But We Think the Price Is Worth It

 

As I write this, it appears that the world may have dodged a bullet: Trump has put off his threat to wipe out Iran.  But no one should suppose that he won't change his mind in a week or two, and the reports I've seen so far don't say that Israel has agreed to pause its aggression against Iran. (Or Lebanon.  Or Gaza. Or the Occupied Territories.) Any ceasefire will just give the US and Israel time to arm themselves for further atrocities.

I haven't written about this war before, largely because it's just too depressing.  I'm not alone in this: many commentators I respect have been reduced to sputtering outrage at Trump's conduct.  Doug Henwood, for example, mostly posts one- or two-word grunts on Twitter/X, like "Gross," "Disgusting," "Shameful," "Ugh," etc. over reposts of other people's material. Some do better, but after awhile it comes down to detailing how Trump's a deranged criminal.

It's better than the corporate media's fondness for pussyfooting around.  The political scientist Corey Robin quoted the New York Times on Facebook this evening: "One big question: Experts say Trump’s threatened attacks could be unlawful. It comes down to: What defines a civilian target?"  Later he added, "The New York Times has been hemming and hawing for days about whether killing civilians is a war crime or not. What if civilians are surrounded by 'military-age males?' What if a power grid upon which civilians and hospitals depend has a 'dual use' for military purposes? So complicated, so nuanced, so grey an area. But now comes the prospect of imposing a toll on the Strait of Hormuz. And what is the NYT headline? "How Tolls in the Strait of Hormuz Would Undercut International Law'".

NPR has been about the same.  The other day one of their talking heads fretted about the effectiveness of a ceasefire: would Iran respect it?  He didn't wonder whether the US or Israel would "respect" it; maybe because the answer is so obviously No.

I don't know what it would take to stop Trump and Netanyahu. With one or two honorable exceptions, the mainstream Congressional Democrats have been busy complaining that Trump didn't ask their permission before he went to war. Of course they would have given him that permission, so what difference would it make?  Many of them have wanted to destroy Iran for years.  They might pretend to distinguish between Iranian citizens and "the Regime," but they're willing to sacrifice Iranian lives in a good cause.

In another Facebook post, Corey Robin spelled out parallels between Trump's war and George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.

1. A hard-right Republican president comes to power denouncing the more "internationalist" and "establishment" Republicans and Democrats who see the United States as policeman to the world. (Don't forget, this was one of Bush's promises when he ran in 2000: he wouldn't do nation-building, he wouldn't be the world's cop, he would be "humble," he would have a narrow view of US national interest.)

 

2. A small group of influencers—neocons in Bush's case; the Israelis, in Trump's case—make the case for war to the president on two logically incompatible grounds: a) the enemy regime is poised to be so militarily powerful, that if the US waits any longer, the enemy will be able to land a devastating blow against it; b) destroying the enemy regime militarily will be staggeringly easy.

 

3. Top-level US intelligence and military officials say that this advice is nonsense, totally lacking in evidence. Additionally, they repeatedly ask, what if you are able to destroy the regime, what comes next? How are you going to run the country?

 

4. Eager to destroy an enemy that has been a thorn in the side of the US for decades, the president ignores the intelligence and military establishment, displays scant concern about what comes next, and takes the country to war. 

 

5. Republicans and conservatives scratch their heads. How did a president who came into office promising not to be the world's policeman wind up taking the country to war.

 

Structurally, the two important features to focus on are these: 1) the distinction between a radical right and moderate establishment right in the Republican Party is nonsense; 2) Congress and both parties have long abandoned their role in limiting the power of the president when it comes to war.

One of the most depressing things about this is that, twenty years later, there are still pundits and politicians who defend Dubya's war.  Even if Trump's war were to end now, the long-term consequences, especially for the Iranian people and other civilians killed or hurt or displaced, will continue indefinitely, because neither Trump nor his successor will have any interest in cleaning up after it, and since there have so far been very few US casualties, most Americans will happily sink into lethargy and amnesia.

An Everlasting Name That Will Endure Forever

 

Just a quickie about this lefty guy's words of wisdom.  It's funny to see "eunuchs" used to mean "subservient toadies," when eunuchs historically have been regarded as ruthless, ambitious plotters who worked behind the scenes to undermine the power structure, not support it. If anything, it's macho men who love hierarchy and subordinate themselves for its perpetuation, and men on the left can't seem to shake off its appeal.

Traditional Values

So much going on, I can't keep up.  I'm too old for this!

Right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg fell back on a long-standing talking point the other day:

The left does criticize the countries that Goldberg deplores here.  Not always, of course, and not always as consistently as I could wish.  But overall in the US it's the center (or near-right, to label it more accurately) and the right (meaning practically off the scale) that embrace them.  Trump, for example, conspicuously left Saudi Arabia out of his first-term Muslim ban, along with the other nations in Goldberg's list, but the embrace is bipartisan.  

As for China, it was the well-known leftists, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who brought the Chinese Communist Party into the community of nations. It's usually crazy feminists and leftists who object to Islamic oppression of women, and the Right denounces them for their atheism and contempt for traditional values - until, as with George W. Bush, they decide to invade them ostensibly to protect the rights of women.  (Whatever objections Israel has to the Kingdom, they have nothing to do with its treatment of women.)

The same leftists also criticize our own country for its violations of human rights at home and abroad, and are accused of double standards about that.  Or we criticize reactionary violence against gay people, and are accused of applying corrupt Western values to traditional societies; also false, we criticized our own country first, and still keep having to do it. 

As other commentators pointed out, this question came up in the context of the New York City mayoral race.  Candidates were asked about their allegiance to Israel, which ought to be odd in a local election. Yes, New York is a major city with a sizable Jewish population, but foreign policy shouldn't be a central issue. 

The rest of Goldberg's rant is predictably disingenuous, ignoring Israel's record of violence against Palestinians and its neighbors, which is hardly in the distant past. I believe that Goldberg is also distorting Zohran Mamdani's remarks, and the question he was asked.  It wasn't about recognizing Israel diplomatically, though that is not an unfair question.  He was asked if he recognized Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.  No country has a "right to exist," and it's not clear what "as a Jewish state" is supposed to mean.  You'd think that it's proper to criticize any country that defines itself in terms of ethnic or religious purity -- but as always, "we come up against the venerable shell-game of Jewish identity: 'Look! We’re a religion! No! a race! No! a cultural entity! Sorry–a religion!' When we tire of this game, we get suckered into another: 'anti-Zionism is antisemitism!' quickly alternates with: 'Don’t confuse Zionism with Judaism! How dare you, you antisemite!'" Again, the left, especially in the US, has a long history of rejecting the idea of race as the basis of a nation; if I reject the claim that the United States has a right to exist as a Christian nation, why wouldn't I reject Israel's right to exist as a Jewish one?  It's the right that defends, even celebrates it, and that includes Jonah Goldberg in his defense of Israel.

Only in America?

Another fun tweet today, reacting to the spate of anti-shutdown protests around the US: "Are other countries seeing these types of protests or are Americans being exceptional again?"

A self-styled clown replied: "No, because other countries understand fucking nuance. Demanding people stay at home as much as possible & avoid gatherings during a pandemic where the virus can be infectious & asymptomatic for half a month ≠ tyranny."

This, uh, person is confusing "countries" with people.  I agree that shutdowns for public health reasons do not equal tyranny, but that's not the point.  Does he think that people only protest rationally, with nuance?  I began by recalling pro-Trump rallies in South Korea, by religious nuts every bit as loony as our native wackos.  I wrote about a rally I observed in Seoul in 2017, on the eve of Trump's first visit there, but I see I didn't include any of the photos I took there.  Here's one.

Not only did they believe that Trump would remove Moon Jae-in from office with his bare hands and restore impeached and disgraced Park Geun-hye to the Blue House, they begged him to nuke North Korea.  Luckily, their petitions never came to Trump's attention.

By my next visit a year later, there were weekly marches in Seoul on the same theme, which I wrote about here, with plenty of photographs.  Here's one:

The mixture of US and ROK flags (plus at least one marcher, whom you can see in the post, who carried US, ROK, and Israeli flags) exemplifies the shared sensibility of the Korean and US far right.  There are plenty of contacts between the US and the South Korean far right.  The clown disagreed, saying that these protests had nothing to do with COVID-19 shutdowns, but I was more concerned with the fascist mindset that produced the anti-shutdown protests here.  And I'd really just gotten started.

Another person tried to correct me: "Not true. No other country has people protesting against these stay-at-home orders. Some may not like it, but they aren’t protesting. Outside of the US, healthcare is universal so paid for with tax dollars. People aren’t selfish enough to further risk the lives of frontline staff."

However, there have been protests in South Korea against the shutdowns there, by churches that refused to observe them -- not anymore, though, because all protests have been forbidden there. So no, you won't see religious fanatics marching in the streets, but you will find them fighting with police sent to observe and enforce social-distancing in their services:

A video uploaded by a purported member of the church on YouTube showed a woman lying on the ground while another was heard shouting “Why are you doing this? Is this North Korea?”

South Korea is even more connected to the Internet than the US, and broadcasting or netcasting worship services is no less common.  Korea also has universal health care.

So does Israel, where ultraorthodox Israelis ignored shutdown orders, holding public funerals without masks or social distancing,

In Mea Shearim, video from Israel police showed officers showered with cries of "Nazis" and "murderers" as they made their way down the labyrinthine alleys of the insular Jerusalem neighborhood. A medical team from Magen David Adom (MDA), Israel's emergency response service, was pelted with rocks in the same neighborhood while trying to carry out a coronavirus test, a spokesman from MDA said.

(You may remember a previous occasion when the ultraorthodox protested against "Nazi" repression of their right to spit on eight-year-old girls and call them whores.)  Thousands rallied to protest against the shutdown from the left, and Netanyahu's government has relaxed restrictions somewhat.   And as in Korea and the US, the devout have found that their god doesn't protect them from the virus.

Some Islamists have also ignored warnings and congregated in large numbers, in Pakistan for example.  As of March 12 this year:

Pakistan has so far recorded 20 positive cases with zero fatalities while two people have recovered from the disease. But with its poor health infrastructure, the country has tested fewer people despite bordering China and Iran, where more than 90,000 cases were reported.

Meanwhile, the Pakistan Super League, a nationwide cricket contest, is attracting tens of thousands of spectators to stadiums across the country of 210 million people.

Now, none of this has been obscure.  The connection between reactionary Korean Christianity and COVID-19 has been well-reported here, or so I thought.  CNN reported on the ultraorthodox rebellion too.  Why, then, were these fine, smart people so sure that only Americans were stupid enough to flout warnings and attack their government for trying to protect their health?  I suppose that in part they don't see themselves as belonging to the same America as the protesters here, a sentiment that's mutual.  But it takes self-imposed tunnel vision as disabling as the Right's to ignore well-known examples of jingoistic petulance outside the US, simply in order to preserve their own smug certainties and feelings of superiority.

The Middle East, an Issue That Has Plagued the Region for Centuries

There's been justified hilarity on the Intertoobz over POTUS's clumsy, clueless remarks on Israel-Palestine the other day.  (Plus, of course, predictable scrambling by The Commander-in-Chief's lackeys and apologists to make it seem that his remarks were competent and statesmanlike.)  Quoth POTUS:

So, I’m looking at two-state and one-state and I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one. I thought for a while the two-state looked like it may be the easier of the two but honestly, if Bibi and if the Palestinians — if Israel and the Palestinians are happy, I’m happy with the one they like the best.

Sad.  But being cursed with an undisciplined and out-of-control memory, I couldn't help thinking of remarks made in answer to a college student's question by another POTUS in January 2010.  I know, I know, it was a long time ago, another lifetime, practically another century, who could possibly remember that far back?

The Middle East is obviously an issue that has plagued the region for centuries, and it's an issue that elicits a lot of passions as you have heard. Here's my view. Israel is one of our strongest allies, it has...[applause] let me play this out. It is a vibrant democracy. It shares links with us in all sorts of ways. It...it is critical...for us...and I will never waver from ensuring Israel's security, and helping them secure themselves in what is a really hostile region. So...so...so I make no apologies for that.

Note especially that first sentence: Trump couldn't have bettered it.  By 2013, Obama had his act down.  Asked a hostile but not unreasonable question (which he didn't understand, since it was in Hebrew), Obama mocked the questioner, an Arab-Israeli student from Haifa University, joking, "I have to say we actually arranged for that because it made me feel at home ... I wouldn't feel comfortable if I didn't have at least one heckler."

I hold no brief for Trump.  But isn't it nice to know that, far from the upheavals that Democrats warned we would face, we have so much continuity between POTUS Barack Obama and his POTUS successor on this and other vital issues?  The issue here isn't their lack of eloquence in response to questions, but that there's not a lot of daylight between Obama and Trump on Israel-Palestine.  Obama talked prettier, but he still let Netanyahu have more or less whatever he wanted.  The outcome for Palestinians was terrible, as it will probably be under Trump.

Sit Back, Relax, and Leave the Foreign Policy to Us

I've been reading Ben Ehrenreich's new book The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine (Penguin, 2016).  It's a long, grim slog, but worth it, and every now and then there's a touch of comic relief.  Describing the 2014 collapse of talks between Israel and Palestine, mediated by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Ehrenreich writes:

Another month would pass before a frank American narrative of what had occurred in Jerusalem and Ramallah hit the press.  In May, the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth's Nahum Barnea published an interview with anonymous senior U.S. officials who, he wrote, had been closely involved in the talks. The story that emerged from what Barnea called "the closest thing to an official American version of what happened" was one of Israeli cynicism and an almost astonishing American naivete.  "We didn't realize," said one of Barnea's sources, that "Netanyahu was using the announcements of tenders for settlement construction as a way to ensure the survival of his own government.  We didn't realize continuing construction allowed ministers in his government to very effectively sabotage the success of the talks."  If true, this is a shocking admission: the Americans, with all their vast data-collecting capabilities, did not know what even the least observant reader of Israeli newspapers had for months understood to be self-evident [262].

The theme of American naivete unto gullibility when faced with conniving Oriental slick dealing is well-worn by now, and makes me suspicious.  American elites have always tried to excuse their short-sightedness and (let's not mince words) incompetence and/or collusion with authoritarian regimes by claiming that they were babes in the woods, outclassed by the ancient wiles of their opposite numbers.  It's echoed by the Vatican apologists' claim that, confronted with sexually predatory priests, they were so unprepared to deal with such Evil that they could do nothing but send them to new parishes to prey some more.  In either case the defense is unconvincing, and could only be supported by immediate resignation, confessions of incompetence, and departure from public life, except perhaps as garbage collectors.

On the next page Ehrenreich continues:

In the end, the officials pinned the blame for the negotiations' failure squarely on Israel, and on Netanyahu's insistence on continuing settlement expansion throughout the talks: "The Palestinians don't believe that Israel really intends to let them found a state when at the same time it is building settlements on the territory meant for that state.  We're talking about the announcement of 14,000 housing units, no less.  Only now, after the talks blew up, did we learn that this is also about expropriating land on a large scale." 

When I first read that line, I nearly coughed up a small piece of my kidney. "Only now," the unnamed official said [263].

And, of course, six weeks "after the talks collapsed ... Obama sent his secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel," to Israel to pledge eternal U.S. fealty, along with "$3.1 billion per year in foreign military financing, which is not only more than we provide to any other nation, but the most we have provided to any nation in American history" (264).

Which brings me to another bit of comedy.  After the end of the talks, Hagel's opposite number, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, complained to the same newspaper about Kerry's "naive and meddlesome 'messianic fervor' ...'The only thing that can save us ... is for John Kerry to win a Nobel Peace Prize and leave us alone" (234-5).

Of course, Ya'alon doesn't really want Kerry or the U.S. to leave Israel alone, any more than corporate CEOs want meddlesome big government to leave them alone.  Leave them alone -- but continue to send vast amounts of money, stand by them in the United Nations, and make it illegal for any Americans to organize boycotts against them.

The other examples I gave show that this is not a new problem in American foreign policy or diplomacy.  But once again, combined with Obama's (and his fans') feckless responses to domestic opposition, it makes it impossible for me to believe that he or his advisors know what they're doing.

No True Progressive

I received a mass e-mailing this weekend, alerting me that the Center for American Progress has invited Benjamin Netanyahu to speak there, "following heavy pressure from the Israeli Embassy and AIPAC."

Click here to sign our petition to CAP's president telling her that Netanyahu is #NotProgressive and has no business speaking at a self-defined progressive policy institute.

Emails just leaked provide documentation that CAP has been censoring its own staff to prevent criticism of Israel.
  
Netanyahu and Israel's apartheid rule over Palestinians are anything but progressive. 

I don't know -- what is progressive, anyway?  Bernie Sanders is surely a progressive, but he supports Israel in a mainstream way, which means supporting Netanyahu; Sanders joined the unanimous Senate consent supporting the 2014 Israeli blitzkrieg against Gaza.  So do many of the Americans who label themselves progressives.  Barack Obama in the White House, wrote the progressive feminist Katha Pollitt in 2008, "could have big positive repercussions for progressive politics." Obama has continued US support for Israeli atrocities, though he balances out by supporting Saudi atrocities in Yemen and the latest Egyptian dictator.

I see two basic ways of settling the question.  One is that if a self-styled progressive organization supports Israel according to the Israeli line, and this position is common among those labeled progressives in the US, then supporting Israel is a progressive position, and progressives lose their claim to the moral high ground.  The other that if a self-styled progressive organization supports Israel according to the Israeli line, it forfeits its claim to style itself "progressive," no matter how many progressives take the same stance.  But who gets to decide what is a progressive position?  There's the rub.

The e-mail message claimed, you'll notice, that CAP "has been censoring its own staff to prevent criticism of Israel."  Intriguingly, it has recently been revealed that Bernie Sanders has been censoring his own staff, firing a staffer who ejected members of a pro-Palestinian group from a Sanders rally.  It appears, then, that Sanders may be moving away from the mainstream on Israel-Palestine; if so, good for him.

What intrigues me, however, is this whole matter of selecting speakers for organizations like CAP, or at universities and other institutions.  Progressives are more likely, it seems to me, to stress the importance of More Speech, and to fret that opposition to the choice of a speaker constitutes some kind of threat to free speech.  I'm not sure what free speech has to do with it.  There's a longstanding tradition of public figures who retire from public life going on the lecture circuit, for which they are paid quite lucratively.  Colin Powell springs to mind: as far back as 1999, Cary Nelson and Stephen Watt wrote in Academic Keywords (Routledge) that when he

spoke at the University of Cincinnati in 1998 he insisted on traveling by private chartered jet, on limousine transportation on the ground, and had it written into his contract that he would neither answer questions nor sign books.  It was basically the equivalent of a videotape performance with an added photo op.

If a celebrity speaker comes to campus, talks to students, perhaps visits a class or two, it might be defensible to hire such a person; but someone who essentially parachutes in and refuses to interact with his audience isn't giving much to the pursuit of knowledge.  Who makes the decision to bring in someone like Powell?  What do they think is gained by doing so?

Even at $150,000 per appearance Powell is small potatoes compared to ex-Presidents like Ronald Reagan, who was paid $2 million for a speaking tour in Japan, or Bill Clinton, who "recently got paid $500,000 in advance for a 45-minute speaking gig at the 90th birthday soiree for Israeli President Shimon Peres"; or former Senators like Hillary Rodham Clinton:

As Amy Chozik of the Times reports, “For about $200,000, Mrs. Clinton will offer pithy reflections and Mitch Albom-style lessons from her time as the nation’s top diplomat. (‘Leadership is a team sport.’ ‘You can’t win if you don’t show up.’ ‘A whisper can be louder than a shout.’)”

Whatever else you can say about them, while such platitudes are protected by the First Amendment, they're awfully expensive free speech.  I wonder how much of an honorarium Netanyahu is going to receive, and what delicately vital insights he will deliver to the Center for American Progress in return.

More important, who makes these decisions?  As the Salon article I just linked shows, often it's the captains of industry and finance.  If they want to redistribute the wealth from the rich to the rich, no one is going to accuse them of Marxism for doing so, and it's their money (subsidized by the taxpayers, of course).  But when it's a university or a supposedly principled political organization like CAP, I can't help but wonder what is going on.  Cui bono? -- apart from the speakers, that is.  It seems reasonably obvious to me that these people are scratching each other's back, with the expectation that the scratching will be reciprocated, as it always has been.

I can't work up much indignation about CAP's invitation to Netanyahu, therefore.  Rather than try to fight it with a petition, I think it would be better to publicize the episode as evidence of the group's moral bankruptcy, without worrying whether they're really progressive or not.  One can waste immense amounts of time quibbling over definitions, and I'm not sure people who are concerned about the state of the world have that kind of time to waste.

According to Wikipedia,

The president and chief executive officer of CAP is Neera Tanden, who worked for the Obama and Clinton administrations and for Hillary Clinton’s campaigns. The first president and CEO was John Podesta, who served as chief of staff to then U.S. President Bill Clinton. Podesta remained with the organization as chairman of the board until he joined the Obama White House staff in December 2013. Tom Daschle is the current chairman.

I don't see any progressives there, do you?  Only "centrists," which is to say, right-wing Democrats.  Neera Tanden, the current CEO, is "a stalwart Clinton loyalist as well as a former Obama White House official." Of course such a group would invite someone like Netanyahu to speak to them.  I'm not sure I believe that any pressure from AIPAC was needed.

Kill Them All, Let Yahweh Sort Them Out

[NOTE: I revised and extended the ending paragraphs later this afternoon.]

Daniel Larison did a nice job today of dissecting a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece on the current Israeli blitzkrieg in Gaza.  He points out that the writer, one Thane Rosenbaum, "unintentionally endorses the logic of every terrorist group in history:"

On some basic level, you forfeit your right to be called civilians when you freely elect members of a terrorist organization as statesmen, invite them to dinner with blood on their hands and allow them to set up shop in your living room as their base of operations. At that point you begin to look a lot more like conscripted soldiers than innocent civilians. And you have wittingly made yourself targets.

As Larison indicates, Rosenbaum's argument would justify Arab "terrorist" attacks on Israel, whose citizens have freely elected a government that carries out attacks on civilians and thereby -- on Rosenbaum's logic -- wittingly made themselves targets.  As far as I can tell, the overwhelming majority of Israelis are strongly supportive of what their government and their army are doing, thereby allowing them to set up shop in their living room as their base of operations.

Larison also answers a popular defense of Israeli violence that was often invoked in the NPR coverage I heard while traveling over the weekend (I added the bold type):

It may please Hamas to make use of these victims’ deaths for their own purposes, but that doesn’t absolve the Israeli government of its responsibility for causing those deaths. If Hamas benefits politically from these civilian deaths, and it seems likely that they do, it would seem obvious that Israel should not want to cause any more, and yet at each step over the last few weeks Israel’s government has responded with tactics that are guaranteed to continue killing many more non-combatants for as long as this operation continues. 

Of course, Israel also benefits politically from Israeli civilian deaths (though according to Rosenbaum, remember, there are no civilians), which would suggest that its enemies should not want to cause any more either.  It also indicates that the US government and corporate media should view Israeli exploitation of its civilians' injuries as they view Hamas's.  Of course that isn't going to happen; indeed, President Obama joins in the exploitation of the suffering of Israeli civilians.

The comments, as usual under Larison's work, are pretty good.  One person asked:

I ask this as a rather naive bystander, but: why is it that, on any given day, I can read The American Conservative on how Israel continues to kill more and more non-combatants (“running up the score”) and I can read National Review’s defense of Israel as being about the most careful regime in the world in terms of protecting non-combatants. What is the truth?

I don't see these two positions as necessarily contradictory.  An apologist for Israel could reply that if Israel weren't so scrupulous and careful, many more Palestinians would be killed.  (An apologist for Hamas could argue that they are even more careful, since rockets fired from Gaza into Israel kill almost nobody, civilian or military.  No one would take such an argument seriously, of course.)  Therefore, the apologist would continue, covering Palestinian deaths is a sign of the media's anti-Israel and indeed anti-Semitic bias, trying to win sympathy for these animals in hopes of driving Israel into the sea.  The problem for Israel is that they are clearly targeting civilians and civilian targets, such as hospitals, deliberately (though, the apologist would insist, they would kill so many more if Israel weren't such a moral exemplar), and this doesn't look good.  As another commenter pointed out, the killing of Arab civilians has been Israeli policy since its founding in 1948.

Another commenter wrote:

But the practical question is, what is Israel to do? Hamas deliberately installs rocket launchers in densely populated areas, it benefits politically from civilian casualties. We are witnessing a new form of warfare, where one side (Hamas) uses a horrific strategy of maximizing casualties among their own as an informational warfare weapon.  It works, too.

As I already pointed out, so does Israel, especially since any Israeli casualties will be trumpeted to the world as proof of Arab barbarism. When US media say that things have been quiet in Israel-Palestine of late, they mean only that no Israelis have been killed; Palestinian deaths are business as usual, nothing to see here, folks.

I suppose another practical question is what you expect Hamas to do. Gaza is, as we’re often told, one of the most densely populated areas on earth. Its government has no place to put defensive weapons except among the civilian population. Certainly Gazans have a right to defend themselves against Israeli violence — don’t they? And Gaza is under blockade, which is an act of war (as even the Israelis recognize if a blockade is directed against them); Israeli violence against Gaza is not limited to major assaults like the one currently underway. And that’s aside from the ongoing, daily violence and repression directed against Palestinians in the West Bank, and increasingly against Israeli Arabs in Israel itself. (Jonathan Cook’s 2006 book Blood and Religion is good on that subject.)

What I find interesting about this comment is that it changes the subject, which is typical among apologists for outlaw states (including the US — I remember the very same argument being made during the US invasion of Iraq). The article Larison dissected argues that it’s okay to kill (Arab) civilians, because they’re all effectively and morally combatants, which renders the question of Israeli scrupulosity irrelevant: Israel is completely in the right to kill civilians, because they're not civilians anyway.  (A recent error of attribution by ABC News showed this very effectively: given a photo of a family in their bombed-out house, ABC assumed that the suffering civilians must be Israelis -- but they were Palestinians.)

It’s increasingly difficult for many people to believe anymore that Israel kills civilians only unintentionally, as mere collateral damage, after the killing of four kids building sand castles on the beach, after the bombing of hospitals, and so on.  Israel (like any other state, to be sure) usually explains away these killings by claiming either that the victims were really terrorists or that the killers thought that they were shelling a militant base.  These explanations are routinely exposed as lies, but who cares?  There are no consequences for Israel.  The commenter's question is also irrelevant to the larger problem of Israeli violence against civilians, since Israel targets them directly and deliberately even when they’re not in Gaza. The argument is clearly offered in bad faith when Israeli spokesman make it, so it’s suspect when unofficial apologists make it too.

What do I "expect" Israel to do?  I expect Israel to stop its ongoing campaign of violence against the people it has displaced, to lift the blockade on Gaza, to negotiate a settlement with the Palestinians, and so on.  I don't really expect this to happen, of course.  Israel has gone too far, too successfully, to stop now.  What does Israel expect the Palestinians to do?  It expects them to surrender, I suppose, and failing that, to die, with its assistance.  Prime Minister Netanyahu has said that the current atrocities will continue as long as necessary to guarantee Israel's security.  I don't see how this conduct can produce security for Israel except by exterminating all Palestinians, and that seems to be Israel's goal.  (Or as near to extermination as makes no difference: the US didn't totally wipe out its Indians, but it did kill them off to the point that they no longer posed any danger to US settlers.  Even that wasn't permanent. Israeli leaders may not have heard of the American Indian Movement, but they probably intend not to let any such potential for future resistance survive.)

Israel's wars have not won it security, so Netanyahu's "goal of bringing a prolonged quiet to the area" is disingenuous at best.  But then, like those of his American counterparts, his lies never have any consequences for him. When Israel has gained prolonged quiet from Palestinians in the past, it has always ended it with new violence.  (And to repeat, its war of attrition against the Palestinians, through dispossession, harassment, and retail violence, never stops.)   Like an American hawk, Netanyahu claims that only military strength guarantees security, though it hasn't given Israel (or the US ) security so far.  Larison has written about this many times: no matter how much military might and action they get, hawks always claim that their country is weak and ineffectual, under constant threat, so more weapons and invasions are needed to instill fear in our (real, imagined, or potential) enemies.  The difference, for what it's worth, is that most Americans aren't hawks, while Netanyahu speaks for the majority of Israelis.  Endless war hasn't gotten Israel what it wants or claims to want, but I see no hope that it will try less murderous alternatives.

One More Time, with Feeling

Israel is now attacking Gaza and the Occupied Territories as vengeance for the kidnapping and killing of three Israeli teenagers from an illegal settlement, blaming the deed on Hamas even though another group has claimed credit for it.  But who did it isn't all that important.  If I condemn the killing of those three kids, and I do, then I must condemn even more the long history of atrocities by a country that has killed far more than three teenagers along with babies, young children, old people, and adults; that has violated most of its agreements, including ceasefires; that has used torture on an administrative basis; that uses civilians as human shields; that has refused negotiated settlements for decades, secure in the knowledge that it can get away with its obstructionism; and that refuses to recognize the right of its opponent to exist.

When Israel attacked Gaza a couple of years ago, I encountered a move by apologists for Israel that I hadn't seen before.  Apparently, they'd finally decided they needed to engage with the fact that Palestinian and other casualties of Israeli violence greatly outnumber the Israeli casualties of Palestinian violence, by a factor of ten or more to one.  The apologists retorted that this was because Israel is better at defending its people than the dirty Arabs are.  It's not a very good move, since an obvious response would be that in that case, the Palestinians need to find ways to get past Israeli defenses and kill a lot more Jews.  I don't think the hasbaristas really want anyone to draw the conclusion from what is, after all, their logic.  But they were certainly granting that as far as they're concerned it is okay, in a conflict, to kill as many civilians on the other side as you can, which means that Israel has no moral case to object when its people are attacked: Israel can't honestly complain that killing civilians is a sign of intractable evil.  But it appears that Israel has largely abandoned the pretense of a moral high ground in its conflicts.

At around that same time a Jewish friend on Facebook objected to some criticism I'd made of Israel, responding with the prepackaged claim that Israel is a "vibrant democracy."  (He also deployed the equally prepackaged pinkwashing move.)  That's dubious in any case, but even if an overwhelming majority of Israelis favor the slaughter of Arabs (and I gather they do), it doesn't legitimize it.

My Freedom of Speech

Something I meant to put into yesterday's post but didn't get around to: I believe that in principle, any issue at all can and should be debated.  Even crank theories, conspiracy theories, hateful bigoted positions on any issue.  I don't make an exception for issues that affect me directly and personally, like homosexuality.  I've spent decades debating them with people.  Which is why I was PO'd when I read that a student staffing a table on affirmative action, confronted by some opponents of the policy, asked angrily, "How long do I have to go on debating this?"  As long as it takes, obviously.  Sure, one gets tired, so others need to step up and take over the work for a while.  But I've been confronting racists, antigay bigots, religious nuts, war lovers, right-wing loons and liberal apologists for all the above, for longer than that kid has been alive.  And that reminds me of the Kliban cartoon in which a Zen master tells his assembled students, "The road to Enlightenment is long and difficult, which is why I asked you to bring sandwiches and a change of clothing."

Remember, I said in principle.  In practice, as I wrote yesterday, I know and accept that there isn't time for full-on debate of every disagreement every time it arises.  Schools can't cover every subject partisans want them to teach, and choices have to be made.  I just started reading former Representative Tom Allen's new book Dangerous Convictions: What's Really Wrong with the U.S. Congress (Oxford, 2013), which looks like it will give me some insight into how Congress handles the vast amount of information it processes to make legislation.  Choices must be made there too, even if the choices made aren't good ones often enough.  Sure, I'm critical of our political system and its players, but I have the impression that many critics of Congress are like the people who think members of Congress and the President are wildly overpaid.  Not compared to our captains of industry, they're not.

But there are other considerations.  There's a controversy raging at the New York City LGBT Center now because the Center refused to permit Sarah Schulman to do a presentation on her new book Israel/Palestine and the Queer International there.  The Center has apparently been evasive as to why, referring to their published room rental policy.  After a similar 2010 controversy, the Center "announced an 'indefinite moratorium' on renting to groups that 'organize around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict' ... because it was 'forced to divert significant resources from its primary purpose of providing programming and services to instead navigating between opposing positions involving the Middle East conflict.'"  The article compares this controversy to the similar one at Brooklyn College, where the college stood up to complaints and pressure, and allowed an event on the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement involving Israel/Palestine.

The article doesn't say anything about the LBGT Center's status.  Unlike Brooklyn College, which has policies of academic freedom, it may not have a mission statement privileging free speech and intellectual freedom.  Some of those who advocated preventing the BDS event argued that no institution is required to give a platform to any old person who wants one.  That's true, but it's not what the Brooklyn College flap involved.  It wasn't as if Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti asked to speak there and were turned down; rather, students in the Political Science Department organized the event with the permission (not endorsement) of the department chairman.  Only after the event was scheduled was there pressure to block it, mostly by outsiders.  It's also outsiders who pressured the LGBT Center not to permit events related to Israel/Palestine, notably gay porn mogul Michael Lucas, who not so long ago was whining that he was being persecuted by "supergays" and "superlesbians" because some pictures of him were removed from a news site.  Thanks to his own "supergay" allies, Lucas's pictures were restored.

Glenn Greenwald had some fun pointing out the inconsistencies (not to mention lies) in Alan Dershowitz' complaints about the event.  It wasn't fair, Dershowitz said, to have an event like this without both sides being allowed to make their case.

Despite how controversial he is, Dershowitz routinely appears on college campuses to speak without opposition. Indeed, as the Gawker writer who writes under the pen name Mobutu Sese Seko first documented, Dershowitz himself has spoken at Brooklyn College on several occasions without opposition. That includes - as the college's Political Science Professor Corey Robin noted - when he was chosen by the school's Political Science department to deliver the Konefsky lecture in which he spoke at length - and without opposition. He also delivered a 2008 speech at Brooklyn College, alone, in which he discussed a wide variety of controversial views, including torture. As Professor Robin noted, when Dershowitz agreed to speak at the school, "he didn't insist that we invite someone to rebut him or to represent the opposing view."

Nor did any of the New York City politicians objecting to this BDS event as "one-sided" object to Dershowitz's speech given without opposition. Why is that?

Dershowitz claimed that Brooklyn College had refused to sponsor or "endorse anti-BDS events or even pro-Israel speakers who advocate the two state solution and an end to the settlements." Greenwald quoted a Brooklyn College prof who declared that "the chair went through all of his emails today and has not found a single request from a student or student group for us to host an anti-BDS event."  Numerous commenters on this post repeated or reinvented these bogus arguments, either unaware or not caring that they'd already been answered.

Also today this message was posted on a Facebook page in support of the Sullivan (Indiana) High School Prom, which will admit GLBT as well as non-gay students.  This event drew wide attention because some students and a teacher have protested this inclusiveness, and want to organize an "alternative," heterosexual-only prom.  Fine with me: let the bigots identify themselves publicly.  As long as they pay for it themselves -- it shouldn't get any school support.

The organizer of the support page announced today that no further debate of the rightness or wrongness of homosexuality would be allowed there.  That seems fair to me, and I'd support the organizer of a pro-Catholic page who refused to permit debate, let alone trolling or abuse there.  After all, whether on Facebook or elsewhere on the Internet, it's easy to make your own page supporting or rejecting any position.  And indeed, the antigay bigots of Sullivan, Indiana have at least one Facebook page touting their prom.  They proudly declare:

Yes, there is going to be a prom for the straight. Yes we shall have it cuz we can. We shall have it cuz we dont want homosexuals in our midst. We have the right to hold a straight prom just as they claim they can be homosexuals

The page has already drawn some pro-gay trolls, showing their greater intelligence and compassion.  I'm being sarcastic there, of course.  Yet it shouldn't take much intelligence to answer that little manifesto: The official Sullivan High prom isn't a prom for homosexuals, it's for "the straight" along with gay, lesbians, and bisexuals.  Only the "alternative" prom is for one group alone, namely bigots.  And of course, the bigots will still have "homosexuals in their midst" when they go to school, when they're at the mall -- even when they go to church.  And can there really be that many out gay, lesbian, or bisexual students in Sullivan High?

So: every controversy doesn't need to be debated all the time.  But to repeat, in principle every controversy is debatable.  And one thing that becomes obvious when watching the liberal side in online debates is that on the whole they're no better informed, no more rational, than their opposite numbers.  They too are just repeating what they've heard someone else say, maybe in a recent episode of Glee, and they're lucky that they're unlikely to run into an opponent who knows more than they do.  Actual debate might even help them: chastened by an effective rebuttal, they might do their homework and inform themselves.

A school, while it can't explore every controversy, does have the obligation to produce informed and rational students, particularly where live issues are involved.  And whether I like it or not, Creationism vs. Evolution, homosexuality, feminism, racism, religion, and many other issues are alive in our society.  I should think anyone can see that simply calling Creationists ignorant morons hasn't worked very well.  Forty-six percent of Americans with college degrees believe that human beings were created, not evolved -- the same proportion, Katha Pollitt wailed, as the general population.  How's that smug denunciation of Bible-thumpers working for you, Katha?  Maybe it would be worthwhile to try critical thinking and teaching the conflicts instead.

On the other hand, nobody can see evolution taking place, but people can get to know gay people.  No one knows for sure, but it's a reasonable guess that the status of gay people in America has improved over the past few decades because we made ourselves visible, especially to people we knew: our families, our friends, our co-workers.  But there have also been debates about us, even if they haven't always been of the highest standard.  I've learned a lot from them.  Others have too, and more should.  But I admit, it's largely an article of faith for me that more information is better information, and rationality (despite its limits) is better than irrationality.  Hurling insults at the Rethuglitards, while soul-satisfying, is not rationality in action.  Maybe we don't need debate, but those who claim they favor critical thinking need to do more of it themselves.

It's like what I say when someone accuses me of being prejudiced against prejudice: Okay, make an argument for prejudice.  I'm not sure anyone has ever tried to do so when challenged.  Maybe the self-styled advocates of critical thinking should drop the pretense and make their argument for irrationality and authoritarianism.  I'd be fascinated to hear it.

All The Other Rogue States Are Doing It!

As Israel continues to make itself a shame unto the nations, Democracy Now! reported briefly on the Palestinian Authority's protest against a new wave of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  At least five European countries have "summoned their Israeli ambassadors."  The Obama administration has responded with the speed and force of a closing steel trap, calling the new settlements "counterproductive."  Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman mounted a revealing defense:

Now I want to remind you that building (settlements) in Jerusalem is with accordance to Israeli law. If anyone wants to investigate further, they can go to the Bush letter and see all those settlements blocks and the changes in the territory which the U.S. president spoke of.

In very much the same way, the mistreatment of German Jewry in the 1930s was "with accordance to" German law.  Slavery and the destruction of the American Indian peoples were "with accordance to" American law.  Lots of terrible state crimes have conformed fully to the laws of their respective nations, because by an amazing coincidence, those nations wrote their laws to enable them to do what they wanted to do.  And citing George W. Bush as authority for your actions is unlikely to persuade anybody.

My Brother's Keeper III

In view of the current Israeli attack on Gaza, it has become increasingly untenable to try to cast Israel's conduct as self-defense.  (Which doesn't keep the Only President We've Got from trying, of course.)  Once again Israeli broke a ceasefire to kill a few people in Gaza, which led to retaliatory missiles aimed at Israel, which led to the Israeli assassination of a Hamas official and then to the Israeli blitzkrieg.  It needs to be stressed again that it is usually Israel that breaks the ceasefires, and that if Israeli leaders really wanted to stop missiles from Gaza, they need only to stop their own attacks.  If any further evidence were needed, it is clear that contrary to its protestations, it is Israel that doesn't want peace, except the peace of the conqueror.

I was quite surprised to see that the Washington Post had put on their front page a picture of a Palestinian father grieving for his 11-month-old baby killed by Israeli violence.  Ordinarily only Israeli suffering gets this treatment in corporate US media.  But of course, most other US coverage of the attacks on Gaza has followed the Israeli/US line.  That means lying, but what else is new?

An interesting trope emerged in comments to Glenn Greenwald's post on the subject today:

Missing is some good literature about what would happen to the Israelis if the Arabs won. What would happen to the Jewish and Christian Arab children, women and older men if the IDF is defeated? How would the Arabs treat the Israelis that are left alive? How would they divide up the country among the victorious parties? A good thought piece for a novel, and one that many people don't ever think about.

But what would happen if the people of Gaza won, and were able to rush out of Gaza and take over Israel. Would they be nicer to the Jews than the Israeils were to them?

This is a rather daring move, comparable to Obama apologists who admit that their POTUS has been something of a disappointment.  This commenter admits, at least rhetorically, that the Israelis have not been "nice" to the people of Gaza, which is pretty bold since all decent people know that the Arabs have only gotten what they deserved for wanting to drive the Jews into the sea.  We are constantly dunned with celebrations of the moral superiority of Israel not only to the Arabs but to all other nations. (The commenter also makes an interesting flipflop from "Jews" to "Israelis.")  Given what the commenter admitted, could Israelis and their American apologists really complain if a defeated Israel suffered the same treatment it has inflicted on its enemies?  If the conquering "Arabs" were no "nicer" to the defeated Israelis than the Israelis have been to the Palestinians and Lebanese, consistency would require the world (or at least the US) to marvel at the conquerors' very great indulgence and mercy, and to hail them as a moral example to the rest of the world.

But as with Obamabots, the concession is in the service of a greater lie.  It's a breathtaking diversion, but one I've seen before, sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit.  No doubt many people in the Middle East would like to see Israel vanish into thin air, but Hamas has declared that it accepts a two-state solution on the 1967 borders.  Perhaps this declaration is as disingenuous as Israel's own claims to want peace, but it should be tested.  It won't, of course, because both the US and Israel reject it, in defiance of the international consensus. And it would not mean that the Palestinians had won and were ready to take over Israel.  (The commenter's echo of traditional anti-Semitic rhetoric is, I presume, unconscious.)  It's unlikely that Palestine would ever have the military might that Israel has, which includes a nuclear arsenal of dubious legality, nor would it receive military aid on the scale Israel receives.  Maybe what the commenter is proposing is a worthwhile thought experiment, but I don't see why.  It's really irrelevant, but I think it lurks beneath the surface of a lot of Israeli and pro-Israeli propaganda, so it's worth noticing.

What I and probably most thoughtful critics of Israel favor is not an Israeli defeat. What we favor is that Israel should stop its terrorist violence against the Palestinians and others. (A good parallel would be the US "defeat" in Vietnam, which only meant that the US had to withdraw its forces; it did not mean US surrender to the Vietnamese people, who did not then occupy Washington and take over the US government.)  The Israelis need not surrender, contrary to what the commenter and others assume. All they need to do is stop their abuse of human rights, their violation of every humane concern that arose after the obscenity of World War II and the Nazi crimes. There are more alternatives than the status quo and the obliteration of Israel.

As the political philosopher Michael Neumann wrote in his 2005 book The Case Against Israel (Counterpunch/AK Press), no one is morally required to compromise with an invasion, and "having renounced all of pre-1967 Israel, the Palestinians have already compromised enormously when they demand total withdrawal from the Occupied Territories" (146). What comparable compromise can the Israelis offer?

Un Peuple en Diaspora

I haven't read much by the late Eric Hobsbawm, who died this week at the age of 95, but this excerpt from his autobiography, quoted at Jews sans frontieres, got my attention:

What exactly could 'being Jewish' mean in the 1920's to an intelligent Anglo-Viennese boy who suffered no anti-Semitism and was so remote from the practices and beliefs of traditional Judaism that, until after puberty, he was unaware even of being circumcised? Perhaps only this: that sometime around the age of ten I acquired a simple principle from my mother on a now forgotten occasion when I must have reported, or perhaps even repeated, some negative observations of an uncle's behaviour as 'typically Jewish'. She told me very firmly: 'You must never do anything, or seem to do anything that might suggest that you are ashamed of being a Jew.'

I have tried to observe it ever since, although the strain of doing so is sometimes intolerable, in the light of the behaviour of the government of Israel. My mother's principle was sufficient for me to abstain, with regret, from declaring myself konfessionslos (without religion) as one was entitled to do in Austria at the age of thirteen. It has landed me with the lifetime burden of an unpronounceable surname which seems spontaneously to call for the convenient slide into Hobson or Osborn. It has been enough to define my Judaism ever since, and left me free to live as what my friend Isaac Deutscher called a 'non-Jewish Jew', but not what the miscellaneous regiment of religious or nationalist publicists call a 'self-hating Jew'. I have no emotional obligation to the practices of an ancestral religion and even less to the small, militarist, culturally disappointing and politically  aggressive nation-state which asks for my solidarity on racial grounds. I do not even have to fit in with the most fashionable posture of the turn of the new century, that of 'the victim', the Jew who, on the strength of the Shoah (and in the era of unique and unprecedented Jewish world achievement, success and public acceptance), asserts unique claims on the world's  conscience as a victim of persecution.

Right and wrong, justice and injustice, do not wear ethnic badges or wave national flags. And as a historian I observe that, if there is any justification for the claim that the 0.25 per cent of the global population in the year 2000 which constitute the tribe into which I was born are a 'chosen' or special people, it rests not on what it has done within the ghettos or special territories, self-chosen or imposed by others, past, present or future. It rests on its quite disproportionate and remarkable contribution to humanity in the wider world, mainly in the two centuries or so since the Jews were allowed to leave the ghettos, and chose to do so. We are, to quote the title of the book by my friend Richard Marienstras, Polish Jew, French Resistance fighter, defender of Yiddish culture and his country's chief expert on Shakespeare, 'un peuple en diaspora'. We shall, in all probability, remain so. And if we make the thought experiment of supposing that Herzl's dream came true and all Jews ended up in a small independent territorial state which excluded from full citizenship all who were not the sons of Jewish mothers, it would be a bad day for the rest of humanity - and for the Jews themselves.

-- Eric Hobsbawm: Interesting Times: A Twentieth Century Life (Pantheon, 2002, p.24).

Just what I need: another oeuvre of a prolific writer to add to my piles of books to be read.  I probably don't have to read all his work, and I've already read The Invention of Tradition.  I'll probably start with Interesting Times.

Our Inalienable Right to Spit on You

It looks like it's going to be one of those days when I can't stop posting.

Whatever It Is I'm Against It posted on Saturday about the latest wave of ultra-Orthodox protests in Israel, defending ultra-Orthodox men's right and duty to spit on eight-year-old girls who dress immodestly. This morning I took a look at the Jerusalem Post article he'd linked to, and it was fascinating for what it showed about the way people react when they're criticized for their bad behavior: they obfuscate and they lie, and they can be quite shameless about it. I almost titled this post "Where Are the Adults?" because as I've noticed before, adults regress to the age of about three in such circumstances.

So, first, the protesters put their children on the line. The kids (and some nominal adults) were dressed in prison stripes with yellow stars of David, and apparently many other protesters wore yellow stars on their frock coats. The symbolism, of course, was that the "secularists" were Nazis, and the ultra-Orthodox were poor suffering victims about to be carted away to the gas chambers.

“What’s happening is exactly like what happened in Germany,” said one man wearing a yellow star, who gave his name only as Moishe. “It started with incitement and continued to different types of oppression. Is it insulting that we wear these stars? Absolutely, and it hurts people to see this, but this is how we feel at the moment, we feel we are being prevented from observing the Torah in the manner in which we wish.”

Don't you remember your history? German Jewish men were spitting on German Jewish girls for dressing like whores, and the Nazis started with incitement against them, so they were prevented from observing the Torah in the manner in which they wished and ultimately six million were killed. Yeah, I remember now ... As Whatever It Is I'm Against It said, "assholes like these would have been complaining to the Gestapo that the women weren’t forced to sit in the back of the cattle cars."

(In reality -- just in case my sarcasm is too subtle -- many of the Jews the Nazis killed weren't even observant, let alone orthodox; the Nazis weren't interested in such subtle distinctions. German Jewry was mostly quite assimilated, and the assimilationists -- who often despised "stereotypical" Jews with their hats and beards and forelocks -- were shocked when they learned that the Final Solution was going to "solve" them too.)

Moishe's remark echoes the rhetoric of reactionary Christians in the US, who view the existence of people who practice different forms of Christianity as an assault on their freedom of religion. (For that matter, it echoes the rhetoric of Nazism, which also presented itself as a defense of Christian and Aryan civilization against the Jewish threat.) He forgets that the fuss is over some ultra-Orthodox men who want to prevent other Jews from observing Torah in the manner they wish, by harassing and assaulting Jewish women and girls who don't meet their standards of observance. The same pluralistic society that allows them to observe Torah as they wish requires them to allow other Jews the same latitude, but they've made it clear that freedom of observance is only for them. They demand toleration, but they refuse to tolerate anyone else.

(Still, this raises questions. Suppose the haredi concluded that Torah required them -- as it does -- to execute adulterers. Would they be entitled to demand that they be allowed to do so, in the name of religious freedom, as long as they only executed adulterers in their own community? But it's an academic question, because we've already seen that they wouldn't stop there. They might "begin slowly", but eventually they would insist on policing everyone in Israel, haredi or secular, Jew or gentile.

(And I've made it relatively easy by choosing an extreme example. What about conservative groups, Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu, in the US? Should they be allowed to raise their children as they wish in every particular? If Quiverfull Christians believe that girls don't need education, or only very minimal education, to carry out their God-ordained role as helpmeets and baby makers, does their freedom of religion trump their daughters'? What about the Amish? I don't have ready answers for such questions. They arise in any pluralistic society.)

Angry crowds also followed uniformed police, shouting at them and calling them “Nazis.”

“It’s like how it started with the Nazis – very slowly,” American yeshiva student Salomon Hoberman said, defending the use of the yellow stars.

“They’re separating us from the Jewish people because we’re following the way of the Torah. They hate us because we’re going the Jewish way.

And there’s only one Jewish way.”

Notice how Hoberman muddies the issue: clearly there is more than one Jewish way, since not all the Jewish people follow his. If only "his way of the Torah" counts as Jewish, then his sect is not being "separat[ed] from the Jewish people" by other Jews: they're separating themselves from pagan secularists who claim to be Jews but are not. (There is ample biblical precedent for that move, by the way, both in the Tanakh and in the New Testament. If that juxtaposition sounds odd, remember that Christianity began as a Jewish sect which claimed to be the one true Jewish way.) Conservative American Christians use the same ploy, maximizing the number of Christians when they want to claim this as a Christian nation, but minimizing it when they want to impose their one Christian way on others: then every other Christian way becomes apostasy.

To be fair and balanced, I'll adduce another example, closer to home for me: gay groups that want to maintain 100% gay purity, excluding not only heterosexuals but bisexuals, who would sap their precious bodily fluids with heterosexual cooties, causing respectable Homo-Americans to turn straight.

... Shimon Levy, a young haredi man from a veteran Jerusalem family ... asserted that “the hatred and incitement being directed at us because we do not want to take on the ethical standards of the secular [community] is simply intolerable.”

That's a three-year-old talking. They're picking on us for no reason at all! We didn't do anything ... except, yeah, we spat on some little girls, but it was their fault for dressing like whores! It's not fair! They can dress like whores, and we're supposed to just stand here and take it like it was all right! Do you think it's all right for these sluts to walk around and stick their bare faces in our faces like kourveh? You probably do. You probably go to whores yourself. You hate me, you want to kill me for no reason at all! You're a Nazi!

I don't suppose these reactions are "genetic", as knee-jerk and cross-cultural as they are, but they do seem to come easily to human beings. We can unlearn them, though, and we'd better do so.

Doomed to Repeat It

Noam Chomsky has a statement up about the Israeli hijacking of the Mavi Marmara, with this important reminder:

It is worth bearing in mind that the crime is nothing new. For decades, Israel has been hijacking boats in international waters between Cyprus and Lebanon, killing or kidnapping passengers, sometimes bringing them to prisons in Israel including secret prison/torture chambers, sometimes holding them as hostages for many years. Israel assumes that it can carry out such crimes with impunity because the US tolerates them and Europe generally follows the US lead.

But remember, we have to look forward into the future, not backward into the past!

Incidentally, though the Israelis thought they'd confiscated all video and other potentially embarrassing evidence from the surviving passengers of the Mavi Marmara, some got through anyway. Even in the future nothing works!

And as a reminder that our brave armed forces, border police, and paramilitaries are ever-vigilant to protect America against the threat of terror, one of them shot a Mexican teenager on the other side of the border in the head. As usual, the initial government reports were lies.

Free Gaza Protest, Seoul

Thanks to a link at The Distant Ocean, I learned that there would be a demonstration today in protest of Israel's murderous attack on the Freedom Flotilla. It took me a while to find it because the Israeli Embassy is not on Embassy Row like the heavily fortified American Embassy a few blocks north, but on the sixteenth floor of an office building owned by one of the big Seoul newspapers.

It was quite small, not like the ones in Chicago, New York, or London: about thirty people at most, three of whom were Americans; the rest were Koreans, mostly young. The only media in attendance was a Reuters photographer. But it's a beginning, and it was important that there be demonstrations worldwide to make it clear that the revulsion at the hijacking is worldwide.

(To see larger versions of my photos, click on the Picasa symbol in the lower right hand corner of the slideshow.)

Late-Night Notes

Numerous other people (including me) have quoted this line from Glenn Greenwald's May 31 post, but it's so on-target that I want to spread it a little farther:

Just ponder what we'd be hearing if Iran had raided a humanitarian ship in international waters and killed 15 or so civilians aboard.

And the only President we've got seems to be deliberately seeking to prove once again that reality outruns satire (via):

A compromise statement instead calls for an impartial investigation which Washington indicated could be carried out by Israel.

Yes, really: Israel can be trusted to carry out an "impartial" investigation of the incident, just as Saddam Hussein could have carried out an "impartial" investigation of his invasion of Kuwait. Or the burglar who broke into your house could "impartially" preside over the police investigation, if not his own trial.

Meanwhile, Israel has begun releasing the people they kidnapped from the Flotilla, and sending them home. Isn't it telling that this article repeatedly uses the word "deport"?

Israel moved swiftly on Wednesday to deport hundreds of activists detained during a deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, as world pressure mounted for a full investigation of the fiasco.

I don't know, maybe that's the correct technical term for sending people home after you've kidnapped them. It just rings oddly to my ear. (But now I see that Democracy Now! also used "deport." It still sounds odd to me.) Towards the end of the same article:

Speaking to his security cabinet late on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended the blockade and said it would remain in place in order to prevent Gaza's Hamas rulers from bolstering their arsenal.

No doubt that's a good idea, but shouldn't something be done to prevent Israel's leaders from bolstering their arsenal, much of which is shipped in openly from the United States? Contrary to much of the Israeli propaganda propaganda I've been reading today, it is usually Israel that breaks the peace.

I've just spent over an hour trying to find where she posted this (presumably in comments, but no go), so I'll just quote aimai's alicublog comment (no permalink -- fie on JS-kit!):

As I posted over at Balloon Juice my grandfather wrote "Underground to Palestine" after travelling with displaced jews on a wonky boat--the Jews themselves were contraband, btw--in 1946. The Israelis should die of shame over this act. Literally. Die.In.Shame.

Her grandfather being the great dissident journalist I. F. Stone. I read Underground to Palestine a long time ago, and remember how it tugged my heartstrings, which was its aim: to outrage the reader with the effects of an internationally-approved British blockade of Palestine. Even if the Israeli blockade were legal, there's no reason to respect it, as once again Israel embraces, repeats, and amplifies the crimes of its past persecutors.

(Though it's not directly relevant to the attack on the Freedom Flotilla, Michael Neumann's latest article at Counterpunch bears on the European Jewish refugees trying to get into Palestine after World War II.

Finally it is worth remembering that not only Canada but other democracies were very attentive to the wishes of the alleged spokesmen for the Jewish people. If those democracies didn't make greater efforts to admit Jewish refugees, it was in no small part because Jewish Zionists, deeply influential on those governments, cared far more about getting Jews to Palestine than about saving Jews from agonizing death in the camps. Ben Gurion's explicit remarks on the subject are a matter of record. Less well known but equally telling is the reaction of The Jewish Chronicle to Roosevelt's implementation of a no-questions-asked refugee camp for Jews very close to Canada, in Fort Ontario, New York:

"Why transport hapless Jews all the way across the Atlantic when a country - Palestine - in the very area where they are now located can find room for them not only in the proposed insignificant numbers but in the tens and scores of thousands?" (Quoted in Ronald Sanders, Shores of Refuge: A Hundred Years of Jewish Emigration, New York (Schocken) 1988, 556.)

Thus spoke those who had successfully arrogated to themselves the right to speak for a 'Jewish people'. They showed no interest whatever in getting more Jews admitted to the US, nor any sense that traumatized refugees might prefer a long sea voyage to being placed in the middle of an ethnic war. Should we be surprised if the US government could not muster more enthusiasm for their project?

Oh, and one last thought. Several of the online hasbaristas keep harping on Israel's status as a democratic state in the Middle East. But Hamas was democratically elected -- too democratically, many feel -- as were Ahmadinejad, and Chavez, and Morales; which shows the limitations of assuming that democratic elections confer moral superiority on a state.