My new column is up at The American Prospect:

Bashar al-Assad has not yet fallen. I note this only because of the tone of inevitability in some news reports on Syria’s civil war. The downfall of Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi may be no more predictive than a roulette ball falling on red in the last three spins. Arguably, the popular convulsion in the Middle East began not in Tunisia in late 2010 but in Teheran in mid-2009, when the Iranian regime—Assad’s patron—crushed a popular revolution and erased the immense hopes it had raised.

Still, it would be foolish to bet heavily on Assad’s long-term survival as Syria’s leader. His forces may have retaken rebel-held suburbs of Damascus this week, but armed rebels holding suburbs of a capital even for a few days is the political equivalent of a tubercular cough.

Wagering on when the regime will crumble or what will replace it is equally risky. Assad has already defied Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s December prediction that the Syrian regime had only “weeks” left. Assad and the Alawite minority’s rule could last into 2013 or beyond but are “doomed in the long run,” writes Joshua Landis, an American expert and editor of the Syria Comment blog— an evaluation made more damning by Landis’s pro-Assad reputation. Then again, a Lebanese expert suggested to me this week that the Alawite-led army might try to follow the Egyptian example, sacrificing the dictator so that it can remain the real power. A Sunni takeover, perhaps by the Muslim Brotherhood, is also possible—or a sectarian war of all against all.

But this is certain: When a tubercular cough racks Syria, the Middle East shakes. The country’s location and its entanglement in other people’s politics guarantee that. The war inside Syria is already having an impact outside. Its outcome will have stronger effects, which in turn will force America to adjust its policies in the region. Here’s a brief and partial rundown on where things stand in the region:

Lebanon: “Cold war” is the term used by Lebanese experts to describe the country’s politics. The pro-Iranian, pro-Syrian front led by Hezbollah is on one side; the pro-Western and pro-Saudi front is on the other. Over the last ten months, their verbal sparring has gotten much nastier, says political scientist Hilal Khashan of Beirut’s American University.

The hot war in Syria has also splashed over the border. The Free Syrian Army rebels who have held the Syrian town of Zabadani are based just across the border in Lebanon; Syrians wounded by government forces have been treated in Lebanon. Meanwhile, Hezbollah snipers are reportedly fighting on the government’s side in Syria, and the Shiite organization has allegedly tried to apprehend Syrian opposition figures in Lebanon—albeit keeping a low profile to avoid embarrassing the Beirut government. …

Read the rest here.

In my latest American Prospect column, I show that the Republican candidates for president or either incompetent or delusional in their grasp of world affairs. But which is it: Are they D students, or do they live in an alternate universe? And which one’s delusions put him the most parsecs from Earth? You, the readers, can decide!

If there’s anything that can produce more anxiety than watching the Republicans pick a presidential candidate, it’s watching the process from Israel.

Yes, I know that the Republican candidates—well, except for Ron Paul—all love Israel. Newt Gingrich is still in the race because of the cash his super PAC got from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, whose other political investments include financing an Israeli newspaper that exists to promote Benjamin Netanyahu. Rick Santorum has just been endorsed by the high council of theocons, who are sure they understand Israel’s importance better than the Jews do. Mitt Romney’s foreign-policy platform restates—in more polite but equally counterfactual terms—his accusation of last year that “President Obama has thrown Israel under the bus.”

This is exactly what makes me nervous. These candidates would love Israel to death. What’s scary is not just that any Republican from the class of ’12 is likely to replace Barack Obama’s uneven support for Israeli-Palestinian peace with the George W. Bush-style malignant neglect. It’s not just that the Middle East as a whole is downstream from America: Our region gets swamped by the mistakes made in Washington. What’s really scary is that the way that Republicans—including Ron Paul—talk and act about Israel shows that their grasp of world affairs ranges between incompetent and delusional.

Let’s start with Santorum’s statement—video-recorded at an Iowa campaign event—that “all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis. They’re not Palestinians. There is no Palestinian.” It’s worth watching how Santorum reaches this remarkable conclusion. The West Bank, he says, is part of Israel, just as New Mexico is part of the United States. “It was ground that was gained during war,” he says. Challenged that it might make a difference that the “annexation” was recent, the candidate insists, “No, it doesn’t matter. … It is legitimately Israeli country.” And since the land is Israel’s, he infers, everyone living on it is an Israeli. Presto, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict evaporates.

As a Washington Post fact-checker has noted, Santorum staked out a position more extreme than the official Israeli stance. After conquering the West Bank in 1967, Israel did annex East Jerusalem (a move that no other country has recognized). But the Israeli Foreign Ministry describes the rest of the West Bank as “disputed” territory, not as part of Israel. The explicit reason that even hawkish Israeli politicians haven’t followed through on their desire to annex the West Bank is that they don’t want to offer citizenship to its Palestinian residents.

But Santorum isn’t just ignorant of the positions of his supposed ally. He doesn’t know that it does matter when a country gained ground in war. Post-World War II international law, anchored in the U.N. Charter, bans expansion through conquest. Resolution 242, the Security Council’s November 1967 decision on the Arab-Israeli conflict, refers explicitly to “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.” The man who would conduct America’s foreign policy hasn’t heard about this.

Worse, he doesn’t know the difference between nationality and citizenship. He has missed the whole concept of ethnic nationalism—of people who share a language and a culture, regard themselves as a national community and want self-determination. For Santorum, someone who has Israeli citizenship can’t be a Palestinian. By the same logic, there are no Kurds, and no Kurdish question in Turkey, Iraq, or Syria. The Basques have vanished. The conflict between Greek and Turkish Cypriots is beyond comprehension in Santorum’s world. …

Read the rest at the American Prospect; comment there or come back to SoJo to vote.

Gershom Gorenberg

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

I’d really like to be angry at Dorit Beinisch, the chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court. On the eve of her retirement, Beinisch abandoned her role of pushing the Israeli government to honor legal restraints in the occupied territories. Instead, in what could be her last major ruling on Israeli actions in the West Bank, she has given a stamp of approval to colonial economic exploitation.

But let’s put petulance aside. One message of Beinisch’s judgment is that judicial resistance can stretch only so far. Even the highest tribunal in the land cannot reverse a national policy as basic as continuing to rule the West Bank. Another message—whether or not Beinisch intended it—is that treating a situation that has lasted 44 years as “temporary” is absurd. The occupation is not an acute disease; it is a chronic one.

Beinisch’s ruling came in a suit filed three years ago by the Israeli human-rights group Yesh Din, based on the work of land-use researcher and activist Dror Etkes. The suit asked for an order stopping ten Israeli companies from operating quarries in Area C, the portion of the West Bank under full Israeli control. (The autonomous Palestinian Authority administers the land designated Areas A and B.) Most of the rock taken from those quarries is trucked into Israel for use in construction.

Yesh Din argued that the quarries’ operations violated the 1907 Hague Convention on the laws of war. Under the convention, an occupying military power is an “usufructuary”—meaning it can use the fruits of occupied land but must safeguard property and resources. (The usufructuary of an apple tree could pick the apples but not chop the tree down.) More basically, the suit said, the convention requires the military commander who rules occupied territory to act for the good of the local inhabitants, not for the occupier’s economic interests. Prima facie, carving out West Bank rock for Israeli profit breaks that rule.

Implicitly, the case pointed to wider issues. Officially, the West Bank has been under temporary military rule awaiting a diplomatic accord on its future since Israel conquered it in 1967. The policy that most obviously contradicts this official status of limbo is the building of Israeli settlements. But Israel has also made the West Bank a captive market for its products, even as it restricts Palestinian industry. Palestinian firms have not been allowed to join Israel and Jordan in extracting potash and bromide from the mineral-rich waters of the Dead Sea. And Palestinians buy cement (a manufactured good) from Israel, while Israeli firms extract gravel (a raw material) from West Bank quarries.

Beinisch seemed like just the justice to challenge this arrangement. …

Read the rest here.

The Israeli political right is wont to argue that Israel’s only real problem is PR. We’re doing the all the right things; we’re the only real democracy in the Middle East; we want peace and the Palestinians don’t, they proved that in 1947 when they rejected the partition plan and – so goes this brand of kosher whine – we are terribly misunderstand. We need to make our case better. The complaint is sometimes echoed by the kind of “pro-Israel” voices abroad that fail to distinguish between supporting Israel and supporting the policies of the current government, destructive as they may be.

Well, if the government and its supporters want to prove that’s the problem, they’ll have to do a better job at PR than they’ve done in recent days. There are no candidates for best hasbarah (Heb. n.: information, PR, propaganda, bull); only candidates for worst. Readers of SoJo are invited to cast their votes.

• Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign Ministry angrily answered criticism from the four European representatives on the U.N. Security Council – Britain, France, Germany and Portugal. A statement by the four countries had blasted settlement expansion as standing in the way of “the two-state solution that is essential for Israel’s long-term security” and expressed concern about attacks by settlers on Palestinians. The Foreign Ministry’s response attacked the Europeans for “interfering with Israel’s domestic affairs, including on issues which are to be solved within the framework of direct talks”  between Israel and Palestinians. There are too many things wrong with this as hasbarah (Heb. n.: PR, propaganda, bull) to list here; I’ll mention just three: 1. Settlements and settler violence against Palestinians are not “domestic affairs” because the West Bank is not part of Israel. There’s an argument between Israel and the rest of the world about East Jerusalem, but Israel itself rules the rest of the West Bank under laws of military occupation, not as part of the state. 2. The statement acknowledges that the future of the West Bank needs to be discussed in talks with the Palestinians – thereby contradicting in the second clause what is fallaciously asserted in the first clause (that the settlements are a domestic Israeli issue). 3. And most important: There is a long history of regimes asserting that the international community should not “interfere in their internal affairs” or those of their allies. The phrase is used most often by regimes with which decent people do not like to be identified, and with which decent countries are not proud of doing business. Like Lieberman’s praise of Russia’s elections, this comment places Israel in bad company.
• The New York Times invited Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to write an article for its opinion pages. Netanyahu adviser Ron Dermer wrote back to decline the offer on the grounds that the oped page was biased against Israel. Yup. Offered the chance to balance what the prime minister’s office claims is unfair commentary on his policies, Netanyahu said no because he wouldn’t appear on a page that doesn’t have balance. Netanyahu is supposed to be a master of hasbarah (Heb. n.: propaganda, bull) but he simply ceded the podium. Dermer objected to columnist Tom Friedman’s assertion that applause for Netanyahu when he addressed Congress was purchased by the Israel lobby. But Netanyahu is unwilling to face the wider audience of the Times, which cannot be accused of being bought. At first glance, Netanyahu and his advisers gave into childish petulance. If we assume a more adult, reasoned choice, they decided to plead nolo contendere to the criticisms made on the Times oped page rather than risk new criticism based on the inevitable weakness of their defense of Netanyahu’s policies.
• Representative Steve Rothman, Democrat of New Jersey, issued a statement that attacked Friedman for the same column. “I gave Prime Minister Netanyahu a standing ovation, not because of any nefarious lobby, but because it is in America’s vital national security interests to support the Jewish State of Israel and it is right for Congress to give a warm welcome to the leader of such a dear and essential ally,” he said. U.S. News reports that the second largest set of organizational and organizational-linked donations to Rothman since 2009 have come from Norpac, which identifies itself as “the largest pro-Israel PAC.” That obviously doesn’t mean Rothman’s applause was bought; he may have meant it sincerely and his sincerity may be what convinces Norpac to give him money. But Rothman wasn’t just applauding Israel, he was applauding a particular Israeli leader whose policies include continued Israeli rule over a disenfranchised population (that is, extreme ethnic discrimination), supporting legislative attacks on basic democratic principles, and extreme free-market economics. I assume that despite Rothman’s American patriotism – or precisely because of it – a Democratic congressman from Jersey would refrain from leaping to his feet to applaud an American leader who had similar policies. Reading Rothman, we can choose two versions. Either Netanyahu has fooled him, or he thinks he can fool the public. And either way, it shows that bad hasbarah (Heb. n.: bull) can be conducted from Washington as well as Jerusalem.

Those are my candidates. Feel free to vote.

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The mob numbered about 200 young and angry people. Some had covered their faces. They gathered on a West Bank road near midnight and hurled stones at passing cars. Israeli troops, including the commander of the division in charge of the area and his deputy, rushed to the spot. One of the rioters opened the commander’s jeep door and hurled a brick at him. Another shouted, “Nazi” at the deputy commander and hit him with a rock.

The rioters finally left. A few minutes later, several dozen of them—mostly teenagers—forced open the gate of a nearby Israeli army base. The sentries failed to stop them. At the parking lot outside the headquarters, they broke car windows and slashed tires. When a squad of soldiers chased them from the base, they blocked the road leading to it.

Clashes between the Israeli army and locals in the West Bank aren’t a new story. The apparent twist in these incidents, which took place on the night between this Monday and Tuesday, is that the rioters were Israelis—young, extreme rightists commonly known as “hilltop youth.” The reason for their wrath, according to the flood of Israeli news reports of the eventful night, was rumors that the police and army were about to carry out Israeli Supreme Court orders to evacuate a small settlement outpost, Ramat Gilad, built in violation of the laws in force in the West Bank.

From Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu down, Israeli officials responded as if the confrontations represented an unprecedented internal assault on the state, the rule of law, and Israel’s internal cohesion. After an emergency meeting with cabinet ministers and top army and police commanders, Netanyahu declared, “We have a democracy in this country. … No one is allowed to break the law. No one is allowed to attack Israel Defense Forces soldiers.” The head of the army’s Central Command, responsible for the West Bank, said that “in 30 years in the service, I’ve never seen hatred like this from Jews toward our soldiers.” In a press statement, Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared that “homegrown terror … will not be tolerated.”

In short, Netanyahu, Barak, and colleagues were shocked, shocked to find that settlers were breaking the law and that the extreme right can attack the state. In fact, only the details—attacking a division commander and his deputy, breaking into a base—are new. Otherwise, there is plenty of precedent for the extreme right’s behavior. In a wider historical view, settler radicalism has been fostered by Israeli government officials and bodies since the occupation of the West Bank began in 1967. The state is under attack by its own creation. …

Read the rest here.

The online version is the Daily Beast’s longer listing of top reads for the year.

If you’re in Israel and can’t find The Unmaking of Israel locally, you can order a copy from the best best store between the river and the sea, Munther Fahmi’s Bookshop at American Colony Hotel, telephone 02-6279731. And whether or not you buy the book, sign the online petition against the authorities’ egregiously unjust bid to deport Munther from the city of his birth.

The Unmaking of Israel is also available electronically for Kindle, Nook and iEverything.

Excerpts from my new column at Hadassah Magazine:

Dear L——,

Please don’t give up on Israel. And please give me a chance to explain before you hit the delete button.

I know, your last e-mail virtually asked me not to write this one. You said that you were tired of news about growing West Bank settlements, stalled peace negotiations and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s bellicose statements. Your daughter says the campus debate between anti-Israel and pro-Israel groups is too shrill to bear. You would prefer to focus your progressive political energies on issues close to home. When I write, you implied, I should stick to updates about my kids….

I know you are not alone in your despair. In the recent, excellent documentary Between Two Worlds about American Jewry’s internecine battles, there’s a scene in which Daniel Sokatch, head of the liberal New Israel Fund, explains why young Jews are leaving the conversation: “People will walk away from an argument that looks like [a choice between] ‘Israel, right or wrong’ or ‘Israel is an apartheid demon state.’ That is not a compelling paradigm for most young American Jews.” My only quibble is that lots of older Jews are equally unhappy with a debate restricted to those choices.

But I don’t think you can walk away. If you choose silence on Israel, your silence will also be a statement, interpreted in a way entirely different from what you intend. Besides that, “progressive” means “working for progress.” Giving up on Israel because it isn’t living up to your liberal values would violate those values. …

The bottom line is that you should be working for a better, more progressive Israel and for a more open discussion of Israel among American Jews—a discussion in which supporting Israel includes supporting peace and social change. And the dissonance that makes you want to give up on Israel is a result of two assumptions that I think you will reject once you examine them.

The first is that a Jewish country will automatically be progressive, because that’s how Jews naturally act. Think about it: You don’t believe in the inborn superiority of particular ethnic groups any more than you believe in the opposite, the inherent inferiority of ethnic groups. The Torah does not tell us to remember that we were strangers in Egypt because Jews are instinctively, unequally committed to equality. It repeats that message in a loud drumbeat because we are people, and the natural thing for people to do when they get power is to forget that they were once powerless….

The second flawed assumption is that you should feel tied to Israel only if it is already a progressive country. Think about that word: Progressives are people who work for progress. To your good fortune, Israel is rich with organizations working for change— groups promoting human rights, women’s rights, gay rights, religious freedom, Jewish-Arab dialogue and, of course, peace. In the last several years, American Jewry has seen a flowering of organizations supporting those efforts. …

Read the full column here, and come back to SoJo to comment.

My new column is up at The American Prospect:

The women banter with the soldiers and get through the checkpoint carrying bombs in their handbags. We see them in black and white, which sharpens the lines in their faces and shows their fear more starkly. They arrive at their target. One enters a restaurant. The camera pans the people eating as she pushes her bag under the counter and leaves. As individuals, the victims are innocent, but seeing the world from the camera’s perspective has already told us that the explosion that will rip them apart belongs to revolutionary necessity.

This is a sequence from The Battle of Algiers, the classic 1966 drama about the uprising that drove France from its central North African colony. The film is worth watching again this week, when the Egyptian revolution is back in the center of the news, precisely because Egypt has not followed the Algerian script. Comparisons with the past matter because they underline that so far, history is not repeating itself in Cairo. And this is just part of why the reshaping of Egypt, tarnished and volatile as it may seem, is still so terribly important to the Middle East, and why the revolution turning oppressive would be a tragedy for the entire region.

Let’s stress: Countries have larger turning radiuses than supertankers. In the midst of the turn, no one can predict the final direction. Last winter’s demonstrations toppled Hosni Mubarak, but not military rule. We don’t know how the revolution will conclude. Neither does the apparent majority won this week by the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic groups in the first round of voting tell us where the revolution will go. Later, when the outcome of the revolution is more clear, scholars will explain why it was inevitable. Don’t believe them.

But with that proviso, the first reason that Egypt matters so much is that the mechanics of its change provide a model that could supersede Algeria’s. As portrayed in dramatic form in The Battle of Algiers and theoretically in Frantz Fanon’s treatise The Wretched of the Earth, Algeria taught that violence is absolutely vital to revolution. At first, most of the oppressed—which in Algeria meant the colonized people—were cowed and uncommitted. The small cadre of revolutionaries needed to kill colonists, both uniformed and civilian. In doing so, they provoked greater violence by the colonizers. That overreaction in turn showed the masses that there was no middle ground and pushed more people to the side of the revolution. …

Half a century after Algerian independence, the uprisings in Tunis and Egypt last winter posed a new model for radical change. Social media and satellite TV could bring frustrated masses to demonstrate relatively peacefully, even if the regime responded brutally. Tunis came first, but Egypt had a stronger impact, since it is the fulcrum of the region: the country with the largest population, the major power, the cultural center of the Arab world. Its military chose its own legitimacy over Hosni Mubarak’s continued rule, and promised a transition to democracy. The region has been shaking ever since. Libya and Syria have shown that mass protest is not always enough. What happens in Egypt could preserve or destroy the hope in nonviolent civil uprisings. …

Read the rest here.

“CLEARLY, there’s a war here, sometimes even worse than the one in Samaria,” the yeshiva student said. “It’s not a war with guns. It’s a war of light against darkness.”

We were sitting in the mixed Jewish-Arab town of Acre in Israel. The war he described was another front in the struggle he knew from growing up in a settlement in the northern West Bank, or Samaria: the daily contest between Jews and Palestinians for control of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

The explicit reason that his yeshiva had been established in Acre was to serve as a bridgehead in that struggle, just as West Bank settlements are built to bolster the Jewish hold on land there.

Israeli politicians and pundits labeled the Oct. 3 burning of a mosque in Tuba Zangaria, an Arab community in northern Israel, and the subsequent desecration of Arab graves in Jaffa as a sudden escalation. But they were mistaken.

For several years, extremist West Bank settlers have conducted a campaign of low-level violence against their Palestinian neighbors — destroying property, vandalizing mosques and occasionally injuring people. Such “price tag” attacks, intended to intimidate Palestinians and make Israeli leaders pay a price for enforcing the law against settlers, have become part of the routine of conflict in occupied territory.

Now that conflict is coming home. The words “price tag” spray-painted in Hebrew on the wall of a burned mosque inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders transformed Israel’s Arab citizens into targets and tore at the all-too-delicate fabric of a shared democracy.

Indeed, the mosque burning represented the violent, visible edge of a larger change: the ethnic conflict in the West Bank is metastasizing into Israel, threatening its democracy and unraveling its society. …

Read the rest here.