But not in Israel.

Most of those who blogged or tweeted about the piece were residents of Arab countries. And most of these Arab readers neglected to mention that the celebratory piece was written by an Israeli journalist and published in an Israeli political blog. Israelis, on their end, largely ignored the piece, as they do nearly everything +972 does. According to Noam Sheizaf, +972’s editor in chief, only about 20 percent of the magazine’s readers are Israeli, a testament to the growing unpopularity of its progressive politics in a nation governed by a coalition, led by the Likud, of those who place land and faith above all else.

Rejected by the Arabs, ignored by the Jews: This is the reality with which the magazine’s 15 or so writers have to contend, writing, as they do, in English for a largely American audience. The magazine’s name is no coincidence: It is a tribute to Israel’s international calling code and an acknowledgement that, increasingly, any serious conversation about Israel’s policies is to be had outside of Israel’s borders.

Sparking that conversation is +972’s purpose. The magazine was founded last August,
almost by accident, when Goldman, Sheizaf, Ami Kaufman, and Dimi Reider met in Tel Aviv and agreed to collaborate. At the time, all were working journalists—Goldman and Reider were writing on a freelance basis for a host of international publications, Kaufman was an editor at several Israeli newspapers, Sheizaf was a political columnist for the local edition of Time Out, and all had blogs in English that aimed to provide Israeli news and commentary for an international audience. What began by posting each others’ stories on Facebook quickly evolved into a joint platform. From the first, the +972 crew agreed on an unorthodox journalistic ethos: All the magazine’s bloggers have complete freedom to write whenever and whatever they want. The magazine has a top editor, but the bloggers can fire him or her if they please. And whoever comes on board does so gratis. Other writers were quick to join. The website traffic monitor Alexa shows that visits to the magazine have grown exponentially since its inception, more than doubling in the past few months alone.

The magazine’s loose, horizontal structure, however, is not altogether porous: Underlining everything +972 does is a dedication to promoting a progressive worldview of Israeli politics, advocating an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and protecting human and civil rights in Israel and Palestine. And while the magazine’s reported pieces—roughly half of its content—adhere to sound journalistic practices of news gathering and unbiased reporting, its op-eds and critical essays support specific causes and are aimed at social and political change.

“I think there’s still a chance to resolve things,” said Sheizaf, 37, referring to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “but it’s not going to happen without dramatic pressure from abroad. Left on their own, Israelis will continue the occupation and the current political trends forever.” That’s why Sheizaf caters the magazine to English-speaking readers around the world. “It’s good to internationalize the conversation,” he added. “I believe in this thing we do. I think to bring honest, grassroots voices in English out of Israel, is of the essence.”

Just what these voices might say is unpredictable. Some, like Yossi Gurvitz—a veteran Israeli journalist and former Orthodox Jew—support the one-state solution that would turn Israel and the West Bank into one nation, with equal rights for all its citizens, regardless of their ethnicity. Others, like the American-born Larry Derfner, a former writer for the Jerusalem Post, define themselves as liberal Zionists and support a two-state solution.

“I feel we have a very wide range of opinions [within the left],” said Sheizaf. “If we were more hot-headed, we’d fight each other. But compared to Israeli society and its nationalism and consensus and racism, we’re very focused. This hobby of the left, of having a fierce debate between people standing an inch away in the same ghetto, these arguments are interesting, but not enough to break the package.” And so, while +972’s bloggers often find themselves on opposite ends of their political camp’s most urgent questions, they realize that, for the most part, these differences are nearly invisible to the average American readers.

Plus, Sheizaf added, theirs isn’t an experiment just in politics, but in journalism as well: With traditional media pressed for funds and readers, the magazine’s renown—including frequent mentions in the New York Times—stems in part from its innovative journalistic practices.

Continue reading: Tear gas and Tel Aviv

The pro- side, and specifically Levy, a former Israeli negotiator currently of the New America Foundation, was able to win, ironically, by downplaying the importance of Palestinian membership. “This is not a panacea,” Levy argued at one point (it would be pointless to deny that his English accent serves him extremely well when debating policy in front of an American audience). But it would do some good, he argued: it might halt settlement-building, at least in the long run (Miller pointed out that in the short run it would likely accelerate settlement-building); it would alter “the conceptual universe” (including that of “certain people in New Hampshire tonight”), showing the doubters that there truly is international commitment for a two-state solution. Levy called it “declarative diplomacy,” at once providing an ample rationale and shrinking its importance so that the onus was on the other side either to disagree and assert that it would be a big deal—which would have been a risky gambi given the consensus that the end-goal should be a two-state solution—or to argue that this initiative would simply do more small harm than small good, a task made more difficult by its very smallness.

Miller, a former U.S. negotiator, and Gold, a former adviser to Prime Minister Netanyahu, attempted the latter. “U.N. decision in the absence of a plan will not bring the Palestinians any closer to the sovereignty they deserve,” argued Miller. He noted that Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a hero (in the West) for building real institutions (in the West Bank), “is against this proposition because he knows it will undermine the work he has done.” Miller added, “Recognition would conflate with sovereignty. That may not be legally correct, but that would be the mindset.” Gold pointed out, “You need diplomatic flexibility.” Here he feinted toward what, to my mind, was their side’s strongest argument: that U.N. membership, like borders, settlements, and the statuses of refugees and Jerusalem, is something best left to the negotiating table rather than given up for nothing.

And here we get to the aforementioned flared tempers. For negotiations work best between two sides that are in relatively equal positions to bargain, but, of course, this arguably does not accurately describe the Israelis and the Palestinians. Barghouthi compared them to two mice fighting over a piece of cheese, with the Palestinian mouse imprisoned behind bars and helpless as he watches the Israeli mouse get the whole wedge to himself. To which the rebuttal is that the mouse, trapped behind bars, has put itself on a level playing field—and an un-level moral one—by sending suicide bombers and rockets toward the Israeli mouse.

Levy and Barghouthi had answers for this, too. For Levy, once again, it’s about symbolism: Palestinian membership would be something akin to what literary theorists call a speech-act. It would force the Palestinians to get serious. “Palestine: you’re in the U.N., read the U.N. charter,” which calls for all nations to be “peace-loving,” Levy said. “Hamas, you want in? You read the U.N. charter too.” Barghouthi went a step further, noting that Hamas has recently called for renouncing violence and accepting the 1967 borders—and without noting that other elements of Hamas have done the exact opposite and that Hamas’s infamous charter remains unchanged. “That strains the bounds of credulity,” Miller retorted in the understated fashion that was his style. He was referring to Barghouthi’s claim that Hamas has reformed, but he may as well have been referring also to Levy’s claim that Palestinian membership would reform Hamas.

Gold here went for something like the jugular, asking Barghouthi if he was at a confab in Cairo late last month that included not only members of the ruling Fatah party and other relatively moderate ones like Barghouthi’s own, but also Hamas and Islamic Jihad. He had. If the debate were a larger one, this might have been the trump card, but Levy stepped in to note that U.N. recognition would confer legitimacy on the much broader and more representative Palestine Liberation Organization, and he was never pressed on the prospect that Hamas and Islamic Jihad would need to become PLO members for the thing to have any sort of legitimacy among the Palestinian people in the near to intermediate future, and so defused that particular bombshell. (He did make a rare error in all but comparing Hamas to Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, leaving Gold the easy in to accuse Levy of “moral equivalence,” which he did, over and over and over again, like your uncle at the Seder table).

By the end, all that seemed clear is what we probably knew before: continued Israeli intransigence over settlements and continued division among the Palestinians—with a large portion if not the majority supporting the unsupportable Hamas—means there won’t be peace in the Middle East any time soon. I thought Levy and Barghouthi (specifically Levy) out-argued Gold and Miller, though it was Miller I found myself most frequently nodding in agreement with. You can make the argument that conferring membership might help compensate for continued settlement-building, both symbolically and instrumentally (as it might give the Palestinians access to international courts). But you are entering too many unknowns—who the Palestinian leadership is, how Israel will respond, how other countries in the region will react—for my taste.

“If we do not have a Palestine, we are saying Kaddish for Israeli democracy,” Levy pleaded at one point. Of course, that was not necessarily germane to the motion. The motion, of course, is impossible: full membership would require passage in the Security Council, and the United States will veto any such motion. So instead Levy’s cri de coeur would have to be filed away in the audience-members’ worried minds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I felt like a time machine,” he told me. “I could not believe all the buildings. And when I came to the village, I didn’t know a soul.”

In the village of Saffa, west of Ramallah, Sumoud Karajeh, 23, is marveling at her new lease on life. In 2009, Karajeh was sentenced to 20 years in prison for stabbing a guard at the Qalandiya checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah.

“When I was in prison, I thought I will not be a mother, I won’t study until I am 40 years old,” Karajeh said last week in her living room. Now she’s moved back into her childhood bedroom, reconnected with friends, and plans to study social work at Al Quds Open University as she did before her arrest. “I will have a normal life,” she said.

***

Barghouti and Karajeh are only two of the 1,027 Palestinian prisoners Israel agreed to release last month in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, captured and held by Hamas since June 2006. Even though most Israelis support the swap, most also recoil at the idea that convicted militants like Barghouti and Karajeh have been given a chance to lead normal lives. And yet both say they have no regrets about the crimes they committed. For Barghouti and Karajeh, and scores of other Palestinians who could otherwise never enter Israel, prison, in fact, offers a rare opportunity to live in the belly of the beast. It serves as a rite of passage—a forge where Palestinian national ideals are hammered into place.

Karajeh spoke to me on a rainy day last week. A tiny schoolgirl carrying a yellow umbrella had pointed the way to Karajeh’s home at the edge of the village of about 4,000. A banner of Palestinian flags fluttered over olive trees in the yard. On the front door was a poster: “Free Palestinian Prisoners,” it said in English and Arabic. Inside, the house was cold enough to wear a jacket. A picture of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas embracing Karajeh leaned on a shelf next to an oversized stuffed puppy. Karajeh and her mother, Hanan, sat on ornate wooden chairs upholstered in gold. Karajeh wore a bright patterned headscarf, pristine white sneakers, jeans, and a blue cardigan. Pale, with thick black eyeliner and full lips, she had a gap between her front teeth that made her look younger than 23. While she spoke, her mother brought out tiny cups of strong coffee.

Though Karajeh admitted she was in prison because she stabbed an Israeli soldier, she refused to give any details about the stabbing or her motivation. An onlooker captured the event on a cell-phone video and posted it to YouTube. Karajeh said that Israeli intelligence officers had summoned her to the Ofer compound near Ramallah for a two-hour interrogation two days before we met, and she was still rattled by it.

The hardest thing about prison, Karajeh said, was the first 30 days. Israeli intelligence officers interrogated her deep underground in the Russian Compound, a prison steps from Zion Square in central Jerusalem, she said. For a month, Karajeh saw only the investigation room and the tiny cell where she was in solitary confinement. She could not tell what time it was. “Prison was like a grave,” Karajeh said.

I asked her how she stayed sane. “Well, my name is Sumoud,” she quipped. Sumoud is Arabic for steadfastness. “The soldiers would shout, and I would think to myself about my life, about my village and my street and my house,” she said. “I would remember my relatives and name their children in my head, and I would sing to myself.”

A religious Muslim, Karajeh said she trusted that Allah would deliver her from her suffering. And once she was tried and sentenced, life improved. Karajeh was transferred to the women’s division of Hadarim prison, and three months later to Damoun in northern Israel. It was her first time away from home, where she was one of seven brothers and sisters. The other Palestinian prisoners took pity on her. “They were kind to me because I was the youngest,” she said. “They would bring me gifts from the canteen. They would teach me things like English and Hebrew.”

Continue reading: ‘Israel made us kill’

Synonyms are both logical fallacies—no two words can be identical—and artistically useful (expedient, practical); synonymic poetics furthers that paradox into history, or histories. Which is to say that though the genres of tragedy and comedy transcend borders, races, and creeds, specific tragedies and comedies do not. The event one people celebrate with a victorious ode another people commemorate with an elegy of defeat.

Poetry that’s old enough, that has justified its age, tends to be credited to that greatest of versifiers, “Anonymous.” Let’s summon that God, for a moment, to bless the following scraps, translated into the neutrality of English:

How will you fill your cup
On the day of liberation? and with what?
Are you prepared, in your joy, to endure
The dark howling heard
From skulls of days glittering
In a bottomless pit?

And:

We survived much death. We defeated forgetfulness and you said to me: We survive, but do not triumph. I said to you: Survival is the prey’s potential triumph over the hunter. Steadfastness is survival and survival is the beginning of existence. We persevered and much blood flowed on the coasts and in the deserts. Much more blood than what the name needed for its identity, or what identity needed for its name.

The first fragment is a stanza from How? written in 1943 in the Vilna Ghetto by the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever. The second is from In the Presence of Absence, one of the last collections of stray sentences in paragraphs by Mahmoud Darwish, perhaps the foremost Palestinian poet of last century (published in Arabic in 2006, and this month by Archipelago Books, in a translation by Sinan Antoon).

That these two texts spring from a shared poetics can be denied only by those who read prejudicially, who judge books by covers of their own creation: When you oppress a people, when you beat and rape and kill them, the literature they write will inevitably resemble the literatures of other peoples who’ve been beaten, raped, and murdered (unless you’ve stumbled upon a happy tribe of masochists). But this shock must be admitted: The same poetics has sadly marked the literatures of Jews—not just Israelis—and Palestinians, in the same century—a poetics that fled Europe and hid, until it found another shelter.

***

Al-Birwa was a tiny olive, grain, and watermelon village in Western Galilee, Mandate Palestine. Darwish was born there to a Sunni Muslim family in March 1941, the same month and year the Nazis’ extermination camps became fully operational. In 1948, with war ended, war began: Darwish’s family was forced from their orchards by the nascent IDF’s Carmeli Brigade; they fled to Lebanon, to Jezzine and Damour. Later, they illegally returned to Israel—insofar as one can return to a different country—settling in Deir al-Asad, which had been renamed, in Hebrew, Shagur. (Darwish spoke fluent Hebrew.)

In 1970, Darwish, then a communist, briefly attended university in Moscow before migrating to Egypt and then to Lebanon again. There he joined the PLO, for which he coauthored the Algiers Declaration. When the PLO was expelled from Lebanon, Darwish went to Cyprus. Stints followed in Tunis and Paris. For his work in the PLO, the poet was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, originally the Stalin Peace Prize, which he accepted as idealistically as he’d later reject the Oslo Accords (which occasioned his break with Yasser Arafat).

It was Oslo, however, in its slight easing of restrictions in the Occupied Territories, that gave Darwish a temporary reprieve: In 1996, now a poet with an international reputation and a major cardiac condition, he finally received Israeli permission to settle in Ramallah. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, major infarcts had led to major surgeries. Though his literary heart was strong, his literal heart was weak—so went the global obituaries. In August 2008, while undergoing treatment at a hospital in Houston, he died. He’s buried in Ramallah, atop a hill called Al-Rabweh, “the hill of green grass”—a small snatch of his childhood Galilee transported to the dusty West Bank.

So do not reconcile with anything except for this obscure reason. Do not regret a war that ripened you just as August ripens pomegranates on the slopes of stolen mountains. For there is no other hell waiting for you. What once was yours is now against you.

And:

I am already quite scarce. For years
appearing only here and there
at the edges of jungle. My awkward body,
camouflaged by reeds, clings
to the damp shadow around it.
Had I been civilized,
I would never have been able to withstand.
I am tired. Only the great fires
still drive me from hiding to hiding.

Let’s avoid turning this survey into an exercise in perversity, a childish game: I’ve chosen to quote Darwish in his prose-poems, and the others, the original Others, enjambed. The man “already quite scarce” is the Israeli poet Dan Pagis. The source for the excerpt above is a poem called The Last Ones. The initial circumstance is the language, then the name and title, and only then, the poem. Bad poetry wants for forewords, good poetry, for afterwords, whereas Pagis’ poetry, like Darwish’s, needs a more encompassing apparatus—it necessitates experience.

Continue reading: A political coup

But there is another way to connect the OWS and Palestinian causes, and here the latter becomes a much bigger deal. You can declare them, essentially, the same. Again, a relevant text is a Mondoweiss post. For Mondoweiss’ Adam Horowitz, the horror show Tuesday night at Occupy Wall Street’s Oakland branch—in which police set upon protesters with tear gas and ostensibly nonlethal projectiles, and several were reported wounded, including an Iraq War vet who as of last night was in critical condition—basically was the Palestinian struggle; to quote his post’s headline, it was “Palestine in Oakland.” He cites Max Blumenthal’s reporting that the weapons used in Oakland are not only the same as some of those used against West Bank protesters, but are indeed manufactured by the same company. Blumenthal concludes, “the issue is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid now that the protesters are confronted with the very same weapons Israel uses to crush unarmed Palestinian resistance.” Horowitz also quotes a poem that appeared on the Occupy Writers Website, in which the left-wing Jewish poet Amirah Mizrahi writes, “i was palestine in Oakland.”

Contra Blumenthal and Mizrahi, I find the issue pretty easily avoided. If Oakland was Palestine, well, that’s only because the police were only maiming protesters; if they had been killing them, then Oakland would have been Syria; as it is, Palestine is far from the only place Oakland could be. I don’t doubt Blumenthal’s reporting, and it is a chilling coincidence, but a coincidence isn’t an indictment. Unless you are a pacifist, you can believe rubber bullets can be used unjustly and that rubber bullets can also be used justly; and if there are two instances in which they are used unjustly, that does not automatically make the two instances equivalent, much less essentially a common struggle.

However, as a spectator and as someone sympathetic to the broad contours of OWS’ economic argument, I find it compelling and depressing that, in the minds of some, the injustice in the Bay Area is the injustice in the West Bank village; I think of our common humanity; and I also think of what Mondoweiss’ proprietor, Philip Weiss, told Tablet Magazine columnist Michelle Goldberg: “I am ethnocentric.”

Palestine in Oakland [Mondoweiss]
Related: Mondo Weiss [Tablet Magazine]

With the help of journalist David Landau, Peres has written a new biography of Ben-Gurion, his mentor: Ben-Gurion: A Political Life, available now from Nextbook Press. Landau, a former editor of Haaretz and Israel correspondent of The Economist, spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about Ben-Gurion, his realpolitik approach to leadership, and what lessons his example can provide to Israel’s leaders today. [Running time: 30:09.]

But if the theater worked one way—the U.S. president saying, for the first time, explicitly what everyone already knew to be true, and then being forgiven for saying the exact same thing three days later—then maybe it will work the other way, too? The president’s AIPAC speech established, first, that he is not going to alter his course in the face of intimidation, hectoring, and lecturing from the Israeli prime minister, and, second, that the reason he decided to take the diplomatic step is because he feels time is not on Israel’s side. As he said: “I believe that the current situation in the Middle East does not allow for procrastination.” Obama changed no substance, but he did engage in a bit of diplomacy, and it will have been successful diplomacy if it had a similar type of effect on the Palestinians and the Europeans that it did on Netanyahu.

There was no movement form the Palestinians. The fact is, there were two overwhelmingly pro-Israel speeches—among many other things, both explicitly called for a demilitarized Palestinian state—and even more moderate Palestinians read them as such. Fatah insisted Netanyahu remains too intransigent for direct talks, and that it will continue down its road to a September statehood push at the United Nations; President Abbas’s spokesperson expressed extreme dissatisfaction. Hamas went further, pledging not to recognize Israel. Furthermore—as Obama reminded us, both Thursday and Sunday—Hamas and Fatah are now allies. So clearly Obama failed to sway the Palestinians, which doubtfully was ever the purpose.

That said, the speech’s primary audience may have been Europe. Obama flew there yesterday for a six-day trip, to Ireland; Britain; a G-8 meeting in France; and Poland. “Administration officials said it would be up to Mr. Obama, during an economic summit in Paris next weekend, to try to talk his European counterparts out of endorsing Palestinian statehood in a coming United Nations vote, a prospect that would deeply embarrass Israel,” the Times reported.

All reporting suggests that Netanyahu lashed out at Obama after Thursday’s speech because he was surprised by it, and doesn’t like to be surprised, and is fearful of what other surpises may be on the way. Additionally, I am of the opinion that Netanyahu reacted the way he did—arrogantly lecturing his superpower patron and host while ignoring the substance of what he said—because he is personally boorish, ideologically inflexible, and characterologically craven.

However. To European eyes and ears, the Israeli leader’s dissatisfaction might serve also as proof of the U.S.’s fundamental reasonableness. The European Union’s foreign ministers have already jumped aboard Obama’s call for negotiating a treaty based on the 1967 borders, with land swaps. Wouldn’t it be funny if it helped persuade them that the U.S. remains worthy of leading when it comes to the question of Mideast peace, and therefore that it should be followed, when, in September, it opposes Palestinian efforts to secure statehood at the U.N.?

Netanyahu Aides Play Down Differences with Obama [WP]
AIPAC Likes Clarification on ’67 Lines [JTA]
Remarks by the President at the AIPAC Policy Conference 2011 [White House]
Palestinians: Netanyahu’s Dismissals of Obama’s Ideas Shows No Common Ground for Peace Talks [AP/WP]
Hamas: Obama Will Fail in Forcing Us to Recognize Israel [Haaretz]
Obama Presses Israel to Make ‘Hard Choices’ [NYT]
Mideast Questions Likely to Surface in Obama Trip to Europe [NYT]
EU Backs Obama’s Call for Mideast Treaty Based on 1967 Borders [AP/Haaretz]
Earlier: At AIPAC Summit, Obama Stays His Course
Bibi Gets What He Wants, Replies With Scorn

The mosque at the centre has gone except for the minaret, which stands forlornly alone, surrounded by ugly cement shopping malls and hotels that look like dormitories devoid of all charm. … The water in the lake is over-pumped to serve extensively heavy water-dependent farming that makes no sense in a country with limited water resources. A number of economically unsuccessful new towns have been established in the area, isolated from the natural continuation of the land to the south by the infamous semi-permeable wall, erected to separate them from the West bank, that prevents Palestinians from crossing over but allows Israelis living on both sides to go back and forth.

Shehadeh, a lawyer by profession, tours the Galilee to retrace the steps his uncle, Najib Nassar, took as he fled arrest at the hands of the Ottomans at the turn of the last century. Armed with Nassar’s diary and a 1933 map of Mandate Palestine, he searches for the villages, roads, mountains, and rivers his uncle visited while on the run across what became Israel, the West Bank, Jordan, and Lebanon. But he finds that the last six decades have transformed the land nearly beyond recognition. Israeli historian Benny Morris estimates 400 Palestinian villages were abandoned in 1948 and were later demolished, forested, or converted into Jewish farming towns. Nearly all of the geographical features of the land were renamed from Arabic to Hebrew and subsumed in the urban sprawl typical of a Western country. The combination pushes Shehadeh to mentally excavate the visible landscape, searching for traces of Palestinian villages and people long gone.

Shehadeh is not the first to write a mournful account about the Palestine that was lost in 1948 nor to return to sites in their present-day guises. But by following his uncle’s path, Shehadeh shows how rural Palestinians lived and thought and how intimately they and their urban guest were connected to the land in the early 1900s. Quoted commentary from the celebrated British archaeologist and commander T.E. Lawrence suffuses the old landscape with vivid detail. Shehadeh adds another degree of familiarity by weaving himself into the narrative through frequent comparisons and snippets of his own political life. In his elegy for the peasant life long gone, Shehadeh challenges the view that Israel’s policies have been good for the land. On a broader level, he makes a case for rethinking the welter of borders that make his trip cumbersome and sometimes impossible.

“I have no memory of the way things were,” he said recently by phone from Ramallah. “In writing the book I explored how the land used to look. It made me sad, because it was once a mixed land with much more variety.” Is his book a call for an Ottoman revival? “I have no intent on calling for a return of the Ottoman Empire,” he said. “But I think the Ottoman Empire provides a precedent that is important to consider, when the region was unified.”

***

Raja Shehadeh at a book reading in Ramallah, October 16, 2010.
Daniella Cheslow

A Rift in Time opens with Shehadeh nervously facing arrest by Palestinian security officers in 1996, just after the Oslo Accords were signed. He was implicated in a client’s land deal gone wrong in Jericho. He escapes arrest through the intervention of well-connected friends, but the ordeal reminds him of his uncle, who enjoyed no such respite.

Najib Nassar, born in 1865 in southern Lebanon, moved with his family to Haifa, where he founded and edited the Al-Karmil newspaper. He was a short, outgoing, and generous man who staunchly believed in the Ottoman Empire but decried its decision to fight in World War I with the Axis powers. But the Ottomans feared Nassar had hidden loyalties to the British and put a bounty on his head. Nassar spent three years hiding in villages scattered across the region, often knocking on doors before dawn and with empty pockets. Whether or not his hosts knew him, they nearly always offered him food, a bed, a horse, and even gold coins to send him on his way. Because of this generosity, Nassar was able to evade the Ottomans until he turned himself in to spare his family.

According to Birzeit University sociologist Salim Tamari, the Palestinian memoir tradition goes back at least 100 years, to Jerusalemites who kept diaries. Khalil Sakakini, a Palestinian educator, writer, and poet who lived from 1878 to 1953, called himself the “prince of idleness” but documented both his youthful escapades and his later work in America, his attempts to reform Palestinian education, and his exile. Wasif Jawhariyyeh, who lived from 1897 to 1972, was a similar-minded bon vivant, poet, composer, and musician whose journals show Jerusalem over six decades. Both men’s diaries have been translated in whole or in part into English.

Yet after 1948, what Palestinians term the Nakba, or catastrophe, the intellectual leadership of Palestinian society dispersed, and political writing overtook the personal. The playwright and author Ghassan Kanafani, who worked for the PLO and was assassinated by the Mossad, wrote a 1962 play called Men in the Sun, about Palestinian refugees who suffocate while being smuggled to Kuwait. Mahmoud Darwish, the late Palestinian poet laureate, achieved renown with his highly political “Identity Card,” from 1964:

Record!
I am an Arab
And my identity card is number fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth is coming after a summer
Will you be angry?

While there was always a trickle of memoirs, including one by Sakakini’s daughter Hala and another by the renowned Arab translator Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, the last 20 years have seen a major revival, Tamari said.

“If we can compare the two events, I think it’s similar to the Holocaust experience,” said Tamari, whose parents, like Shehadeh’s, fled Jaffa. “The people who experienced the Holocaust and survived did not speak about it until years later, in the 1960s and ’70s. They were ashamed and embarrassed. In the Palestinian case, they were ashamed they did not resist, that they allowed themselves to be taken like sheep from their homes. My parents did not talk about it until many years later.”

That changed after the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. Dozens of formerly exiled Palestinians were allowed to return to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. “They had a very idealistic view of Palestine, and they found it not mundane, but a country lacking in sovereignty, and looking very much like a third-world formation,” Tamari said. “Since many came from urban, metropolitan centers like Cairo, Tunis, Beirut, and Damascus, they were shocked at how shabby the country looked.”

***

One of the landmarks of the evolving genre is Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, published in Arabic in 1997 and translated into English three years later. The book won Egypt’s Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature. In it, Barghouti returns to his childhood home near Ramallah in 1996 after a 30-year exile and finds his village ringed with Jewish settlements. The Ramallah vegetable market is as dingy as it was when he was a child, and the Palestinian Authority has brought a class of officials who flaunt their income but do little to advance the common good. Yet Barghouti’s memoir mainly focuses on his own family’s experience. It does not have the same breadth as Shehadeh’s Rift, which encompasses the entire region.

Likewise, Edward Said’s 1999 memoir Out of Place details his childhood and adolescence in Cairo.

Unlike Said or Barghouti, Shehadeh remained in the Palestinian territories his entire life. As founder and former head of the Al-Haq legal aid organization, Shehadeh initially published technical works on Israeli law and human rights. He first tackled personal writing in 1982 with The Third Way, a collection of stories from Ramallah. The book was hailed in the Journal of Palestine Studies as “the first such book on life for the Palestinians under occupation.” Shehadeh’s full story emerged in Strangers in the House, a tour de force that encompassed his strained relationship with his father, exacerbated by Israeli rule that emasculated the head of the house.

In his last two books, Shehadeh departs from his family and daily life to give words to the Palestinian landscape. An avid hiker, he published Palestinian Walks in 2008, showing the growing difficulty of walking the West Bank without encountering Israeli settlements, soldiers, or roadblocks. It won him Britain’s Orwell Prize.

Palestinians protesting Israel’s security fence in the West Bank village of Bil’in, February 22, 2008.
David Silverman/Getty Images

Rift features those difficulties as a side story to the odyssey of Najib Nassar, whose trail markers are now deeply buried. In resurrecting the world of a century ago, Shehadeh shows what he sees as the price of Israel’s independence. Nassar hid in tents with Bedouin and spent his happiest days herding sheep while scratching the lice off himself. Farms were small and smelled of dung-fired ovens where today they are large and silent stretches of green plowed by tractors. For Shehadeh, despite the grinding poverty, exploitation, and constant water shortage, Palestinian peasant life was a state of grace.

“Gone is the mix of people that existed in Najib’s time,” he writes. “In their place a large variety of Jews from Arab countries, Eastern Europe and from the West, along with those Palestinian Arabs who have managed to stay, now share the land unequally. But gone are most of the Bedouin tribes, Palestinian Arabs and Arabs from various parts of North Africa, and the Marsh Arabs who lived in the Huleh region with their water buffaloes that are now extinct here.”

In one instance, Shehadeh is surprised to find expanses of wheat where he had expected to see a handful of the villages Nassar mentioned. Then he notices an almond tree in the middle of a field, which he notes only grows when cultivated. Almond trees are the ruins of the villages he is seeking, as he writes:

When I looked at the open green fields spread on both sides of my path I could see more almond trees that I had failed to notice before I recognized their significance. … There to the west Kufra must have stood and nearby to the south Bira, Dana and Tireh. With the possible location of the Arab villages, the old features of this cemetery of a land began to emerge, illuminated by the white blossoms of the almond trees, marked by the petals that slowly glided down to the ground around them in utter, hushed silence.

That same hallowed sense of loss is in Israeli work as well. As early as 1963, the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua wrote about a deserted Palestinian village hidden by Israeli-planted trees in his novella Facing the Forest. Former Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Meron Benvenisti used 1946 maps to hunt for the disappeared Palestinian rural world in Sacred Landscape. “I would spread the relevant map on the ground, and suddenly the old landscape arose like an apparition,” he wrote. “And each plot and every prominent feature had its Arabic name marked on the map, so poetic and so apt that my heart ached.”

***

Palestinians, too, have mourned the lost villages, none so exhaustively as Walid Khalidi in his 700-page memoir, All That Remains. But Shehadeh combines the sadness of a Palestinian perspective with the poetry of a lost landscape and the escapades of his strong-willed uncle.

At times, Shehadeh’s lengthy rants can get tiresome, particularly because he pits Palestinian rural life against Israeli modernity. He notes that the goats and sheep that used to graze in the Galilee have given way to “lumbering grain-fed cows,” who pollute the air with their “fabled flatulence.” A look at the shopping malls and subdivisions in today’s Ramallah suggests that the same modernity may have beset the region even if the Palestinian villages had remained.

And while Shehadeh’s books have found an increasingly warm reception, his name is far better known outside the West Bank than it is at home, because his work is written in English, the language in which he was educated. Only two of his literary books have made it into Arabic, according to Omar Hamilton, creative producer of the four-year-old annual Palestine Festival of Literature.

The torrent of books on Palestinian life is hardly close to stopping. Tamari said that since the 1990s, students, researchers, and social clubs have been gathering oral histories of 1948 and its aftermath. Other Palestinians are exploring West Bank life under Jordan in the 1950s and ’60s. Humor is also gradually seeping through the lines, such as Ramallah-based Suad Amiry’s 2010 collection of women’s stories, Menopausal Palestine. For Shehadeh, it’s a welcome development.

“So many people feel so much weight that people try to tell the whole story from the beginning to end, and there is nothing worse for small books than trying to tell the whole story,” Shehadeh said. “Now people are feeling relieved of the whole story because 1948 has been dealt with.”

As the subtitle (The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict) of his book implies, Jonathan Schneer sees the Balfour Declaration as a milestone on the path sketched by Azoury 12 years before it was issued. One of the major themes of the tale he tells is the inevitable clash produced by Great Britain’s simultaneous and often duplicitous cultivation of the two competing claims—from Zionism and Arab nationalism—on Palestine.

Two or three decades ago it was fashionable among professional historians to dismiss diplomatic history as the study of what one clerk wrote to another. One could indeed point to too many middling diplomatic historians who filled volumes with long quotes from diplomatic dispatches and the minutes written in their margins in foreign offices. But a series of first-rate, sometimes spectacular, studies demonstrated that diplomatic history could be written in a grand way. Several of them focused on World War I and its sequels in the Middle East.

Thus Elie Kedourie at the London School of Economics devoted his talents and efforts to deciphering Britain’s role in the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the construction of the contemporary state system in the Middle East. David Fromkin described in fascinating detail in his history, The Peace to End All Peace, how in the aftermath of World War I, the victors fashioned the modern Middle East. With a perceptive eye and the talent of the raconteur, Fromkin combined intriguing portraits of the main actors, a fine analysis of the issues and forces at work, and a trove of entertaining anecdotes. Margaret MacMillan, the Canadian historian (now an Oxford don) and a scion of Lloyd George’s family, used a similar technique on a larger canvas in her acclaimed Paris 1919.

Jonathan Schneer, a professor of history at Georgia Tech, who specializes in British history, has gone in the other direction by focusing on one aspect of the complex diplomatic history of World War I in the Middle East. The Balfour Declaration—the British Foreign Minister’s letter to Lord Rothschild in November 2, 1917, stating that His Majesty’s Government “will view with favor the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine”—was a crucial step in the process that culminated in the establishment of the state of Israel 30 years later. The compelling story of how the British government came to issue that declaration has been told several times in book and essay form. What Schneer chose to do was to use his command of British history and to make a massive investment in fresh archival research in order to tell the story of the Balfour Declaration in the grand style of Fromkin and MacMillan.

The Balfour Declaration was to a considerable extent the achievement of Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. Like some of his predecessors, Schneer describes well Weizmann’s charm and charisma, his ability to penetrate the highest echelons of Britain’s society, and his relentless, single-minded pursuit of his goal. But the Balfour Declaration was not merely a product of the Zionist leader’s personal exploits; it derived to a large extent from a cluster of British geopolitical interests and wartime considerations and calculations:

• The ongoing rivalry with London’s ally, France. Soon after signing the Sykes-Picot Agreement in May 1916, the British government regretted having agreed to a French foothold in an internationalized Palestine and sought to keep the French as far as possible from the Suez Canal. A Jewish national home under British protection would be the least awkward way of breaking the written commitment.

• Given the importance of oil and Britain’s anticipated position in Mesopotamia, London wanted territorial continuity to the Mediterranean and a secure high-quality port on its Eastern shore. Haifa was an obvious choice.

• British decision-makers overrated the importance and significance of “international Jewry.” As the war wore on they felt the need to obtain and maintain the support of Russia and America’s Jewish communities for the war. This tendency was reinforced by rumors of a comparable German initiative (think of the irony of counting on the Zionist sympathies of Trotsky and his other Jewish colleagues). The flip side of this consideration was the anti-Semitic views and sentiments of many members of the British elite as illustrated by Schneer.

Significant as these considerations were, the voyage toward the publication of the Balfour Declaration was anything but smooth. Several obstacles had to be overcome. One was the powerful opposition of the assimilationist anti-Zionist, Anglo-Jewish establishment, men like Lord Montagu (a member of Lloyd George’s cabinet) and Lucien Wolf who believed that a formal British recognition of a Jewish “nationhood” and the establishment of a Jewish national home would jeopardize the position that the Jewish community had finally achieved.

A second obstacle was France’s anticipated opposition to both the notion of Jewish nationhood and to British protectorate over a Jewish-Zionist entity in part of what the French had traditionally seen as their own domain in “Greater Syria.” Schneer rightfully assigns a cardinal role in his story to Sir Mark Sykes, and he describes in fascinating detail how Sykes in tandem with Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow artfully “sold” the idea to the French government. What Schneer failed to do was to consult the excellent book by Andrew and Kanya Forstner, France Overseas. Had he done that he would have presented Robert de Caix, the architect of French policy in the Levant, in a different light.

The most controversial aspect of Britain’s decision to promise Palestine to the Zionist movement concerns Palestine’s status vis-à-vis Britain’s earlier commitment to Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his Arab nationalist allies. This issue has been dissected and debated for decades now, and Jonathan Schneer goes through it with appropriate detail without presuming to settle the controversy, the essence of which is this: In 1915 the British government through its high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, came to an agreement with Sharif Hussein, the custodian of the Muslim Holy Places in Mecca. Hussein was to stage a revolt against the Ottomans and was to be rewarded by the war’s end by becoming the head of an ill-defined independent Arab state. The British motivation was threefold: to neutralize the Ottoman’s Sultan’s call for Jihad, to subvert the Ottoman war effort (that proved to be much more resilient than expected), and to lay the foundations for a post Ottoman order in the Middle East.

In the course of his correspondence with Sharif Hussein McMahon explicitly excluded from the territory of the future Arab state “certain areas” that were not “purely Arab.” These areas were defined as “lying to the west of the district of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo.” This formulation clearly refers to Lebanon (France’s cherished prize), but what about Palestine? McMahon did not use the term “Vilayet” (province), so did he exclude Palestine, which lay west of the southern part of the Ottoman province of Damascus, or did he not?

The Arab nationalist claim was and is that Palestine was included in the commitment to Hussein. The Zionist claim is that it was not. If it was not, the Balfour Declaration did not constitute a violation of an earlier promise. The Balfour Declaration has been seen as an important element in building the Zionist case in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s (its text was incorporated in the League of Nations mandate for Palestine given to Great Britain), and it was therefore deemed important to present it in a positive rather than a dubious light.

The truth, as the book amply demonstrates, is that Britain misled everybody: the French—to whom they tried to deny not just Palestine but also inland Syria—the Arabs, and the Zionists. Schneer is at his most innovative when describing how after issuing the Balfour Declaration the British government empowered a series of intermediaries to negotiate a separate peace with the Ottoman Empire. The negotiators failed, but had negotiations succeeded they could have resulted in some form of continued Ottoman presence in Palestine. Weizmann and his colleagues were aware of some of these efforts but were reluctant to oppose an effort to limit the scope of the Great War.

Clearly Jonathan Schneer knows how to tell a tale in broad strokes and with attention to detail. Parts of the story have been told before, but telling it from a fresh angle embellished by new source material was a worthy effort. His achievement is marred by small irritants. When writing about Sokolow’s meeting with Monsignor Eugenio Pacelli (the future Pius XII), Schneer writes that Pacelli’s “attitude toward Jews remains a matter of contention: He was not very helpful to Italian or foreign Jews during War World Two and his defenders argue that he did what he could.” This is peculiar leniency toward the pope whose passive attitude toward Nazi Germany and the Holocaust has been exposed by Saul Friedlander decades ago.

Schneer is equally lenient toward the Jerusalem Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini. “Hunted by the British,” he writes, “he fled, landing finally in Nazi Germany during World War Two, where he sought Hitler’s support for Arab independence.” Anyone who knows anything about the Mufti’s close collaboration with Nazi Germany and support for the Holocaust would regard this as a gross understatement.

Schneer’s final lines tell us that the destruction of the Ottoman Empire led to national and ethnic violence. As in the case of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, it is not certain that a series of warring nation states was a better alternative to the multi-national empires of the 19th century. These lines have an ironic ring to them, published as they are when the Islamist government of Turkey is pursuing what is described as a policy of Neo-Ottomanism.

Itamar Rabinovich is the Ettinger Professor of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University and a Distinguished Global Professor at New York University.

The first person to learn about the Balfour Declaration—even before Rothschild—was Chaim Weizmann, who more than any other individual was responsible for winning the British government over to the Zionist cause. In The Balfour Declaration, his dynamic new telling of this famous history, Jonathan Schneer describes Weizmann’s reaction to the news, as recalled by a fellow Zionist leader, Shmuel Tolkowsky. “Weizmann was so filled with pleasure, Tolkowsky recorded, that he ‘behaved like a child: He embraced me for a long time, placed his head on my shoulder and pressed my hand, repeating over and over mazel tov.’ That night, at his home, at an impromptu celebration, Weizmann and his wife and friends literally danced for joy.” A month later, at a mass meeting in London, thousands of people heard Rothschild declare, “We are met on the most momentous occasion in the history of Judaism for the last eighteen hundred years.”

But was it? The Balfour Declaration is still regarded, almost a century later, as one of the great milestones in Jewish history and as the unofficial beginning of the State of Israel—if not its birthday, then its date of conception. Certainly, as Schneer shows, Weizmann and his colleagues—including Nahum Sokolow, the Zionist movement’s chief diplomat, and less famous figures like the Manchester-based Zionists Harry Sacher, Israel Sieff, and Simon Marks—had ample reason to celebrate. They had been working for years to convince the British government that Jewish settlement in Palestine would advance British interests in the Middle East, as well as being an act of historical justice for the Jews. They lobbied politicians all the way up to the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. They enlisted journalists like C.P. Scott, liberal editor of the Manchester Guardian, and society figures like Dorothy Rothschild, the 18-year-old daughter-in-law of the family’s French scion. And they met with a surprising degree of enthusiasm from the British Foreign Office, especially from Sir Mark Sykes, the roving diplomat who was Britain’s chief Middle East expert. (It was Sykes who told Weizmann about the Declaration, greeting him with the words, “It’s a boy.”)

One of the many ironies in this story is that Weizmann, a Russian-born Jew who more or less appointed himself the leader of British Zionism, came to be seen by the government as a more legitimate representative of Jewish interests than Britain’s own established Jewish organizations, which were mostly anti-Zionist. Schneer focuses on the figure of Lucien Wolf, a former journalist who was the head of the Conjoint Committee, a group devoted to lobbying against the Zionist program. To Wolf, just as to some Jewish anti-Zionists today, Zionism was a betrayal of the Jews’ “invincible attachment to things of the spirit and … their strongly marked individualism.” The future, he and his supporters believed, would be post-national, with no place for ethnically based states. Worse, creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine would endanger the claims of Jews everywhere else to equal citizenship.

It was to assuage this fear that the Declaration included the phrase about not prejudicing the rights of Jews in any other country. But this provision was not enough to satisfy Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, who was the only Jew in the Cabinet that approved the Balfour Declaration—and its most vocal opponent. When the Declaration was approved, Montagu wrote in his diary: “The Government has dealt an irreparable blow to Jewish Britons, and they have endeavoured to set up a people which does not exist.” There was a certain idealism in the assimilationist view, Schneer shows, as well as an obvious dread of Jewish conspicuousness. What it lacked, as Schneer points out, was any realism about the Jewish predicament. “Anti-Semitism has scaled heights beyond Montagu’s imagining in 1917,” he writes, “but without regard to Britain’s recognition of Palestine as ‘a national home for the Jewish people.’ ”

In other ways, however, it is surprising how much the Balfour Declaration still seems to matter. Readers of Tablet will remember, for instance, that this summer, Israel’s President Shimon Peres caused a sensation when he undiplomatically told Benny Morris that the British establishment had always been pro-Arab and anti-Jewish. In the ensuing debate, exhibit number one was the Balfour Declaration. To Zionists, it is a standing rebuke to British hypocrisy, since—according to historian Efraim Karsh, writing about Peres’ comment in the Jerusalem Post—“no sooner had Britain been appointed as the mandatory power in Palestine, with the explicit task of facilitating the establishment of a Jewish national home in the country in accordance with the Balfour Declaration, than it reneged on this obligation.” To foes of Israel, on the other hand, the Declaration looks like proof that the country is a creature of imperialism. Thus a writer at the anti-Israel website middleeastmonitor.org speaks of “the persistent question marks over [Israel’s] legitimacy, going back to 1917 and colonial Britain’s endorsement of the Zionist project through the Balfour Declaration.”

It seems bizarrely easy to lose sight of the fact that, in the 93 years since the Declaration was issued, the Jewish population of what began as Palestine and is now Israel has grown from less than a hundred thousand to nearly 6 million. A network of agricultural settlements has become an advanced urban society and a powerful state. In short, it should no longer matter, practically or morally or legally, whether the Balfour Declaration made Israel possible, since it certainly did not make modern Israel actual. As Karsh notes, in fact, the Declaration was the high point of British enthusiasm for the Zionist project. Within five years of the Declaration, the British were restricting land purchases by Jews in Palestine; in the 1930s, they closed the region to Jewish immigration, just as Nazism made it more necessary than ever; and in the 1940s, they resisted Jewish claims to statehood as long as possible, including with violence.

Even the subtitle of Schneer’s book—“The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict”—seems to overstate the Declaration’s real significance. It is certainly true that Britain’s Middle East policy during World War I—and nothing less than that is Schneer’s real subject—laid up plenty of trouble for the future. Parallel to the story of the Declaration, Schneer tells the even better-known story of the Arab Revolt: the attempt, assisted by British officials including Lawrence of Arabia, to overthrow the Ottomans and establish an Arab state in the Middle East. Even before the war was over, it became clear that Britain’s promise to Sharif Hussein of Mecca—to install him as king of an Arab empire stretching from Damascus to Baghdad—was not made in good faith.

For one thing, of course, it contradicted the pledge of Palestine to the Jews. Still more duplicitous was the Sykes-Picot agreement, in which Britain and France secretly carved up the map of the Middle East between them. Britain even considered making a deal with the Ottoman Turks—a part of the story that Schneer tells in great detail, even though the unofficial negotiations never amounted to much. Even the willingness to consider a separate peace with the Turks, however, showed how ready the British were to throw over their Arab and Jewish clients in the interest of winning the war.

But even if the British had not been so feckless, there is no reason to think that more careful diplomacy could have headed off “the Arab-Israeli conflict.” The root of that conflict was not that Britain promised the same land to two different peoples, but that two different peoples wanted the same land. The Balfour Declaration, which inspired such jubilation among Zionists in 1917, did not give that land to the Jews. It only gave the Jews the opportunity to struggle for it.

Shahzad was not a “one-off,” a frustrated Muslim immigrant pushed over the edge by the sinful American way of life or radicalized by the treatment of Muslims in Chechnya or Israel’s wars in Lebanon and Gaza. Rather, as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder admitted this weekend, he was an emissary of the Pakistani Taliban, a group with which the United States is quietly—here, but not over there—at war. “We know that they helped facilitate it,” Holder said of Taliban support for Shahzad’s operation. “We know that they probably helped finance it. And that [Shahzad] was working at their direction.”

It is notable that the initial news coverage of Shahzad’s failed effort offered nearly a dozen psycho-religious explanations for his behavior—he lost his mortgage, he lost his wife, he is a madman, he is a religious fanatic, he is a crazy jihadi—all of which may or may not be true but pale next to the obvious fact: The United States is at war with the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is not clear why the ancient historical principle of lex talonis—an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth—is lost on us, as if there is no price to pay for killing people in war, both militants and civilians. If one of the chief goals of the Obama Administration’s counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is to protect that country’s civilian population, it suggests that something is deeply wrong with a strategy that has now made U.S. civilians vulnerable to mass murder at home. The reason that American civilians are endangered here, and that U.S. troops are at risk in Iraq and Afghanistan, is that we have killed tens of thousands Muslims in those countries, which we continue to occupy.

This is not, one must add, because of Israeli actions in the West Bank. Last week this column looked at the theory of linkage, or the idea that every problem in the Middle East is inextricably linked to the Arab-Israeli conflict. I detailed the concept’s history, identified some of its proponents, explained its strategic values for successive U.S. governments, and showed how it has tied our fate to that of our Arab allies. One Tablet reader contended that I had overstated the case, commenting that linkage is simply another way “to blame everything on Jews.” He wrote: “Judeophobia/anti-Semitism is a motivating factor for linkage.”

After some deliberation, I concluded that couldn’t be right. Sure, it’s true that 2,000 years of anti-Semitic narratives holding the Jews responsible for everything from the murder of Jesus to the black plague to Sept. 11 could easily pave the way for a theory attributing the myriad problems of the Middle East to the Jews. But it’s hard to believe that large segments of the foreign-policy establishment of a country that overwhelmingly supports the Jewish state could hold a conviction that is at its core anti-Semitic. That’s the stuff of medieval thinking, and the United States is the engine of historical, and moral, progress. After all, a country that once went to war over slavery has elected an African-American president, thanks in no small part to the energies of our intellectual classes in the press and the academy—many of whom also subscribe to the idea of linkage. So, the idea that people who are anti-racist could also promote narratives that are anti-Semitic is irrational.

Nonetheless, it’s true that over the last year linkage has seemed to figure much more prominently in U.S. Middle East policy than ever before. So, this week I wanted to explore some of the reasons why, with reference to the Shahzad case.

The first and most obvious reason linkage is in the news of late is that the concept will always be more of an issue under those U.S. administrations to whom the peace process is most vital. For the Democratic Party, the peace process is always important. As Steven Rosen, director of the Middle East Forum’s Washington Program, told me, “The peace process is a part of the Democrats’ DNA.” That is to say, when the Middle East is relatively calm, the peace process is important, but, as the apostles of linkage explain, it is never more urgent than when other issues in the region are heating up. Successful peace processing turns the temperature down across all the Middle East.

So, what are the major regional issues? As I discussed last week, our Arab allies and Israel agree that the threat of a nuclear-weapons-capable Iran is the chief concern in their region. However, Washington does not concur. Rather, U.S. officials from both this White House and its predecessor believe that the most pressing concern for the United States is its two theatres of combat in the Middle East: Iraq and Afghanistan. Where the Bush Administration was eager to win Iraq and, according to its critics, took its eye off the ball in Afghanistan, the Obama team just wants to get out of Iraq as quietly as possible while it devotes more resources to winning the war in Afghanistan, which the president has told the American public is not a war of choice but a war of necessity.

The robust war that we are now waging in Afghanistan includes a troop surge, firefights in towns and cities, and drone strikes—53 in 2009 alone, more than during Bush’s entire tenure. Indeed, drones have become such a part of the popular consciousness that the president made a drone joke at the annual White House Correspondents’ dinner. In some corners of the world, the president’s joke probably didn’t go over too well: A report from the New America Foundation argues that in the 123 drone strikes in northwest Pakistan between 2004 and 2010, as many as 1,285 people—about the same number of Lebanese nationals killed when Hezbollah and Israel went to war in July 2006—have been killed, one third of them civilians.

In the last nine months, U.S.-led coalition troops have also shot and killed 28 Afghan civilians at checkpoints—for no apparent reason, except that the soldiers who ask Afghan drivers for their papers appear to have itchy trigger fingers. No U.S. soldiers have been brought to trial for killing Afghans at checkpoints, and there has been no expression of international outrage at American cruelty and incompetence, which have been publicly admitted to by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan—in the apparent confidence that his admissions would have no legal consequences whatsoever for himself or for the nervous soldiers under his command. Had IDF troops been responsible, it would’ve been a war crime, but with U.S. forces in the lead it’s something else. “It’s really a challenge to the leadership,” says Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, the operational commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. “It’s a challenge to discipline.”

It is frightening to contemplate, within the framework of linkage theory, how much more radical Palestinians would be if Israeli troops killed an average of 40 Palestinians a year at checkpoints in the West Bank for no evident reason at all and the perpetrators were never charged with any crime. Checkpoints are a key part of the linkage lexicon—the sites where Palestinians are ostensibly humiliated on a daily basis and reportedly radicalized. It is hard to imagine how the kind of wanton bloodshed that the United States is currently inflicting on innocent Afghans would radicalize the Middle East if Israelis were responsible; but then again it’s equally hard to imagine an Israeli leader cracking jokes in public about targeted assassinations of Palestinian militants.

But Israel is not the United States. The former is led by a right-wing government that has shown little interest in making concessions in order to push the peace process forward. The latter is headed by a Democratic president who, in ostensibly stark contrast to his predecessor, has professed a desire for comity with the Muslim masses. The United States does nation-building in Muslim lands, while the Israelis are preventing the birth of a Palestinian state. Israel kills Muslims that it has radicalized through its own actions, while the United States fights in Muslim lands in order to secure its national interests. For example, since October 2002, American forces have killed thousands of Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan in an ongoing hunt for one man, Osama Bin Laden, who may very well be deceased. There is no oil in Afghanistan, and if we are fighting there just to avoid being labeled a paper tiger by our adversaries, then we empower our enemies to determine our strategy, by drawing lines in the sand anywhere in the world and daring us to cross them.

It’s also possible the Obama Administration is just waging war in Afghanistan for the same reason that James Jones—a Marine general who, lacking the tact to refrain from telling Jewish jokes to a Jewish audience, has the president’s ear on sensitive issues—is the national security adviser. Lacking hawkish credentials, the Obama White House is vulnerable to attacks from the GOP, who apparently are also apt to confuse U.S. national security with domestic politics. In any case, the president is ambivalent about owning his war of necessity, and the proof is not just that he set a date for troop withdrawal at the same time he announced his surge.

While it is impossible to know what percentage of Muslim deaths are directly attributable to U.S. force in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fact is that over the last three decades American wars in the Middle East entailed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslims, fighters as well as civilians, and Obama’s cosmetic speeches about respecting Islam’s contribution to the world will do little to hide casualty figures that would make all but the most vicious Middle Eastern regimes blush. It’s hardly surprising then that we are now taking a page out of the Arab regime playbook. Don’t blame us, the linkage theorists say: Look at what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians.

The Obama Administration is obsessed with linkage because it wants to have it both ways. They want to wage war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the strategic value of which is hard to ascertain, without taking moral or political responsibility for that war. The upshot of this cowardice is a form of magical thinking in which the United States evades responsibility for its own actions by shining the spotlight on the Jewish state instead. But it’s not Israel’s checkpoints on the occupied West Bank that compelled the Taliban to dispatch one of its foot soldiers to Times Square last week to kill American civilians. It’s our own war.

The transformation of a political conflict over land into a religious war is one of the most dangerous and frightening goals of radical Islamist politicians—but it has nothing to do with the Quran.

Here the Italian Muslim communal leader and Quranic scholar Sheik Abdul Hadi Palazzi examines what the Quran says about the connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. Far from negating the historical claims of a Jewish presence on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Quran actually confirms Jewish accounts of the building of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem and supports the Biblical claim that the land of Israel was given to the Jews by God.

1. Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem

In August 2002, the Yasser Arafat-appointed “mufti of Jerusalem and the Holy Land,” Ikrima Sabri, told the Western media that “there is not even the smallest indication of the existence of a Jewish temple in Jerusalem in the past. In the whole city, there is not even a single stone indicating Jewish history.” By saying this, he confirmed what Arafat had already said to the London-based Arabic paper al-Hayat and reportedly repeated to Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak at Camp David: “Archaeologists have not found a single stone proving that the Temple of Solomon was there because historically the Temple was not in Palestine.”

In making such statements, Sabri and Arafat not only blatantly denied history, archeology, and the teachings of the Bible, but they also denied the words of the Quran. From the time of the Revelation of the Noble Quran until recently, all Muslims unanimously accepted that the Haram as-Sharif, or Holy Esplanade, on which the Dome of the Rock today stands is the same place where Solomon’s and Zorobabel’s Temples once stood. As a matter of fact, Haram as-Sharif, the Sacred Area of Temple Mount, includes a place called Solomon’s Standpoint, or Maqam Sulayman—according to the Muslim tradition, Solomon used to sit there and supplicate while Hiram’s masons were engaged in building the Temple. From that same place the Muslim tradition says that Solomon prayed to dedicate the House once it was completed and to intercede for those who will approach it for worshipping.

Accepting that Solomon’s Temple was in Jerusalem is compulsory for every Muslim believer, because that is what the Quran and the Islamic oral tradition, called the Sunnah, teach.

In the Quran, Surah Bani Isra’il (the Chapter of the Children of Israel), verses 1-7, we find a description of Solomon’s Temple and of how it was destroyed twice by the enemies of the Jewish people:

Glory to Him Who caused His servant [Muhammad] to travel by night from Masjid al-Haram [in Mecca] to Masjid al-Aqsa [in Jerusalem] whose precincts We did bless, in order that We might show him some of Our Signs: for He is the One Who heareth and seeth everything. We gave Moses the Book [Torah], and made it a Guide to the Children of Israel, commanding: ‘Take not other than Me as Disposer of your affairs.’ O ye that are the offspring of those whom We carried [in the Ark] with Noah, verily he was a devotee most grateful. And We warned the Children of Israel in the Book, that twice would they do mischief on the earth and twice be elated with mighty arrogance. When the first of the warnings came to pass, We sent against you Our creatures [Babylonians], given to terrible warfare: they entered the very inmost parts of your homes, and thus the first warning was fulfilled. Then We did grant you the return as against them; We gave you increase in resources and sons and made you abundant in human power. If ye did well, ye did well for yourselves; if ye did evil, [ye did it] against yourselves. So when the second of the warnings came to pass, [We permitted your enemies] to disfigure your faces, and to enter your Temple as they entered it once before, and to bring to destruction all that fell into their power.

Imam Abu Abdullah al-Qurtubi, who lived from 1214 to 1273 and was one of the most authoritative medieval Quranic annotators, in his Al-Jami’ li Ahkam il-Qur’an, or Encyclopedia of Quranic Rules, explains the context (asbab) of the verses by mentioning among other sources the authentic Prophetic tradition (hadith). He wrote:

Hudhayfah Ibn al-Yaman asked the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him:

‘I travelled more than once to Jerusalem, but saw no Temple standing there. What is the reason?’

The Prophet Muhammad replied:

‘Verily Solomon son of David raised Bayt al-Maqdis [i.e., Beth ha-Mikdash, the First Temple] with gold and silver, with rubies and emeralds, and Allah caused human beings and spirits to work under his command, until the raising of the House was completed. Afterwards a Babylonian King destroyed Bayt al-Maqdis and brought its treasures to the land of Babylonia, until a King of Persia defeated him and ransomed the Children of Israel. They rebuilt Bayt al-Maqdis for the second time [the Second Temple], until it was destroyed for the second time by an army led by a Roman Emperor.’

One can easily verify that Jewish and Muslim traditional sources are confirming each other: The Temple was built by Solomon and destroyed by a Babylonian king. A Persian king later defeated the Babylonians and ransomed the Jews, permitting them to return to the Land of Israel. The Temple was rebuilt but afterward was destroyed by the Romans. This Temple stood in the area referred to as Beth haMikdash in Hebrew and Bayt al-Maqdis in Arabic. Those political and pseudo-religious Palestinian leaders who claim that “there was never a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem” are surely aware that, in order to support their political claims, they are compelled to lie, hide sources, and contradict the letter of the Quran and the Islamic tradition.

An earlier Quranic exegete and jurist, Imam Muhammad ibn Jarir at-Tabari, who lived from 838 to 923, writes in his Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk, or History of Prophets and Kings, that the same sacred area was the place where Jacob had his vision of the Heavenly Ladder:

When Jacob awoke he felt blissful from what he had seen in his trustful dream and vowed, for God’s sake that, if he returned to his family safely, he would build there a Temple for the Almighty. He also vowed to perpetual charity one tenth of his property for the sake of God. He poured oil on the Stone so as to recognize it and called the place Bayt El, which means ‘the House of God.’ It became the location of Jerusalem later.

In Jerusalem on a huge Rock, Solomon son of David built a beautiful Temple to expand the worship of God. Today on the base of that Temple stands the Dome of the Rock.

Historical negation of Jewish and Islamic sources concerning Jerusalem is recent and does not predate the PLO and its political propaganda. In 1932, during the British Mandate period, the Supreme Muslim Council of Jerusalem published a Brief Guide to Haram as-Sharif for Muslim pilgrims, written in English. “This site is one of the oldest in the world,” it says. “Its sanctity dates from the earliest times. Its identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute. This, too, is the spot, according to universal belief, on which David built there an altar unto the Lord, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings.”

Not only were Arafat’s minions and heirs in Jerusalem attempting to rewrite the history of Arabs and Jews in the region as told by others; they were also attempting to rewrite the history of Arabs and Jews in the region as told by Islamic Arab sources, too.

2. Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel

The Biblical notion that God granted the land of Canaan to the Children of Israel is confirmed by the Quran. In the Surah of Jonah, verse 93, we read:

We settled the Children of Israel in a beautiful dwelling-place, and provided for them sustenance of the best.

In Surah al-Ahraf (of the Barrier), verse 137, we read:

We made a people considered weak inheritors of the Land in both Eastern and Western side [of the Jordan river] whereon we sent down Our blessings. The fair promise of thy Lord was fulfilled for the Children of Israel, because they had patience and constancy, and We levelled to the ground the great works and fine buildings which Pharaoh and his people erected.

Surah al Maidah (the Table), verse 21, is the only passage in which the Holy Land is mentioned by that title (al-Ard al-Muqaddas). It refers to the words Moses spoke to the descendants of Isaac:

Remember Moses said To his people: ‘O my People, call in remembrance the favor of God unto you, when He produced prophets among you, made you kings, and gave You what He had not given To any other among the peoples. O my people! Enter The Holy Land which God hath written for you, and turn not back ignominiously [to this heritage of yours], for then will ye be overthrown, to your own ruin.

In a commentary of Imam Abu al-Qasim Mahmud al-Zamakshari, who lived from 1074 to 1144, titled al-Kashaf, or The Revealer, we read the following explanation:

As for the borders of ‘the Holy Land,’ some scholars says its northern border is the Mount [Hermon] and its surroundings, and for others in also includes a part of the Land of Sham [the Golan]. Others say it extends from the territory of the Philistines [Gaza] until Damascus and a part of Urvum. Some say that God presented to Abraham this Land as an inheritance for his children when he went up to the mountain and said to him: ‘Look around as far as your gaze can reach. Every place reached by your eyes will be theirs.’ The Holy Temple was the dwelling place of the prophets and the residence of the believers. ‘God hath written for you’ means ‘God swore it and wrote in the Divine Tablets of Predestination: that it is yours, belongs to your people and do not turn back from it. Do not be afraid of the Philistine giants who live there.

A similar note is also found in a commentary of Abdallah ibn ‘Umar al-Qadi al-Baidawi, who lived from 1226 to 1260, titled Asrar ut-Tanzil wa Asrar ut-Ta’wil, or The Secrets of Revelation and the Secrets of Interpretation.

3. Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel was never abolished

Moreover, the Quran explicitly refers to the return of the Jews to the Land of Israel before the Last Judgment when it says in the Surah of the Children of Israel, verse 104:

And thereafter We [God] said to the Children of Israel: ‘Dwell securely in the Promised Land. And when the last warning will come to pass, we will gather you together in a mingled crowd.’

Therefore, from an Islamic point of view, Israel is the legitimate owner of the land God deeded to her and whose borders were defined by Abraham in Genesis.

All recent claims according to which the “assignment of the Land of Israel to the Jewish people was withdrawn or abrogated” are bereft of scriptural or traditional evidence. The Quran mentions the territory that God assigned to the Jewish people, but neither it nor the traditional Islamic sources mention a supposed withdrawal.

Imam al-Qurtubi explains in al-Jami that the last promise concerning the return of the Jewish people “together in a mingled crowd” after the destruction of the Second Temple will be a sign that precedes the coming of the Messiah.

The Quran only mentions a double period of mischief and a double punishment with exile from the Land. God says:

We warned the Children of Israel in the Book, that TWICE would they do mischief on the earth and TWICE be elated with mighty arrogance.

According to this Quranic proof, the contemporary Zionist rebuilding of the State of Israel—the third entry of the Jews to their divinely appointed land—is not mischief but rather a fulfillment of what Imam az-Zamakshari reminds the Jews: “God swore it and wrote in the Divine Tablets of Predestination: that it is yours, belongs to your people and do not turn back from it.”

Sheikh Abdul Hadi Palazzi is secretary general of the Italian Muslim Assembly.

• The French and Spanish foreign ministers are the most prominent supporters of an initiative that would see the European Union recognize a Palestinian state within 18 months. Israel is opposed. [Haaretz]

• One report states that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally approved Mossad’s killing of Hamas weapons man Mahmoud Mabhouh. (Much more on the Dubai murder mystery at 10am.) [Times of London]

• Despite an anti-blockade backlash throughout the Arab world, Egypt is moving ahead with plans to block off smuggling tunnels into Gaza. [WSJ]

• Alexander Haig, a secretary of state in the Reagan administration, died at 85, and was remembered as a friend and fond admirer of Israel. [JPost, Haaretz]

• In case you didn’t see it yesterday, you really must read about Yitta Schwartz, of Kiryas Joel, New York, who died in January at 93. A Holocaust survivor, Satmar Hasid, and mother of 16, she is estimated to have—from a 75-year-old daughter to a week-old great-great-grandson—over 2,000 living descendants. [NYT]

Barak’s larger remarks were not overly dovish. He called for an immediate resumption of peace negotiations, but explicitly rejected the Palestinian demand for a construction freeze throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, before talks resume. (Fayyad, for his part, insisted on that precondition.) In other words, Barak was not exactly playing the lefty.

Two questions:

How soon until it is fully mainstream—until it is not news, requiring of, say, an immediate blogpost—for an important Israeli (or American) to use the word “apartheid” to describe Israel’s potential future?

And, if Israel’s current situation is a country headed for “apartheid,” what needs to happen for it to be a country that actually practices “apartheid” already? What are some of those preconditions? Are any of them already satisfied?

And, again, don’t forget to check in on Judith Miller’s dispatches from Herzliya for Tablet Magazine.

Barak: Peace With Palestinians or Apartheid [AP/TPM]

Earlier: Peres Passes Peace Torch to Fayyad

Google Defines Samaria as ‘Palestinian Territory’ [Arutz Sheva]

The main tension articulated in the poll results, it seems to us, is between Israelis’ apparent lack of a sense of urgency regarding a final-status agreement with the Palestinians and their perception of the American attitude here. Half think an agreement must be reached over the next few years; nearly half think an agreement should take “as long as necessary”; and nearly 60 percent think an agreement will not ever be struck. (Pity the at-least 10 percent who think both an agreement must occur soon and an agreement will occur never.) Yet, the Israelis also perceive the United States’s eagerness to settle the matter in the near future, and therefore worry that in the event that Israel rejects a United States-sponsored final agreement, military and financial repercussions will follow. The one country in the world whose trust and support it cannot afford to lose—65 percent believe the United States is the only powerful country it can count on—also does not know what is best for it, many Israelis fear.

A final note: the poll was done by Gerstein | Agne Strategic Communications, and specifically by partner Jim Gerstein. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Tablet Magazine’s Allison Hoffman has profiled him, and because he is a leading pollster for the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization J Street. Expect that group to argue that the numbers confirm that the president’s attempts at tough love toward the Israelis have not fallen as flatly as his critics have alleged. Meanwhile, expect those same critics to contend that even the high numbers are not high enough.

New America Foundation Israel Survey Analysis [New America Foundation]
Engaging Israelis on the Road to Final Status [New America Foundation]

Related: The Pulse-Taker [Tablet Magazine]

Related: The Pragmatist

Israel’s response to that event, which was communicated through a Foreign Ministry official on background and which references Sweden’s iconic national company, ought to be savored, like a really expensive glass of wine. “The peace process in the Middle East,” Israel said, “is not like IKEA furniture. It takes more than a screw and a hammer, it takes a true understanding of the constraints and sensitivities of both sides, and in that Sweden failed miserably.” (Our bold.) Because we’re journalists, whose main bias is not for a particular side as much as for a good story, we hope that Sweden’s rebuttal is forthcoming. In fact, we hope it mentions how difficult it is to get through the stubborn sole of a Teva sandal.

Israeli Officials to Sweden: Middle East Peace is Not Like IKEA Furniture [Haaretz]

Previously: Swede Dreams

He could just as easily have been talking about his political fortunes. A Western-trained economist praised by many in Israel and the United States, Fayyad has emerged in recent years as an unlikely Arab visionary—the “Ben Gurion of Palestine,” as Israeli President Shimon Peres recently called him. To hear most observers tell it, Fayyad governs like the Michael Bloomberg of Palestine—managerially, with seemingly little interest in politics over policy. But his ability to implement his vision is being hindered by old-guard interests on both sides of the Green Line, the demarcation that separates Israel from the West Bank. It’s one of those paradoxical realities of the Middle East that the heralded technocrat of Palestine has no democratic legitimacy but serves entirely at the pleasure of P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas, who appointed Fayyad to his position. Abbas last month announced his intention to step down as the Palestinian Authority president, citing Israeli intransigence on the peace process. If Abbas—Fayyad’s constituency of one—leaves, many observers of the region agree, that could create a power vacuum in the P.A. and lead to a third intifada, unraveling all of what Fayyad’s administration has accomplished. But, until then, his leadership provides what seems to be Palestinians’ best hope for a more functional future, and the prime minister seems unfazed that progress is being held hostage to factionalism. “We have competing ideologies and concepts,” Fayyad said. “But there are two ways of doing things: to sit on our hands and do nothing until we figure it out by talking, or to get on with it and act in a manner that’s consistent with a shared, broader outlook. I prefer to get on with it.”

And so he has. By all accounts, in the two years since Fayyad was named prime minister, the West Bank has been transformed from a besieged and impoverished bantustan into a rough sketch of what a functioning Palestinian state might look like—if it ever comes to fruition. In August, Fayyad laid out the most ambitious, bottom-up plan ever devised for Palestinian nationalism, “de facto statehood,” which is spoken of respectfully even by Israeli officials who oppose it (and most do). Meanwhile, Fayyad’s homegrown critics say his proposal conforms a little too nicely to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own designs for the occupied territories. He’s still combating cynical and entrenched PLO interests, held over from the Arafat era, who don’t like transparent government. He’s also jockeying to reunify Gaza and the West Bank, two regions separated in the midst of an internecine civil war in 2006 and now governed, respectively, by the Islamist party Hamas and the secular party Fatah.

A man apart and an agent of change in a territory with a 40-year status quo, Fayyad has, unsurprisingly, accrued enemies and skeptics, though his biggest cheerleaders are Americans. “He’s a real revolutionary,” said Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic (and a Tablet Magazine contributor). “He’s done more to improve the quality of life in the West Bank than anyone else.” Indeed, concrete progress been made so rapidly under “Fayyadism”—New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s term for the prime minister’s ultra-pragmatic style of governance—that one former Bush administration official asked not to be identified for this article because “I don’t want to make Salam’s life more difficult by having someone like me praise him.”

* * *

Fayyad speaks perfect English with an accent marked by his cosmopolitan upbringing. Though he grew up in the West Bank city of Tulkarm—he was 15 years old when the Six-Day War broke out in 1967—and went to college at American University in Beirut, all of Fayyad’s graduate work was done the United States. In Texas, to be exact: he earned an MBA at St. Edward’s University, a Jesuit-run liberal-arts college just outside Austin, and a doctorate in economics from the University of Texas at Austin. His thesis adviser was a leading macroeconomist, William Barnett, who told me that one memory that stands out of Fayyad the student was how badly in debt he always was—not necessarily a compliment for a budding economist. But this was because, Barnett explained, Fayyad was constantly bailing out friends who were even worse off financially. How did a Palestinian expat comport himself in George W. Bush country? “I am a Jew,” Barnett said, “and he chose me to be his thesis adviser. Does that answer your question?”

Post-graduate stints at the St. Louis Federal Reserve and the World Bank followed, and then Fayyad went to work for the International Monetary Fund in 1995 as representative to the Palestinian Authority, which had been established a year earlier, under the Oslo Accords. He credits a sense of patriotism with his return home and his decision, in 2001, to accept the portfolio of P.A. finance minister, a job that Yasser Arafat was forced to offer him because of angry domestic protests about P.A. graft and corruption.

Throughout the 1990s, poverty was endemic in the West Bank, and yet Arafat and his wife, Suha, lived like royalty. The International Monetary Fund estimated that from 1995 to 2000 Arafat stole $900 million from the Palestinian Authority. Fayyad, with his advanced degrees, Italian suits, and reputation for incorruptibility, set to work modernizing and un-corrupting this third-world political economy. In 2003, he gave an interview to Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes in which he accused Arafat of using a network of monopolies in commodities like flour and cement to siphon off most of the cash. According to David Samuels, who wrote about Arafat’s reign of corruption in a 2005 profile in The Atlantic, “the price of a ton of cement in Gaza [was] $74, of which $17 went into Arafat’s private bank account.” The biggest sieve, though, was the Petroleum Corporation, which operated as a P.A. slush fund. “If there was not money in the treasury, [Arafat] went to the Petroleum Corporation,” Fayyad told Stahl.

Ultimately, Fayyad shut down the petroleum company, prompting speculation that he would be murdered by vengeful agents of the PLO. What saved Fayyad’s life was a mixture of morality and cunning: in one of his first major reforms as finance minister, he started paying P.A. security forces by direct deposit. Previously, they’d been paid in cash, and officials who handled that cash—including even P.A. ministers—routinely skimmed from it. By popular estimate, 50 percent of P.A. security personnel’s income was stolen every pay cycle, so Fayyad’s switch to direct deposit effectively doubled their salaries. “After that,” Barnett said, “when Salam walked down the street, even in Gaza, the police saluted him. He was probably safer than Arafat.”

His name was soon synonymous with integrity and honesty among both Palestinians and Israelis. Fayyad became a fixture on both sides of the Green Line, frequenting both the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem and the King David Hotel in West Jerusalem. His ease with President George W. Bush was apparent, if only in kitsch form, when the president greeted the onetime-Longhorn prime minister, on his first visit to the Oval Office, with the Texas “Hook ’Em Horns” sign.

“We found him easy to deal with,” a Likud Knesset member, Silvan Shalom, told Haaretz in 2007, “and [former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon] believed that if money is being transferred to the Palestinians then at least it should go directly to him.” Daniel Seaman, who now runs Israeli Government Press Office, agreed in an interview: “When it comes to accountability, especially with money, he’s the best the Palestinians have.” Fayyad’s universal charm was surreally captured in 2005, when he attended the wedding of the daughter of Dov Weisglass, the ultra-Likudnik legal adviser to Sharon. The future Palestinian premier was seated next to the acting Israeli one, and the two talked amicably about the chuppah.

* * *

In 2006, Fayyad ran for a seat on the Palestinian Legislative Council, the P.A.’s parliament. He was on a so-called “Third Way” ticket with Yasser Abed Rabbo, a veteran politician, and Hanan Ashrawi, a human rights activist and disciple of the Columbia University postcolonial theorist Edward Said. Though the slate received a meager 2.4 percent of the vote, Fayyad and Ashrawi both won seats on the Council, and Fayyad’s reputation was strong enough in elite circles to ignite rumors that he’d be appointed prime minister in the forthcoming government. He responded at the time that he wouldn’t accept the position as long as Hamas—the Islamist party, which won the election in a landslide—refused to recognize Israel. So Fayyad instead once again became finance minister in a short-lived Fatah-Hamas coalition government. After Hamas attempted a coup in 2007, and a brutal civil war erupted between the two parties that left Hamas in control of Gaza, Abbas, the Fatah leader, named Fayyad prime minister of a new “independent” Palestinian Authority, governing the West Bank. The move violated the Palestinian Basic Law, a kind of proto-constitution, which mandates that a prime minister be approved by the Palestinian Legislative Council—where Hamas still held a majority—but Abbas invoked executive privilege, citing a time of “national emergency.” That Fayyad is technically an illegal prime minister is dismissed by his admirers. “Remember that Ben Gurion had very undemocratic techniques,” said Seaman of the Israeli Press Office. “Sometimes for the establishment of a country, that’s necessary.”

Two years after Fayyad’s installation, with the peace process again stalled and increasing signs that the Obama administration’s efforts to restart it are hopelessly idealistic, the socioeconomic disparity between Gaza and the West Bank is depressingly stark. Gaza now faces massive unemployment and starvation, worsened by last winter’s Israeli war against Hamas, while the West Bank’s economy is expected to grow at 5 percent in 2009, according to Fayyad’s old employer, the World Bank, usually a purveyor of gloomy annual forecasts. Ramallah is awash with construction cranes and new shopping centers. Since 2008, the World Bank found, 6,000 news jobs have been created. Trade with Israel is up 82 percent; tourism in Bethlehem is up 94 percent; and agricultural exports are up 200 percent. Since Netanyahu took office, the IDF has dismantled dozens of manned roadblocks, increasing mobility in the territory; according to numerous reports, there are also plans to allow several hundred Palestinian businessmen free access to Israel.

“They’ve been easing our restrictions, yes,” Fayyad acknowledged, “but we want more to produce a critical mass of change in a way that’s going to impress the business community. Incrementalism isn’t good.” The key to past and future successes, he said, is bolstering internal security, perhaps his biggest preoccupation: “The main reason we have seen improvements in the economic sphere is that—long before Israelis eased restrictions—there were improvements in our security. Security is as much a Palestinian need as it is an Israeli one.” Of the 25,000 members of the Palestinian Authority Security Forces, about 2,100 paramilitary troops have been trained by U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton; their capabilities are such that Fayyad has used them to conduct autonomous operations against sectarian militants, especially those affiliated with Hamas.

Fayyad is no longer “safer than Arafat” on the streets of Gaza. Since he replaced Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as P.A. prime minister, he’s become anti-Islamist No. 1 in the occupied territories. Hamas officials have called him a “traitor” and threatened an “earthquake” of a response to his administration. But so far, most of the tremors have been of Fayyad’s own making. In May, he ordered a raid on a Hamas stronghold in the West Bank town of Qalqilyah that resulted in two dead Hamas militants, three dead P.A. soldiers, and one dead bystander. According to Newsweek, PA security chiefs were “uniformly critical” of Fayyad’s decision not to give the militants more time to surrender. Hundreds of Palestinians saw the raid as a shameful echo of Israeli policy. “Dayton’s Army serves the Jews,” one 24-year-old Palestinian law student shouted at passing P.A. troops. Since Fayyad took office, his forces have arrested 8,000 Palestinians, 700 of whom are still in jail, prompting complaints of a creeping authoritarianism.

“Any excesses or violations of basic rights do not reflect government policy,” Fayyad told me. As to claims that he’s overseeing the emergence of a micro police state, Fayyad was quick to indicate what preceded him, a West Bank mired in “a very bad state of lawlessness and chaos.” Part of the goal of his administration, he insisted, is to build public and civil institutions that ensure that “excesses and violations” are dealt with accordingly, and that West Bankers feel safe but not sorry. “Now we have confidence in our capacity to deal with our own security by improving detention facilities, banning any form of abuse, mental or physical, dealing with crowds and demonstrations,” Fayyad said. As evidence that abuses are on the wane, he mentioned an anti-government protest that occurred 10 days before our conversation. “There was not a single cited violation by security services. We even received letters from the demonstrators acknowledging that.”

* * *

If any of Fayyad’s policies is liable to undermine his reputation as a law-and-order dogmatist, it’s the one with unquestionably revolutionary import. In late August, the prime minister announced the boldest Palestinian plan for nation-building ever conceived: the creation of a de facto Palestinian state by 2011. In a 65-page “blueprint,” Fayyad laid out a reunified country with enough infrastructure, municipal services, and tax incentives for foreign investors to make actual statehood viable—and, he hopes, legal statehood ultimately inevitable. Fayyad envisioned an oil refinery in the West Bank, an international airport in the Jordan Valley, and a reclaimed Qalandia airport just north of Jerusalem “to receive [President Obama] landing in his Air Force One,” as he gleefully told U.S. officials upon unveiling his blueprint. Obama seems willing to help that contingency come to pass; he promised an additional $20 million in aid to the P.A. shortly after Fayyad’s announcement.

Indeed, Fayyad’s goal to “end the occupation despite the occupation” by creating material conditions—or “facts on the ground,” as he puts it, co-opting a slogan of the Israeli pro-settlement community—enjoys broad international support. In September, Tony Blair, chief envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East—a diplomatic conglomerate that represents the United Nations, the United States, the European Union, and Russia—hosted the Ad Hoc Liaison Committee for Assistance to the Palestinians on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York. There, donor nations offered $400 million to the P.A. by the end of 2009.

It also resembles, at first blush, Netanyahu’s own call for “economic peace,” which likewise places the immediate emphasis on bottom-up Palestinian development in anticipation of a formal political statehood. But if Fayyad is seconding an Israeli agenda, he’s the last to admit it. “Look, I’m an economist by training, not someone who would cast any doubts on the importance of economic improvements,” he told me. “Nevertheless, economics is just one leg on which a future Palestine must stand. To think that ‘economic peace’ is going to be a substitute for the political tract—that’s not something I would agree with.”

That doesn’t seem to be a risk. While Fayyad conceded that Israeli officials have read over his document “carefully and methodically,” he said he’s discouraged that both Netanyahu and Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman have balked at de facto statehood, arguing that it violates the letter of the Oslo Interim Agreement, established in 1994, which recognizes the PLO as the sole Palestinian negotiating partner for a permanent-status agreement. The Interim Agreement prohibits either side from taking “any step that will change the status of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, pending the outcome of the permanent status agreement,” something that Netanyahu and Lieberman suggest Fayyad is in fact undertaking unilaterally. “My response to that,” Fayyad countered, “is that what we’re building toward statehood and getting ready for statehood, and that’s a Palestinian responsibility. It is unilateral. But it is positive unilateralism. Nowhere in that document do we mention the unilateral declaration of statehood. That’s a political declaration and that’s the purview of the PLO. So we’re very careful there.”

But Israel also hasn’t rejected Fayyad’s proposal outright, as Seaman of the Government Press Office points out. “What we’re doing is not negotiating through the media,” Seaman said. “You don’t just accept something like that. Anytime there’s a position we see as being acceptable or having room for thought, it becomes a starting point that deteriorates from there. Compared to everything else—Oslo, the Cairo Accords, President George W. Bush’s “road map”—what Fayyad’s suggesting is not inconceivable. But we worry that people on their side are not serious about taking responsibility”—he means security responsibility, Palestinians preventing attacks on Israel—“for what comes along with the plan.”

Palestinians aren’t unified behind Fayyad’s plan, either. Never mind Hamas; even Fatah power brokers have unequivocally dismissed Fayyad’s two-year plan as a bureaucrat’s capitulation to Zionism—a “governmental intifada.” “The PLO is dominated by Fatah members and Fatah senior cadres and not all of Fatah is supportive of Fayyad because he represents a new way of doing things,” said Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, a Washington-based group devoted the emergence of a Palestinian state existing peacefully alongside Israel. “Fatah and the PLO have a long history of being revolutionary armed movements, and Fayyad’s approach is furthest from that.”

Fayyad isn’t reluctant to challenging PLO orthodoxy. In mid-August, right before he released his blueprint, Fayyad told Haaretz that he was agnostic on the question of whether or not Israel should be classified as a Jewish state—one of Netanyahu’s preconditions for restarting the peace process. “Israel’s character is Israel’s business and nobody else’s,” Fayyad said. A month earlier, he had told a large crowd at the Aspen Institute in Colorado that Jews would be allowed to live in any future nation of Palestine and they “certainly will not enjoy any less rights than Israeli Arabs enjoy now in the state of Israel.” That same month, the only substantive resolution passed at Fatah’s General Assembly was the one recommending an investigation into how, exactly, Israel assassinated Arafat.

But the prime minister is quick to play down these differences. “Both constitutionally and morally, the government I have is a Palestinian government, so clearly there cannot be a situation where there’s a Fatah contradiction or difference in position or view. I’m an independent, but we all operate under the umbrella of the PLO.” Ibish suggests that he’s done more to separate party and state than he cares to admit: “The president’s cabinet contains fewer Fatah members than it did before Fayyad came to power.” But the bulk of the credit, Ibish insists, is owed to the Palestinian president. “What Abbas acknowledged is that it’s healthy both for Fatah and the government to have some distance between each other. Fayyad’s approach to governance is consistent with the Abbas policy on the future of Palestine—that it is more important than pleasing every Fatah figure.”

* * *

Now that Abbas is likely on his way out—determined, he keeps saying, not to stay on as president—one must wonder if Fayyad harbors political ambitions of his own, to go along with his enormous geopolitical ambitions. He says he does not. “I have no plans to run for the presidency,” he told me. “I’m campaigning for de facto statehood on the strength of what we’ve been able to accomplish over the past several years.” Ibish, too, doesn’t see Fayyad breaking out of his administrative mold into a glad-hander and baby-kisser. “He’s not a politician in the classic sense, although he does have a party and they do stand people for elections. The time when he can stand as a viable independent candidate for president, however, is a long ways off.”

And, anyway, the fate of democracy itself in Palestine is uncertain. Hamas is planning to boycott the parliamentary elections set for January, and Ibish doesn’t see how a secular party like Fatah can ever realign with an Islamist party—and Iranian patron—like Hamas. “That’s a circle you can’t square,” he said. But he also noted, pointedly, that “a reconciliation that sacrifices the Fayyad strategy would not be worth it.” Fayyad disagrees. “Ultimately, reunification is going to happen because it’s a popular demand,” he said, insisting that it’s the sine qua non for Palestinian statehood. But the prime minister is vague—like, one might note, a politician—on how two fratricidal groups with contradictory purposes can be brought together again. He puts the most faith in his people’s awakening to material conditions.

Fayyad thinks like an economist, and though he may not be a political climber, his strategy is undoubtedly shrewd—offer the Palestinians a kind of Pepsi Challenge of self-determination: misery and religious totalitarianism in Gaza, or prosperity and growing freedom in the West Bank. Fayyad’s mantra is the economist’s version of the screenwriter’s imperative to show, not tell. “We’re not different from other countries with different parties and ideologies,” he said. “Our future will be decided by the Palestinian people, not by arguing on split-screen television. I am trying to produce results on the ground and then let the people decide.”

The Arab League, which includes most Arab states in the Middle East, is still backing the PA’s plan, the BBC says. The P.A.’s rival, Hamas, however, made the valid point yesterday that the new strategy is made somewhat lamer for not being exactly new. As Haaretz put it, “a unilateral declaration of statehood had already been made by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1988.”

Palestinians Under World Pressure Not to Declare State Unilaterally [Haaretz]
EU Rejects Palestinian State Plan [Al Jazeera]

Egypt Leader Urges Abbas to Stay [BBC]

The pressing questions about Abbas’ putative retirement, then, may be slightly less pressing, but no less confusing. First and foremost, is Abbas really planning to step down? He has, as the Economist points out, threatened resignation before. “Some of the Palestinian leader’s aides, however, insisted that this time he would go,” the magazine reported. “Others predicted that he would be persuaded to stay. Still others speculated that he could drop his post as president of the Palestinian Authority (PA), while continuing to wield power as chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the umbrella organisation that embraces an array of nationalist groups, and as head of Fatah.”

And if Abbas does step down, who will replace him? No one’s exactly jumping for the job, but the most frequently named successor is Marwan Barghouti, a Fatah leader who helped organize the first and second intifadas, and is popular within Hamas as well. The problem with Barghouti is that he’s serving five life terms in Israeli prison. If he were to win the election, Yossi Beilin, a former justice minister of Israel and a friend of Abbas, writes in the Forward,a whole new set of questions would emerge: “Will Israel release Barghouti from jail and negotiate with him? Or will Israel’s leaders express a sigh of relief and feel justified in refusing to negotiate with someone they consider a terrorist?”

And then there are the more drastic possibilities. Some Fatah officials are considering unilaterally declaring an independent Palestinian state along 1967 borders, and then demanding “the UN to come and drag the occupation forces from our land,” as an Abbas aide told the Financial Times. There’s also a proposal to internally dismantle the P.A. in protest of its lack of real power, the paper said.

In any case, the portrait of Abbas that is emerging is of a man who is resigned in the emotional if not yet in the political sense of the word. As Beilin put it, “Abu Mazen never much liked power, never liked being president, and he eagerly awaits the day he will leave his job.”

Mahmoud Abbas Puts Off Palestinian Elections After Hamas Opposition [Guardian]
Will He Jump? [Economist]
Missing the Abu Mazen Opportunity [The Forward]
Fatah Signals New Strategy if Abbas Quits [Financial Times]

Ungerleider points out that “the depressed Palestinian economy makes it impossible for all but the rich and upper-middle class to afford regular hotel stays,” which means the new business will likely cater primarily to business and political travelers, who tend to overnight on visits to the West Bank due to the lengthy bureaucratic process of getting in and out. He also posts a bleakly shot video introduction to Ramallah, which promises that “it’s always fun to walk around, even if you weren’t looking for something,” but ends on a somber note: “Ramallah is great,” reads a caption, “but do you know what lies beyond our city? A Wall. Separation. Isolation. Checkpoints.”

Hotel Chains Discover the West Bank [True/Slant]

Palestinian President Says He Won’t Seek Reelection [NYT]

Critics of the report maintain that it ignores the complexities of Israel’s history and geography, and international law, in order to portray Israel negatively. “Amnesty’s report manipulates the issue of water and ignores the complexities of history and law in order to again falsely portray Israel as a brutal regime,” NGO Monitor president Gerald Steinberg told the Jerusalem Post. “Rather than recognize that water supply is a complex regional issue, Amnesty focuses only on Palestinian shortages.”

Water Authority Blasts Amnesty on Report [JPost]
Israel ‘Cutting Palestinian Water’ [Al Jazeera]

Palestinians
in Ma’aleh Adumim Employed by Israel But on Jordanian Terms [Haaretz]

Palestinian Official: We’re Ready for Talks With U.S., but Not Israel [Haaretz]

“He made three crucial mistakes,” Abu-Toameh said of Obama in an interview after his talk. “The first was manufacturing a crisis out of the settlements issue; the Palestinian Authority never made an issue of the settlements until Obama demanded a full freeze. The second mistake was dragging [Palestinian President] Mahmoud Abbas to New York to meet with Obama and Bibi on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly—that was a humiliation for Abbas because the Friday before the meeting Abbas had announced he unequivocally that he would not restart the peace process until all settlement activity had been frozen. Then the third mistake came with the Goldstone Report scandal, when the Americans forced Abbas to pull the Goldstone petition from the U.N., and then the story leaked. So this administration has wrecked Abbas’s reputation and credibility.”

Abu-Toameh argued during his speech that demands that Israel leave the West Bank don’t help, either. “Fatah has an interest in keeping Israel in the West Bank because Israel is doing its job by cracking down on Hamas there.” If Israel were to disengage, he noted, “the place would fall apart, and Hamas would win an election in the West Bank.” The top priority in an attempt to restore peace negotiations, Abu-Toameh said, needs to be political reconciliation among the Palestinians. “Instead of putting all the pressure on Bibi, I would go to the Palestinians and say, reunite the West Bank and Gaza, establish good government, speak in one voice, then go talk to the Jews about peace.”

Fayyad to Obama: Tell Israel no Mickey Mouse State [Reuters]

Whatever legal ramifications ensue from the Goldstone Report, Yossi Klein Halevi argues in The New Republic that its very composition and global reception “may well mark the end of Israel’s limited wars against terrorist groups. Israel cannot afford to continue to be drawn into mini-wars against terrorists hiding behind their own civilians to attack Israeli civilians, given that each such conflict inexorably draws the Jewish state one step closer toward pariah status. Limited victories on the battlefield are being turned into major defeats in the arena of world opinion.”

Palestinians Halt Push on War Report [NYT]
The Goldstone Factor [TNR]

Now, nearly a decade later, Israel has invested more effort in reconciling with its Palestinian neighbors than in coming to terms with its aggrieved Arab citizens, and Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike, on both the left and the right, agree that another confrontation is likely around the corner. And while the clashes between these two publics are still less violent and less heralded than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they nonetheless call into question Israel’s very vision of itself as a democratic state.

To mark the anniversary of the October Events, the Arab Higher Monitoring Committee, as the umbrella group of heads of Arab municipalities calls itself, organized a general strike in the Arab sector, as well as a march in Arrabeh, a village in the Wadi Ara section of the Lower Galilee where two of the victims of the 2000 police shootings lived and died. For the first time in its history, the march was attended by several European diplomats, indicating that the Israeli-Arab claims of discrimination are beginning to find a ready ear in the international community.

Which, of course, puts Israel in a tight spot. The Jewish state is rightly proud of its Declaration of Independence, which guarantees equality before the law for all its citizens, and yet is well-aware that some of those citizens—the Jewish ones—are more equal than others. With the Law of Return granting automatic citizenship to any Jew who seeks it, and with the nation’s symbols all drawing on Jewish history and theology, Israel’s Arab citizens have always had to struggle for a place of their own.

Two recent government decisions, however, are bound to make this precarious situation even more loaded. The first is an announcement by the new education minister, Gideon Saar, that schools in the Arab sector could not use the word “nakba” (Arabic for “catastrophe” and the term used to describe the calamity that befell many Arab citizens as a consequence of Israel’s independence) in lessons referring to the creation of the state. A short while after Saar’s statement, Israel’s transportation minister, Yisrael Katz, issued a decision stating that the Arabic on road signs is now to give destination names in transliteration from the Hebrew, rather than using the Arabic place name, which has been the norm here since 1948. These two steps serve to remind the state’s Arabs that they are visitors here (not especially welcome ones).

Their economic condition further demonstrates the Israeli Arabs’ growing sense of inequality: as of last year, 53 percent of all impoverished families in Israel were Arab, as were 36 of the 40 Israeli towns hit hardest by unemployment. According to a New Israel Fund 2005 report, the Israeli government spends an average of $192 a year on an Arab student, compared with $1,100 on his or her Jewish counterpart. Recent years saw little improvement in any of these grim statistics.

Many of these inequalities were stipulated in the report of an official state commission of inquiry into the events of October 2000, led by then Supreme Court justice Theodor Or and completed in 2003. The Or Commission not only concluded that the police’s use of lethal force had been largely unjustified, and that action should be taken against a variety of officials both high and low in connection with the 13 deaths, but also looked at the national context in which the events had taken place, and called on the government to “erase the tarnish of discrimination” from which Arabs suffered. And yet, not a single official was ever charged in any of the shootings, and the Israeli government, busy fighting the Palestinian intifada, had no inclination to deal with the problems facing the Arab minority.

A large part of the problem, experts agree, may lie in a deep and inherent difficulty stemming from each side’s definition of its national identity. Even among liberal-minded Israeli Jews, any attempt to question the Law of Return or propose a change in the national anthem can bring the conversation to a dead halt. In fact, a two-year-long dialogue between 20 Israeli Jewish and Arab intellectuals, sponsored a decade ago by the Israel Democracy Institute and entrusted with the question of whether the two sides could reach an agreement about what the relationship should be between Israel’s majority and minority, ended with the conclusion that they couldn’t. The 2006 book summarizing their meetings, Whose Land Is It?: A Quest for an Arab-Jewish Compact in Israel, makes for painful reading.

Similarly, a number of more recent, unilateral efforts by Israeli Arab NGOs, some of which outlined their respective visions of Israel as a multiethnic “state of all its citizens,” have been rejected out of hand by Israeli Jews almost across the board. No counter-proposals flourished in their stead, and dialogue on this crucial question has largely ceased.

Unsurprisingly, then, the floor was left vacant for the demagogues. On the Arab side, Islamists like Sheikh Raed Salah, head of the Northern Branch of Israel’s Islamic Movement, are skilled at exploiting fears and hatred. On the Jewish side, officials like Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman rarely pass up an opportunity to stir up Jewish beliefs that the country’s Arabs constitute a fifth column. Lieberman has long talked about the need for “transfer” of Arab-Israeli towns near the Green Line to any future Palestinian state. In last February’s election, his party, Yisrael Beiteinu, grew from 11 Knesset seats to 15, passing the Labor Party in size, largely on the strength of Lieberman’s call for annulling the citizenship of Israelis (read: Arabs) who refuse to take an oath of loyalty to the state and its Jewish and Zionist values. With the election coming weeks after Operation Cast Lead, Lieberman’s rhetoric was received enthusiastically.

Israel can defend itself from another Palestinian intifada, although the price paid by both sides in human life will continue to rise. But it’s less obvious that Israel as we know it, a free and democratic state with a majority Jewish population and character, will be able to sustain an uprising by its Arab minority. And the even more ominous possibility of Israeli Arabs making common cause with the Palestinians to fight the Jewish state—a scenario already visible in several recent cases in which Israeli Arabs have been accused of aiding Palestinian suicide bombers to infiltrate Israeli towns—is a nightmare that only politicians like Avigdor Lieberman care to contemplate. This traumatic anniversary, then, is a good time to recall that the problem of Israel’s national minority is not going away.

David B. Green is an editor at Ha’aretz English Edition.

Restricted: Visas Good for West Bank Only [Forward]

Palestinian Officials: ‘Abbas Willing to Meet With Netanyahu’ [JPost]
Earlier: Palestinian State by 2011, Fayyad Says

Palestinian PM: We’ll Form de Facto State by 2011 [Haaretz]

Citing Cohen’s commitment to donate proceeds of his shows to victims of violence in both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Noaz Bar Nir, the ministry’s director-general, called on Cohen to schedule a second gig in Israel and play Jesus’s hometown. Such a concert, he added, would “attract a large and varied audience from all the sectors of Israeli society, as well as tourists, who, together, can listen to moving music, enjoy the beauty of nature that surrounds the amphitheater and can realize the concert slogan” of peace and reconciliation. To which we say: Hallelujah.

Tourism Ministry Chief Urges Leonard Cohen to Perform in Nazareth [JPost]

Fatah Congress Elects First Jewish-Born Member [The Guardian]
Report: Jewish Fatah Member Nominated for Party’s Revolutionary Council [Haaretz]
Israeli Wins Fatah Top Body Seat [BBC]

Abbas: Popular Resistance to Go On [JPost]
Lieberman: Fatah Platform Buries Chance for Peace Deal [Haaretz]

Fatah Adopts Resolution Blaming Israel for Arafat’s Death [JPost]

Israel Evicts Palestinians From Homes [NYT]

The lengthy piece mostly focuses on the crazed, brilliant, mad, pleased-with-himself Emanuel rather than this contretemps specifically, and it contains little that will be news to those of us who have read the umpteen profiles of Emanuel that have showed up in the American press. But appearing in Israel, in the same newspaper that originally broke the alleged “self-hating Jews” remark, the article could repudiate not only Netanyahu’s particular characterization of Emanuel but perhaps also Netanyahu’s larger attempt to discredit the U.S.’s calls for a more moderate approach to the Palestinian question.

Rahm Emanuel: Self-Hating Jew or Peace-Broker? [Haaretz]
Spokesman Denies Bibi’s “Self-Hating Jews” Remark [JTA]
Previously: D.C.’s ‘Self-Hating Jews’

Hamas: Israel Distributes Libido-Increasing Gum in Gaza [Ynet]

Now Messud’s attentions have returned to the Middle East, this time with a column in the Boston Globe recounting her recent very unpleasant time in Israel and the West Bank. Messud and a handful of other writers from around the world had traveled to Jerusalem to attend Palestine Festival of Literature, originally scheduled to take place at the Palestine National Theater—that is, until event was relocated, along with its attendees, all bedecked in their evening wear and spilling their cocktails over the rocky terrain, by “machine-gun toting Israeli soldiers in flak jackets.”

Messud offers no reason why IDF soldiers would ask a group of scribblers to take their business elsewhere, except that, as she coyly puts it, “our literary festival had the word ‘Palestine’ in its title.” According to the Palestinians she encountered, many other such cultural events have been shut down or hampered by the Israeli military in a city she notes UNESCO declared the Capital of Arab Culture for 2009. A little investigation might have gone a long way; instead, the rest of her piece is a monument to cant and banality—members of her entourage, she writes, compared the circumstances of a colonial population living under military supervision to “Orwell’s 1984; to Kafka.” It was no doubt Orwellian of Messud to refer to her stifled confab by its popular acronym, “Palfest.” And her background coloration scans like some Fodor’s Guide to Orientalist Cliché:

We scrambled up rocks among terraced olive groves to a stone shepherd’s hut, from which we could see the green and gold hills interlaced to the horizon. We picked our way along a dry riverbed, surprising a patterned tortoise, and on to a small village, where a mangy donkey gazed balefully from its tether and ruddy-faced children demonstrated their tree-climbing prowess.

You know how long it takes for a patterned tortoise to even know you’re there? All that’s missing from this strophe is the call of the muezzin drowned out by machine gun fire, and sand-scorched Western palates thrilling to the wondrous flavors of hummus. But, hey, before you know it, Messud is actually referring to one swarthy denizen of the region as “nut-brown.” And this happens to be Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli who blew the whistle on his country’s nuclear program 25 years ago and served time for almost as long. He is now a nut-brown man without a sky-blue Israeli passport.

Messud’s piece was more than enough to set Marty Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, off on a thousand-word blog tear:

Messud’s ignorance and incuriousness—her piece is an instant classic in the literature of the writer as political tourist—shows in her portraits of both the Palestinians and the Israelis. Her Palestinians are innocent victims who wish merely to read and write freely. Nowhere in her plangent prose in there a suggestion that they owe a good deal of their present misery to their own refusal of various offers of statehood. Nowhere is there a hint of actual literary and cultural life under Hamas and under Fatah. Messud seems to think that but for the Israelis and their occupation Palestine is an oasis of freedom and cultivation.

The real question, though, is how Peretz’s former star book critic James Wood, who graduated from TNR to The New Yorker a few years back and is—not incidentally—Messud’s husband, is handling all of this. A high priest at the Temple of Saul Bellow, Wood would no doubt be fielding angry calls from his now-dead hero and the author of To Jerusalem and Back for his wife’s freshman foray into leftist travelogue writing.

Walking Miles in Palestinian Feet [Boston Globe]
Her Truths [TNR]

However, the Haaretz article doesn’t specify perhaps the most important aspect of the poll of roughly 2,000 Palestinians: when it was taken. Was this before or after the revolt in Iran and the international scorn heaped upon the theocratic regime there, which been the chief sponsor and encourager of both Hamas and Hezbollah?

Most surprising of all may be how Palestinians view Barack Obama. More than 49 percent think he’ll have no impact whatsoever on the peace process. Though for perennial peace optimists, a Fatah victory would finally give Israel a negotiating partner that recognizes Israel’s right to exist, which may be an auspicious complement to Benjamin Netanyahu’s grudging about-face on Palestinian statehood.

Poll: Hamas popularity falls in both West Bank and Gaza [Haaretz]

Carter Target of Assassination Attempt [JPost]
Hamas Boasts, Then Denies Foiling Attack on Carter’s Life [Arutz Sheva]

To Arab leaders, Bibi held out a rhetorical olive branch: “Let us meet,” he said. “Let us speak of peace and let us make peace. I am ready to meet with you at any time. I am willing to go to Damascus, to Riyadh, to Beirut, to any place—including Jerusalem…. I call on the leaders of the Arab world and on the Palestinian leadership, let us continue together on the path of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin and King Hussein.” To the Palestinian Authority, in particular, the prime minister said, “Let’s begin negotiations immediately without preconditions.”

Netanyahu’s second audience—the Israeli electorate—remains fearful that any further Israeli withdrawals threaten to create another terror-breeding Hamastan, and so to them he stressed, as if they hadn’t heard it before, that the source of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict lies deep within Arab rejectionism.

Every withdrawal was met with massive waves of terror, by suicide bombers and thousands of missiles.

We tried to withdraw with an agreement and without an agreement. We tried a partial withdrawal and a full withdrawal. In 2000 and again last year, Israel proposed an almost total withdrawal in exchange for an end to the conflict, and twice our offers were rejected.

We evacuated every last inch of the Gaza strip, we uprooted tens of settlements and evicted thousands of Israelis from their homes, and in response, we received a hail of missiles on our cities, towns and children.

Bibi’s real audience, however, was in fact neither team, but the referee. To Barack Obama, Netanyahu wished to make two points. First, he sought to counter the president’s implication in his Cairo address earlier this month that Israel was granted to the Jews as restitution for the Holocaust. Netanyahu insisted instead on seeing the land as the birthplace of the Jewish people:

The Jewish people and the Land of Israel has lasted for more than 3,500 years. Judea and Samaria, the places where Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, David and Solomon, and Isaiah and Jeremiah lived, are not alien to us. This is the land of our forefathers.

The right of the Jewish people to a state in the land of Israel does not derive from the catastrophes that have plagued our people. True, for 2,000 years the Jewish people suffered expulsions, pogroms, blood libels, and massacres which culminated in a Holocaust—a suffering which has no parallel in human history.

There are those who say that if the Holocaust had not occurred, the state of Israel would never have been established. But I say that if the state of Israel would have been established earlier, the Holocaust would not have occurred.

More controversially—and here we get to the nub of his speech—Netanyahu pledged that Israel would build no new settlements nor appropriate more West Bank land, and he set forth last night for the first time his vision of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, much as Obama wanted. The man who had so staunchly opposed the Oslo Accords may have been short on details—roadmap, yes or no? Annapolis, yes or no? Saudi initiative, yes or no? 1967 borders?—but his two conditions for granting statehood were clear enough: demilitarization, and unambiguous recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people.

As for the first condition, it must be said that one searches one’s memory almost in vain for successful precedents. There are countries without standing armies, like Andorra; but that tiny state is defended by France and Spain. And there are of course demilitarized zones: Åland, an island region on the coast of Finland demilitarized since 1921; the DMZ separating North from South Korea, created by the United Nations in 1953; and the Sinai.

But Netanyahu’s proposal, for all the hype, is nothing new. Both teams and the referees have at one time or another endorsed the idea. A demilitarized Palestinian state, after all, was a cornerstone of the Oslo Process—one of former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak’s four “red lines” for final-status negotiations at the July 2000 Camp David summit. The Palestinian moderate Sari Nusseibeh, the president of Al-Quds University, called for the creation of a demilitarized Palestinian state as far back as January 2002. In the U.S., Gen. James Jones, as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s special envoy to the Annapolis conference in 2007, concluded that a future Palestinian state would require third-party troops—from NATO, for example—to secure Israel’s security.

Bibi’s second condition, however, his insistence on recognition, is by far the deeper. It used to be, in the days when wealth derived from natural resources, that wars were fought to gain those resources. Today, territorial aggrandizement has been rendered obsolete; in a globalized world, a society’s economic success depends on enterprising men and woman working in an environment in which innovation is rewarded. High tech is the new coal. This is why Bibi closed his speech with praise of “Silicon Wadi,” the cluster of high-tech and research companies along Israel’s coastline: “Our microchips are powering the world’s computers,” he said. “Our medicines are treating diseases once considered incurable.” Today, however, conflicts—this one preeminent among them–more commonly arise from the desire for recognition, for dignity, and for having one’s aspirations validated by others.

Not surprisingly, then, Sunday night’s speech did not find favor in Arab eyes, especially for the ways it wrapped Palestinian statehood in a classic Zionist narrative. Israeli Arab MK Ahmed Tibi called it a “public-relations ploy.” “The peace process has been moving at the speed of a tortoise,” Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said. “Tonight, Netanyahu has flipped it over on its back.” Mustafa Al-Barghouti, member of the Palestinian legislature, said: “He is not talking about a state; he is talking about a ghetto, a Bantustan … a system to consolidate an apartheid system.”

So much for recognition.

Benjamin Balint, a writer living in Jerusalem, is a fellow at the Hudson Institute.