soldier Mohamed Ali, whose dynasty fell to Nasser’s Free Officers in a 1952 coup. Mubarak’s son Gamal’s presidency would have represented something like a coup d’etat against the military, which is why they got him out and chief of military intelligence Omar Suleiman was named vice president, making him Mubarak’s official successor. The awful irony is that Gamal and his gang of young financiers and businessmen probably represented Egypt’s best chance to move away from military rule. At least this is what much of the Washington policy establishment believed, with the hope of getting Gamal to pick up the pace of political reform to match the country’s notable economic reform. If Mubarak goes down, the security forces, the military and the Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, will fight each other, or cut a deal, or both.

***

Consider the other options. The United States wants national dialogue, which seems to include Mohamed ElBaradei. By virtue of his name recognition alone, the former IAEA head has been hailed by the Western press as one of the leaders of the democratic opposition. However, at the IAEA this so-called reformer distorted his inspectors’ reports on Iran and effectively paved the way for the Islamic Republic’s march toward a nuclear bomb. Now the Muslim Brotherhood has named him as their interlocutor. In other words, ElBaradei is nothing other than a shill for Islamists.

There’s also Ayman Nour, leader of the liberal Ghad (Tomorrow) party, who finished third in the last presidential elections before he was jailed on trumped-up charges. Then there’s Saad Eddine Ibrahim, the Arab world’s most famous democratic-rights activist, who was also imprisoned by Mubarak and is now living abroad in the United States. During Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel, Ibrahim came down on the side of the Lebanese militia. Ibrahim’s posture was hardly surprising given that his onetime jailer despised Hezbollah. But it is odd that a democratic advocate should applaud war with Israel, a country with whom Cairo has had a peace treaty for more than 30 years.

Maybe this should be one of the tests for Egypt’s democrats in the streets: Where do you stand on Israel? If they are really democrats, or just pragmatists, the young among them protesting for higher pay would answer that warmer relations with an advanced, European-style economy—like, say, Israel’s—would provide jobs for the millions of Egypt’s unemployed. Of course that is not the answer you’re going to get from the young men now filling the streets of Cairo. Or forget about Israel and ask them instead about Hezbollah. Do they support the Islamic resistance? Of course they do, because Egypt’s most famous democrat Saad Eddine Ibrahim supports Hezbollah, the outfit that has turned the remnants of Lebanese democracy on its head while killing its opponents.

No doubt there are real liberals and democrats in Egypt, and some may even be in the streets today, but they are not going to come out on top. In part that is because the United States is not going to help them. Indeed, Washington showed how seriously it takes Arab liberals and democrats two weeks ago when it watched silently from the sidelines as Hezbollah toppled Saad Hariri’s government. Plenty of Arabs hoping for a democratic Lebanon died over the last five years since the assassination of Rafik Hariri, and it is important to note that the million-plus Lebanese who went to the streets on March 14, 2005 demonstrated peacefully, unlike the Egyptians, and all the destruction and violence was caused by Hezbollah and its pro-Syrian allies.

That the United States will not come to the aid of its liberal allies, or strengthen the moderate Muslims against the extremists, is one reason why the Freedom Agenda is not going to work, at least not right now. The underlying reason then is Arab political culture, where real democrats and genuine liberals do not stand a chance against the men with guns.

• The Palestine Papers keep on giving: In 2009, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat told U.S. envoy George Mitchell that President Obama lost “credibility … throughout the region,” adding, “people in the Middle East are not taking Barack Obama seriously. They feared Bush, despite everything.” [JPost]

• The Qatari emir told Sen. Kerry about a year ago that now is the time for the United States to engage Syria, and that Hamas will accept a deal along the 1967 borders, though won’t say so publicly. This one’s WikiLeaks. [WikiLeaks]

• Her intentions aside, Anthony Grafton condemns Sarah Palin’s invocation of the term “blood libel” for the damage it does to history and to the memories of countless Jews who suffered because of it. [TNR]

• A new entry in the “who sucked more, Hitler or Stalin?” debate from Bloodlands author Timothy Snyder. Turns out that Stalin was more motivated by ethnicity than was thought … but that Hitler really did kill significantly more innocents. [NYRB]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Nicholas Noe argues that U.S. policy toward Lebanon since the 2005 Cedar Revolution was a colossal failure, only helping Hezbollah, and that the one way to head off a really bad confrontation with Israel would be to push Israel to make peace with Syria. [NYT]

• Gal Beckerman remembers the late Samuel T. Cohen, the little-known inventor of the neutron bomb whose memoir was called F*** You: Mr. President. [Forward]

• David Nesenoff, the journalist who asked the question that prompted Helen Thomas’s infamous response, has been appointed editor and publisher of Long Island’s The Jewish Star. [The Jewish Star]

• Hélène Grimaud is a courageous, amazing, and beautiful French pianist. So naturally she has to be Jewish, right? Wikipedia, take it away: “She is descended from Sephardi Jews from Corsica on her mother’s side and from Berber Jews on her father’s side.” God, French Jews are great. [NYT]

• Weekend reading: Two articles by the late Daniel Bell. [Dissent]

• The legendary Eric Hobsbawn tackles the strange tale of the Jews of San Nicandro, ably handled in Tablet Magazine by books critic Adam Kirsch. [LRB]

• Futurist-novelist William Gibson finds Stuxnet’s roots in the world of digital vandalism. [NYT]

30 Rock makes a joke about Tablet Magazine’s official Canadian Football League head coach, the tastefully named Marc Trestman (h/t Kaplan’s Korner):

• The Obama administration is offering measured but very real support for the Arab revolts, including in Egypt. [WP]

• WikiLeaks cables reveal that the Obama administration has largely shied from the airing and condemnation of Egyptian human rights abuses, in a successful effort to warm relations with the regime. [NYT]

• Israel, watching the proceedings to its south, cautiously believes Mubarak will not be toppled and there will be no Lebanon-like border incidents. [WP]

• Prime Minister Olmert’s legal troubles, President Abbas’s instransigence, and eventually the Gaza war torpedoed what had been in 2008 a very nearly reached peace deal, according to excerpts from Olmert’s new memoir. [NYT]

• New, Hezbollah-backed Lebanese Prime Minister Nijab Mikati pledged to cut an independent path and not interfere with the U.N. tribunal invesigating the Hariri assassination (which is difficult to believe given Hezbollah’s stake). [NYT]

That’s Israel’s northern border. On its southern border, Egypt today is experiencing unprecedented pro-democratic protests against President Hosni Mubarak, whose “emergency rule” is in its fourth decade. The thousands who flooded a central Cairo square seem to have been inspired by Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution, to which the United States just essentially lent its imprimatur. The New Yorker’s Website has a great dispatch, and contributing editor Jeff Goldberg posts the following video, with the headline: “This Is Not Something That Usually Happens in Egypt.” Indeed.

Lebanese Sunnis Stage Angry Protests as Hezbollah-Backed Candidate Is Appointed PM [WP]
Clinton Warns Hezbollah-Backed Government May Alter U.S. Ties With Lebanon [Haaretz]
Broad Protests Across Egypt Focus Fury on Mubarak [NYT]
Key Diplomat Says U.S. Approves of Tunisia Revolt [LAT]
Letter from Cairo: Anger and Silence [News Desk]

• Crowds of Palestinians reacted angrily to the Palestine Papers, blaming their leadership for being willing to give so much away (as well as, in some cases, blaming al Jazeera for trying to discredit their leadership. [WP]

• Iran is “no longer interested” in a fuel-swap deal, it said at talks last weekend. [NYT]

• While insisting that they are unverified, the State Department reported that the Palestine Papers makes peace negotiations more difficult. [Haaretz]

• Despite the official Palestinian Authority line that the Papers are a “pack of lies,” a former negotiator admitted to al Jazeera that they are valid. [Ynet]

• In new Papers, President Abbas admits that asking Israel to absorb one million refugees would be “illogical,” and that the leadership would settle for 100,000 under a final deal. This news is likely also not to be received well. [Haaretz]

• Two-day international talks over Iran’s nuclear program were essentially over before they began, with the Islamic Republic insisting on the right to enrich uranium from the outset. [LAT]

• Introducting “The Palestine Papers”: Secret documents from Palestinian negotiators that show them offering Israel a great deal. Much more at 10 am. [NYT]

• The new composition of President Obama’s top advisers means the administration is likely to no longer engage the Mideast peace process as much as it has, in part because it will no longer trust Prime Minister Netanyahu as a good-faith peace-maker. [Politico]

• As negotiations over Lebanon’s next government begin, Hezbollah’s leader pledged his group, which has the power to craft a parliamentary majority, would follow state rules and would seek a national unity cabinet. [NYT]

• Egypt’s interior minister pinned the New Year’s day church bombing that killed 21 Coptic Christians on a Gaza-based group linked to Al Qaeda. [WSJ]

It’s worth remembering that it was not six years ago that Jumblatt’s support lay with Hariri and March 14 and against Hezbollah; and it’s also worth remembering that today’s announcement was predictable (indeed, predicted), as Hariri Jumblatt, as columnist Lee Smith reported last year, threw his support to Hezbollah some time ago. Why? One word: Iran. Your weekend reading assignment is this 2009 New Republic dispatch, in which contributing editor David Samuels argued, “In the new Middle East, Tehran—armed with the strategic insulation that nuclear weapons confer—will be able to destabilize any government it doesn’t like without fear of military reprisal. As nearby regimes weigh the pros and cons of life inside the nuclear cage with the Iranian tiger, Lebanon offers a preview of what the future might be like.” That, in a nutshell, is what has changed between 2005, when Jumblatt could feel comfortable on the pro-America side of the fence, and today, when he can’t.

In Blow to Hariri, Jumblatt Pledges Support for Hezbollah [JPost]
Related: The Next Lebanon War [Tablet Magazine]
The Year of the Elephant [TNR]
Earlier: U.N. Files Sealed Indictment in Lebanese Killing
Hezbollah Departs Lebanese Government

• But by destabilizing Lebanon, its base, Hezbollah’s gambit was not without its risks. [NYT]

• How ‘bout China and Russia! China flat-out refused Iran’s offer for a tour of its nuclear facilities, seen as fuzzy at best since the United States was not invited; and Russia such a tour would not be a replacement for negotiations and U.N. inspects. [AP/NYT]

• The man said to be in charge of laundering money to Hamas from sources such as Iran—previously the assassinated Mahmoud al-Mabhouh’s job—was arrested in (where else?) Dubai. [Ynet]

• Yossi Alpher notes that the recent moves toward Palestinian statehood do not touch issues like the right of return and so actually could, judo-like, be used by Israel to move toward a final deal on rather favorable terms. [JPost]

• Israel and Greece, which have drawn closer as Israel and Turkey have bickered, formed a regional force for dealing with natural disasters. [JTA]

Thanassis Cambanis, author of a recent book on Hezbollah, argues today that the Party of God’s gambit is driven entirely by its fear of the United Nations tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri (the current prime minister’s father). The tribunal is expected to implicate Hezbollah’s ally, Syria, as well as Hezbollah itself, when it hands down its indictments, probably imminently.

Writes Cambanis:

Simply put, Hezbollah cannot afford the blow to its popular legitimacy that would occur if it is pinned with the Hariri killing. The group’s power depends on the unconditional backing of its roughly 1 million supporters. Its constituents are the only audience that matters to Hezbollah, which styles itself as sole protector of Arab dignity from humiliation by Israel and the United States.

These supporters will be hard-pressed to understand, much less forgive, their party if it is proved to have killed a leader who was loved by the nation’s Sunni Muslims and also respected by Christians, Druze and even many Shiites, who form Hezbollah’s core support. That is why Hezbollah denies any role in the assassination even though it has unabashedly taken responsibility for destabilizing moves like setting off the 2006 war with Israel or pushing Lebanon to the brink of civil war in 2008.

How Hariri responds is important: Cambanis advises him to stand firm. But he also predicts, “Hezbollah is likely to emerge the end winner because it is willing to sacrifice the Lebanese state to maintain its standing in the Middle East and its perpetual war against Israel.” Which, as far as Israel is concerned (to say nothing of the Lebanese people), wouldn’t be great news.

Hezbollah’s Latest Suicide Mission [NYT]
Israeli Troops Go On Alert Amid Lebanon’s Political Turmoil [JTA]
Talks to Choose New Lebanese PM To Begin Next Week [JPost]
Related: The Next Lebanon War [Tablet Magazine]
Cinders of Lebanon [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Hezbollah Departs Lebanese Government

• The administration’s on-and-off engagement with Lebanon left it with few options when the Hezbollah ministers walked out of the government yesterday. [NYT]

• New Israeli intelligence showing Iran’s halting nuclear development—it may not even try to build a bomb in the near future—has eased Israeli and American political pressure for military options. There are talks the week after next. [Reuters]

• Speaking in Qatar, Secretary of State Clinton called on Arab states to fight their own corruption and lack of democratic practices, blaming these for helping feed extremists. [WSJ]

• The German mediator quietly completed two days in Gaza trying to negotiate the freedom of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit. [Haaretz]

• A nine-year-old Gaza girl paralyzed in a 2006 Israeli airstrike as well as her father and brother were granted temporary-resident status so that she can continue to receive medical care. [AP/NYT]

Wherever Dagan goes, he gets standing ovations for his achievements. Two Sundays ago, Israeli cabinet ministers clapped their hands in appreciation. Four days later, Mossad employees shed tears when Dagan said goodbye and drove his gray 4-wheel-drive car through the gates of Mossad headquarters. Israeli journalists and commentators known for their unflattering, bitter, and cynical approach to nearly everything and everyone—journalists who, it should also be said, rarely had a chance to talk to him, not to mention to know him—are going out of their way to praise him.

“He is one of the best directors, if not the best one, Mossad has had in our 60 years or so of existence,” Ilan Mizrahi, a veteran case officer, told me last week. Mizrahi, who served as former Mossad Director Ephraim Halevy’s deputy, found himself vying with Dagan in 2002 for the top job. He lost but now admits that “Meir restored Mossad’s reputation and brought the organization to new levels.”

Indeed, Dagan has enjoyed the respect and admiration of three prime ministers—quite a feat when one considers who they were: Ariel Sharon, who appointed him as head of the organization in September 2002; Ehud Olmert, who approved some of the most daring Mossad operations in Iran and Syria; and Benjamin Netanyahu, who gave Dagan the permission to send his “combatants”—as Mossad operatives who operate in enemy lands are known—on the controversial Dubai mission to kill the chief of rockets procurement for Hamas, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.

All three heads of state showered Dagan with unprecedentedly generous budgets—a fact obvious to anyone who drives the main road to Haifa. From a distance, one can see the well-guarded Mossad compound, which now includes a half-dozen new offices—all constructed during Dagan’s era. More space means more case officers, more operatives, more researchers, more analysts, better computer and communication wizards, and also additional laboratories and technical gadgets.

But the new structures at Mossad headquarters are only the visible results of Dagan’s tenure. His hidden legacy lies in the hundreds of covert operations for which neither the Mossad nor the government of Israel will ever claim responsibility. They have resulted in the slowing of Iran’s nuclear program; in killing some of the most dangerous terrorists, including Imad Mughniyeh, who Dagan labeled “Hezbollah’s chief of staff”; and—most impressively—the intelligence-gathering that led to the destruction, in minutes, of Syria’s secret plutonium-producing nuclear reactor. This last effort has since become a test case of how precise intelligence data can be turned into a military result with strategic and historical implications.

Perhaps Dagan’s best-publicized triumph, the Syrian operation showcased his ability to respond quickly, forcefully, and creatively to new threats—and to squeeze maximum advantage out of his successes. Because of President Bashar Assad’s deception, for seven years no one—not Syrian ally Iran, not the CIA, neither French nor Israeli intelligence—had a clue about the North Korean-built reactor until April 2007, when Mossad agents discovered that Syria was within months of becoming a nuclear power. Dagan wasted little time. In September of that year, eight Israeli Air Force fighter planes and bombers destroyed the reactor. Israel never took responsibility for the attack. But Dagan’s people showed photos of the reactor before and after its destruction to the CIA, which presented the intelligence to Congress, creating the impression that the CIA was somehow involved in the operation.

Dagan didn’t stop there. One of the few Syrians who knew of the reactor was General Muhammad Sulliman, Assad’s point man to North Korea, Iran, and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Nearly a year after the destruction of the reactor, on a Friday night in August 2008, while entertaining some guests, the general was shot dead at his chalet in the prestigious Rimal al-Zahabieh seafront resort, 10 miles north of the Mediterranean port city of Tartous. A sniper, apparently aboard a ship in the sea, shot Sulliman in the head.

***

Meir Dagan was born Meir Hoberman in 1945 in Novosibirsk, in the Soviet Union, the son of Holocaust survivors who later immigrated to Israel and settled their family in the Bat Yam, a poor town south of Tel Aviv. His grandparents perished in the Nazi gas chambers. On the wall of his Mossad office, Dagan hung a photo of a Jew surrounded by German troops before being led to his death; the man in the photo is his grandfather. It was a constant reminder of Dagan’s mission in life, to defend Israel.

At 18, Dagan volunteered for the paratrooper brigade. In the early 1970s, Dagan, who by then had Hebraized his name from Hoberman, formed and commanded an undercover commando unit, known as Sayeret Rimon, whose task was to combat the increasing Palestinian insurgent violence in the occupied Gaza Strip. Wounded twice and decorated with military medals, Dagan rose to the rank of general and gained a reputation as a cunning planner of daring operations.

In 2002, Ariel Sharon, then the prime minister, appointed Dagan chief of Mossad. Dagan adored Sharon, who in turn treated the spy chief like his son; Sharon even gave the Mossad chief a nickname, “The Cruel,” to emphasize Dagan’s determination against Israel’s enemies and his self-confidence in the most dangerous situations. When Sharon fell into a coma in 2005, Dagan didn’t hide his feelings about having lost his father-figure.

And yet, even with this intensely close relationship to his boss, Dagan’s first two years as head of the Mossad were not all smooth sailing. According to a former Mossad official, Dagan sometimes behaved “like an elephant in a fine-china store.” Some old Mossad hands resented his managerial style, while others disliked the reforms and changes he made. But Dagan had Sharon’s support, and he was, by many accounts, fiercely determined to lead the organization his way.

“Every organization and bureaucracy and its people don’t like a new boss and the changes he brings with him,” Shabtai Shavit, the director of Mossad from 1989 to 1995, said in a recent interview. “Dagan managed with determination to change Mossad’s priorities and to focus on two major fronts: Iran’s nuclear program and its support for terrorist groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, and on the global war against Islamist terrorism inspired by Osama Bin laden and his al-Qaida.”

When I noted that previous Mossad chiefs—Shavit included—had more or less the same priorities, because the threats to Israel have been the same for nearly two decades, Shavit agreed. “But Dagan did it with unprecedented determination,” he said, “and succeeded to direct there all the organizational energy and effort, knowing how to distinguish between the hard core of the problems and the less important ones.”

Dagan concluded his term as Mossad chief by repeating publicly what he had said a few months ago in a secret session of the foreign affairs and security committee of the Knesset: Iran was still far from being capable of producing nuclear weapons, in part because a series of hardware malfunctions had put off its nuclear goal for several years. As a result, he concluded that Iran would not obtain a nuclear weapon before 2015—an estimate compatible with past and present U.S. national intelligence estimates.

This was frustrating for some, who argued that both the Mossad and Israel’s military intelligence, the largest and the most important agency in the intelligence community, have recently zigzagged in their Iran estimates—tailoring them to Israeli diplomatic interests by hyping the threat. Indeed, Israeli estimates have always been alarmist—in 1993, the two agencies estimated that Iran would have nuclear weapons by 1998, an estimate then changed to 2003 and then pushed forward to 2008 and later to 2011 and now 2015—because their very aim is to insert a sense of urgency into what is often otherwise plodding effort. But even beyond this, the truth is that these adjustments have been due primarily to the difficulties Iran has encountered in advancing its program, which are two-fold: Iran’s managerial and technical failure to fully master the difficult scientific and engineering process of uranium enrichment and weaponization; and the concerted international campaign to stop the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions.

Blame for the first lies with Iran; but credit for the second goes to Dagan, who spearheaded the international campaign. Dagan met regularly with his Western intelligence counterparts to present them with raw intelligence in order convince them that their organizations must keep Iran from procuring equipment for the program in their respective countries. He had more face-to-face meetings with President George W. Bush, at which he highlighted the Iranian threat, than the head of any other foreign intelligence organization. And on top of mobilizing his counterparts and Western leaders, Dagan led the Mossad into covert action against Iran. His agents collaborated with the CIA, British MI6, German BND, the French DGSE, and other security services to send operatives into companies around the globe to penetrate Iranian procurement networks, gain their trust, and eventually sell them flawed components. Simultaneously, Israeli, German, and U.S. computer experts programmed unprecedented viruses and worms, which were installed on Iranian systems and paralyzed its computers and controlling panels. The result is that nearly half of Iran’s installed centrifuges at the Natanz plant came to halt, reducing Iran’s ability to produce fissile materials.

But the most daring effort attributed to the Mossad was the set of assassinations in 2010 of leading Iranian scientists in Tehran, who were killed in three separate incidents by bombs that exploded while they were driving to their offices. Though the targets were nominally teachers at various Iranian universities, all secretly worked for Iran’s nuclear military program. Two were killed, and one—Firudan Abbasi, a top expert of the weaponization group—was critically injured. Although the Mossad never takes credit for such assassination operations, the prevailing view around the globe, and especially in Iran, is that combatants from Mossad’s special-ops unit, Kidon (which means “bayonet”), were responsible for the clean job. All the combatants returned home safely. All the targets were eliminated or removed. No fingerprints were left.

And the same can be said about the January 2010 assassination of al-Mabhouh in Dubai—even though the operation resulted in what was perhaps the Mossad’s worst press ever. The conventional wisdom in Israel and abroad is that the Mossad botched the operation, because Dubai police deciphered and solved the mystery of al-Mabhoh’s death. This was the argument made by Dubai’s energetic police commissioner, General Dahi Khalfan, who blamed the Mossad for the operation and presented names and photos of roughly 20 supposed Mossad agents taken by security cameras both before and after the killing at various hotels and the local airport.

But there remains not one inch of evidence to support Khalfan’s claim. The target, al-Mabhouh, was killed by poison. No one was arrested, and all combatants returned home safely. To this day, no one really knows who the assassins were or where they are today. They used fabricated or borrowed passports and credit cards, so there’s little chance that they will be recognized. And a strong message of deterrence was sent to Hamas leadership, which suffered a major blow and is still in search of a suitable replacement for the experienced al-Mabhouh. They will eventually find one, but this is the nature of the war between a state and a terrorist organization: It is a war of mutual attrition, not one of knock-outs.

***

On January 6, Dagan handed over his job to Tamir Pardo. Over the past several weeks, Dagan has accompanied Pardo, who has 30 years’ experience in the Mossad, to various Western capitals to introduce him to his counterparts. One trip abroad—to London, which publicly condemned Israel for using British passports in the Dubai operation—was of particular interest: It showed that whatever crisis there was between London and Jerusalem over Dubai is history.

In Dagan’s several farewell addresses, one comment has been controversial. Dagan said that Israel should go to war only if attacked or in immediate danger of survival. In other words, Dagan is sending a clear message that Israel should avoid initiating a military strike against Iran. According to sources in the prime minister’s office, Benjamin Netanyahu, who talks endlessly about Iran as an imminent existential threat to the Jewish state, doesn’t like hearing this from Dagan. But the former Mossad leader has always spoken his mind.

Now he is off to spend time in his studio, painting and sculpting, ready to be engraved in the public memory as the Mossad director who restored its reputation as an omnipotent intelligence agency with a reach that extends to the ends of the earth. It is an impression that, mythical or not, has contributed to Israel’s ability to deter its enemies. And that, after all, was Dagan’s aim all along.

Yossi Melman is a senior writer on strategic affairs, intelligence, and nuclear issues for Haaretz. He is writing a book about the history of the Israeli intelligence community and the Mossad’s wars in the last decade.

• Auschwitz drew a record 1.38 million voluntary visitors in 2010. [Haaretz]

• Secretary of State Clinton forcefully accused those threatening to topple Lebanon’s government of trying to subvert the U.N. tribunal investigating the former prime minister’s assassination. [Laura Rozen]

• Israel is quietly but actively supporting Sudan’s Christian south in its efforts to secede, while essentially the entire Arab world backs the unionist regime in Khartoum. One reason for Israel’s support for independence? Trade opportunities. [World Tribune]

• Pro-Israel groups are finding it is most effective to be cruel only to be kind. [JTA]

• Newly released documents purport to show that West Germany knew of Adolph Eichmann’s whereabouts eight years before Israeli agents tracked him down and captured him in Argentina. [Der Spiegel]

I think I’ll try Alaska.