illustration by Avi Katz

Links to more Necessary Stories columns

Necessary Stories Live!

Is this all coincidence? Or is part of what’s been happening in the Middle East for the past two weeks a result of the U.S. president declaring that the conflict of civilizations is over? My new article in The American Prospect examines the evidence.

Barack Obama spoke in Cairo two weeks ago. The Middle East has been roiling since. The street scenes in Iran have pushed the surprise pro-Western victory in Lebanon’s elections out of the headlines, along with Benjamin Netanyahu’s pained, precondition-crippled acceptance of a two-state solution and the enraged Palestinian response. Two top Israeli intelligence figures scaling down the Iranian nuclear threat from looming Holocaust to mid-range risk — a major story for a calm week — has gone almost unnoticed.

So did Obama set this off, or was he like the king in The Little Prince who ordered the sun to rise at the precise moment when it would have done so anyway? With that come two more questions: Will the crisis in Iran shake up the region even more? And what should Obama do in response?

Let’s go a step at a time. And assume that the requisite qualifier — everything could change in an hour — is present in every sentence.

First, the Obama Effect: The standard, and well-founded, view is that Iran has come apart on its own. Under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the regime has been more oppressive than under his predecessors — harassing intellectuals, journalists, and bloggers. Young Iranians have supported reformist candidates in past elections; this time their vehicle was Mir Hussein Mousavi.

That said, Mousavi did attack Ahmadinejad for destroying Iran’s international image with his delusional statements, especially his denial of the Holocaust. Were Bush still president, suggests Meir Litvak, a senior fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Center for Iranian Studies, the criticism wouldn’t have resonated. Iranians would have felt, “What difference does it make how we look in the world? The Americans despise us anyway.” Facing Obama and his call for dialogue, “how Iran is seen is important, at least to some Iranians.”…

Read the rest here, and return to South Jerusalem to comment.

Sometimes a mediocre film puts everything in perspective. When the lights went down in the Cinematheque last night I was in the middle of discussion with my companion (full disclosure: I’m married to her) how to parse Bibi’s two-state speech. One position (not mine) was that the prime minister had offered an honest and sincere statement of both Israel’s willingness to compromise for peace, whereas the other position (not hers) was that Bibi was just paying lip service to President Obama’s peace initiative and had no real intention of making any progress with the Palestinians.

The film was Fred Cavayé’s Pour Elle (Anything For Her), a thriller that calls for a willing suspension of more beliefs than does Christopher Hitchens writing about God.

Lisa and Julien are happily in love and have a cute little boy named Oscar. Lisa is arrested and convicted of a murder she did not commit. When all legal recourses are exhausted and Lisa turns suicidal, Julien, who teaches French in a high school, decides to free his wife by force. He consults with a former prisoner who has written a book about his many prison breaks (for a guy on the lam, the guy is startlingly easy to locate and oddly willing to speak freely to a total stranger). Then he carefully concocts a plan, scrawled all over the wall of his study at home, to grab Lisa when she’s being taken to the hospital because of her diabetes and abscond with her and Oscar to El Salvador.

Like all protagonists of this genre, bookish Julien displays a truly awesome talent for landing a left hook and shooting straight at a target, without any training or practice. To get fake papers, he does deals with Parisian lowlifes, and to obtain enough cash to support his family for two years in exile, he robs and shoots two drug dealers. In the process he leaves behind enough fingerprints, hairs, pieces of his car, and witnesses to fill an entire season of CSI scripts.

Of course, in a daring crime like this, anything can go wrong. In Julien’s case, nearly everything does go wrong. He ends up going much farther than he intended to go. His brother and father get wind of the plan, his robbery turns into a murder, the police quickly figure out that Julien is the culprit and that he’s trying to spring his wife, and Lisa wastes precious moments when she, at first, refuses to go along. Fortunately for Julien, although somewhat painfully for my brain’s mechanism for distinguishing between the highly unlikely and the laughably unlikely, everything goes wrong about five seconds too late for them to be apprehended. They make it to El Salvador, and the family is reunited, although there’s the small problem that one of its members is now a real killer and that Interpol is hot on his heels.

So what’s that have to do with Bibi’s speech? Bibi is also seeking to suspend our disbelief and make us accept what is almost certainly a fiction—that he really intends to pursue a two-state solution to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians. He’s concocted a complicated plan to stay friends with the U.S. while continuing to add housing units to settlements and condone the construction of ever more outposts in the West Bank. Anything could go wrong.

But, I have to admit, there’s a small chance that everything will go right. It’s just possible that Bibi’s strategy will unite the Israeli public behind a real peace initiative and create a dynamic that will take him much farther than he intends to go. After all, sometimes leaders act with courage and foresight by mistake. Gorbachev, after all, thought that glasnost would shore up rather than dissolve the Communist regime.

This may not be the film I’d like to see, but it’s the only one playing right now. Let’s hope that Anything for Obama is a real action—as opposed to non-action—movie.

Bloggingheads invited me to talk with neocon David (“Axis of Evil”) Frum about the election fallout here, the new administration there, and what it would take to reach peace.

You can watch here on SoJo, or switch to blogggingheads.tv if you want to zoom in on a particular topic.

When Pete Seeger rewrote chapter 3 of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) as a song, he changed just a few words at the end, making it, “A time for peace – I swear it’s not too late.”

I don’t think it’s too late for Israelis and Palestinians to make peace. But waiting will make it more difficult. On the other hand, strong American involvement – the kind that has been lacking for the last eight years – could move the process forward. So, since everyone else is offering advice to soon-to-be-President Obama, I’ve offered some as well in my new article in The American Prospect:

The main reason for moving quickly… is that every wasted day makes a two-state solution more difficult to reach. Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas has promised his people that diplomacy can bring independence. Delay eats away at his credibility. Meanwhile, Israeli settlements keep growing. Since the Annapolis conference, the number of settlers has risen from 275,000 to 290,000. (That doesn’t include Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, for which up-to-date figures aren’t available.) The more settlers, the greater the internal crisis that Israel would face in withdrawing.

No one knows when a two-state solution will become impossible — but the tipping point is approaching. Past that point, as outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warns, Palestinians will demand political rights in a single state (Olmert’s era will be remembered for the strange gap between his dovish and evermore desperate rhetoric and his failure to stop settlement growth or reach a peace agreement). A binational state would teeter between Bosnian-style communal violence and Belgian-style political paralysis.

Read the full article here, and return to South Jerusalem to comment.

Honey, it's the dawn of a new day!

Haim Watzman

Daneila London-Dekel, Ha’aretz‘s down-to-earth editorial cartoonist, injects a little realism into today’s paper, which consists almost entirely of a series of articles expressing amazement, wonder, and admiration at Barack Obama’s election.

I’m also in a state of amazement, wonder, and admiration but I appreciate London-Dekel’s reminder that we’ve still got to get the kids dressed, fed, and out to school, and clean up the mess at home.

So the exit polls show that 77-78 of Jewish voters picked Obama (there have been slight variations in the reports). The exit polls showed that Kerry got 75%, and Gore got 81%, so this falls right in the middle. Actually, since the Jews are a small part of the exit poll sample, and since exit polls are not known for their high accuracy, perhaps we should take the differences between the numbers for the three elections as statistical noise. As for the great Jewish shift to the Republicans, heralded every four years by Jewish Republicans and neocon pundits, it belongs with the return of the Lubavitcher Rebbe as things that crazy relatives announce but that do not happen. We’re sorry, folks, for their impolite shouts. They’re relatives, so we still invite them for Seder. Maybe someday they’ll get the message.

Hope is in short supply here. Next week in Jerusalem, we will have a local election in which the choice of candidates is, as Yossi Sarid put it well – he puts it well so often – a choice between plague and contagion. In February, we’ll have yet another national election. They come altogether too often, offering much too little. The only candidate with the ability to give a speech is the candidate of fear, of being very afraid, Bibi Netanyahu. Tzipi Livni, the only other realistic contender, has defined the election as a decision on whether to continue the peace process. (As leader of Labor, Ehud Barak seems destined to lead the party from irrelevance to extinction.)

Livni is right, in the sense that the election could decide whether Israel will willingly participate in talks. Whether she intends to complete those talks is a separate issue. If she had truly recovered from her rightwing past, if she fully understood how close this country is to losing the chance for a two-state solution, she could have avoided elections. She could have formed a coalition including Meretz and at least of the Arab parties, finally treating Arab voters as equal partners in the country’s future. There’s no sign she even considered that opportunity for courage.

So far, the only quality that Livni seems to share with Obama is being coolheaded. She will not give speeches that inspire. She has not yet shown willingness to confront Israelis with the choices ahead of us, demand that we give up illusions in order to make a better future.

To be fair, one reason that Americans could talk about hope and change is that there problems are largely internal. That includes the old racial hatreds that were rejected yesterday. Much as the Republicans tried to define the dangers as external, as a vast juggernaut of terror threatening America, most American have gained enough distance from 9/11 to realize that drastic mismanagement was a greater threat.

For Israel to move forward, its Jewish majority must understand that the deepest threat to a Jewish state’s future is our entanglement in the occupied territories. If not ended, that entanglement will lead us to the one-state non-solution, to a state built on an internal eternal ethnic conflict.

The fact that we do face very real external threats makes it much more difficult for any politician to help us see that the shadow of what we fear is much bigger than the thing itself. It’s hard to draw the line between rational and irrational fear. Hope is more difficult to convey under such circumstances, much as its needed. Livni does not seem like the one who will convey it.

Nonetheless, the US election could effect Israeli politics in two ways. As a pageant, a vast morality play, it has taught the lesson that a nation can reinvent itself. On some instinctive emotional level, some Israelis might resonate.

Practically speaking, if President-elect Obama (what a lovely set of words) makes it clear that he wants to pursue Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, Israeli voters might ask themselves which prime minister will be better suited to maintain our relations with the Empire – the candidate of fear, or the candidate of negotiation.

At least, I’d like to hope that voters will ask that question.

There wasn’t much to read in this morning’s Ha’aretz. Nearly every one of the paper’s senior writers has written a piece about how amazing it is that the United States is on the verge of electing a black president.

It is amazing, of course, especially for anyone my age and above, those who can still remember segregation and Jim Crow. But there’s something patronizing about all this going ga-ga over Obama’s race–as if voters are choosing him because he’s black. In fact, it’s his policies and his personality that are attracting Americans; if he wins it will be despite, not because, he’s black.

Ha’aretz‘s swoon over Obama reminds me of how American Jews tend to melt inside when they talk about Golda Meir. Seeing Israel through the lenses of American liberalism, many American MOTs view Meir as a paragon of liberalism and feminism. After all, she was a woman elected to Israel’s highest political office at a time when American feminism was just taking off. So her choice must demonstrate the maturity and lack of sexism of Israeli voters.

Actually, she was no feminist, hardly liberal, and she wasn’t elected–she was chosen in a back room by her party’s leaders. She was chosen despite her gender, and during her tenure the Israeli leadership remained very much closed to those on the margins–not just women, but also Mizrachim and Palestinians.

The significance of Obama’s victory will be that he has convinced a majority of the American people that the selfish, aggressive, and patronizing America of the Bush administration, and that administration’s self-deluding economic, domestic, and foreign policy, has been a disaster. He’ll win because he’ll have restored to the United States an understanding that military force can only be a last resort. He’ll win because he’ll have reminded Americans that a free market cannot operate properly without regulation. He’ll win because he’ll have taught people something they have forgotten–that government can do much to alleviate the ills of American society, and that it is not an undue burden to render taxes to the government so that it can do so.

So the amazing thing we seem to be about to witness is not that America is electing a black president. Like Golda Meir, Obama is no symbol, no token. She held Israel back when it needed to change; Obama promises to push America forward into some long-delayed change. What’s amazing is that, after some long, dark years, America is electing a good president.

Before we get started with that local madness, let me offer a last word on the American fever. If you are still arguing with a relative who thinks that the McCain-Moosehunter ticket will be better for Israeli security, my new article at the American Prospect provides some talking points:

My friends are frightened of the shame of a mother or uncle staining the family, or the tribe, with the wrong vote — a vote purportedly cast out of concern for Israel. From where I sit, this would be a shame, because the reasons Obama is better for Israel’s security are the same reasons he is better for American security.

Start with McCain’s claim to greater foreign-policy experience. Despite that experience, he supported invading Iraq. Obama, of course, opposed it. Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, the war has had strongly negative consequences for Israel.

As a result of the first Gulf War in the 1990s, “Iraq wasn’t a serious threat to Israel,” explains researcher Shlomo Brom of Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, formerly head of strategic planning in the Israeli Army’s general staff. On the other hand, Brom says, the second Gulf War has deeply damaged America’s stature in the Middle East, and “Israel, which is seen as being under American protection, is weakened as a result.” Moreover, by eliminating Iraq as a counterbalance, the war freed Iran from containment. From Israel’s perspective, the regional balance of forces has become much worse. Was this predictable? Yes, actually. Before the invasion in 2003, Israeli officials and experts warned Iran was a more significant threat than Iraq.

Read the whole thing here, and come back to SoJo to comment. Then write a quick email to Tina Fey and ask her if she does male impersonations. We need someone to spoof Bibi during the campaign.