Jeffrey Goldberg

When Muslims Commit Violence

Sun,08 Nov 2009 14:37:13 GMT

A consensus seems to have formed here at The Atlantic that the Ft. Hood massacre means not very much at all. Megan McArdle writes that "there is absolutely no political lesson to be learned from this." James Fallows says: "The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre 'mean'? A decade later, do we 'know' anything about Columbine?" And the Atlantic Wire has already investigated the motivation for the shooting, and released its preliminary findings. Of Nidal Malik Hasan, the Wire states: "A 39-year-old Army psychiatrist, he appears to have not been motivated by his Muslim religion, his Palestinian heritage (he is American by nationality), or any related political causes."

It seems, though, that when an American military officer who is a practicing Muslim allegedly shoots forty of his fellow soldiers who are about to deploy to the two wars the United States is currently fighting in Muslim countries, some broader meaning might, over time, be discerned, especially if the officer did, in fact, yell "Allahu Akbar" while murdering his fellow soldiers, as some soldiers say he did. This is the second time this year American soldiers on American soil have been gunned down by a Muslim who was reportedly unhappy with America's wars in the Middle East (the first took place in Arkansas, to modest levels of notice). And, of course, this would not be the first instance of an American Muslim soldier killing fellow soldiers over his disagreements with American foreign policy; in 2003, Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar killed two officers and wounded fourteen others when he rolled a grenade into a tent in a homicidal protest against American policy.

I am not arguing, of course, that American Muslims, as a whole, are violently unhappy with America (I've argued the opposite, in fact). But I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here's a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.

Now With Extra Bacon

Sun,08 Nov 2009 13:50:11 GMT

Department of Weirdly-Appropriate Names:

"I get so angry when I feel people pushing a weight-loss agenda," said Linda Bacon, a nutrition at City College of San Francisco and author of "Health at Every Size," a book published last year whose title has become the rallying cry of the fat pride community. "What we're doing in public health care policy is harmful. We give a direct and clear message that there's something wrong with being fat."

The Origins of Israel's Tech Miracle

Thu,05 Nov 2009 13:57:21 GMT

Dan Senor and Saul Singer, the authors of the new, best-selling Start-Up Nation, have done the impossible: They've written a book that doesn't examine Israel through the prism of its conflict with the Arabs. Instead, they've produced a fascinating and illuminating look at the reasons Israel has become one of the world's prime incubators of technological innovation. This is a story about Israel, of course, but it's a story with universal implications. "Start-Up Nation" is, among other things, an indispensable business book. I wish I had thought to write it. I spoke with Dan Senor by phone last week, and here is an edited version of our discussion.

Jeffrey Goldberg: This book is a reminder that Israel, despite its many problems -- many of them inflicted from the outside, some self-inflicted -- is a remarkable success story, and I'm wondering what sparked your curiosity about Israel's technological achievements.

Dan Senor: Originally the idea was not to do a book -- when I was in my second year of Harvard Business School in 2001, I took a group of thirty students to Israel, three of them were Jewish, twenty-seven were not, and had no connection to Israel. The idea was to look at the economic opportunities in Israel and also study the history and the politics. It was at a pretty depressing time -- there was a good entrepreneurial economy story there, but it was during the Second Intifada. And I took all these students - to their credit, none of them pulled out even though literally the day we were leaving things were blowing up -- and my classmates were all saying to me, "I get it. There's huge economic opportunity here for people who are willing to invest here and do business here." But even more than that, I was struck by the question of how they pulled it off. It's a very young country, very difficult environment, there are no natural resources, no access to regional capital or regional markets. If you were to paint a picture of the circumstances under which you're not going to have a successful economic developing country, it would be Israel.

JG: One thing about the book that's interesting to me is that it seems that you're trying very hard not to say, 'Well, of course if you put a bunch of Jews in a room, that weird Jewish brain will create something."

DS: We were very self-conscious about that.

JG: Because it's wrong? Because it's stereotypical? Because you don't believe it?

DS: We believe that there are lessons that developing and developed economies can learn from Israel, and that there are prescriptions for the U.S. that can be taken from Israel, and if it is simply about the fact that Jews are smart, well-educated and good at business, it completely undermines the notion that there is anything transferable. We really believe that. We're not naïve; there are certain dynamics that are unique to Israel that cannot be, and should never be, tried elsewhere.

JG: Judaism: Don't try this at home.

DS: Exactly, but we think that's only part of it. There are many elements that absolutely are prescriptive and the moment it becomes about 'Jews are smart,' no one's going to pay attention to the other part. And the other parts are extremely important. For example, we're writing the book, it's September of last year, Lehman blows up, and there's a big debate among economists about productivity gains and how all our economic growth over the last five or ten years was not at all about productivity gains -- it was all about speculative credit, near-zero interest rates -- and we were watching a reversion back to a discussion on the need for basic innovation as the juice for economic growth. And, by the way, the only way you get true innovation into the economy is if it's dominated by small enterprises. And we were struck by this debate, because that's exactly what we were writing about.

JG: One of your arguments is that it's not necessarily Jewish culture that created this, but Israel Defense Force culture, that many of the great entrepreneurs and innovators come out of the Air Force, out of the technical branches of the IDF. And that this is replicable. Is that fair to say?

DS: One, we believe in an anti-hierarchical tolerance for self-criticism -- not only tolerance, almost encouragement.

JG: By the way, it's a well-known Jewish trait.

DS: Shimon Peres told us that Jews have a tendency throughout our history to be dissatisfied. That's a big theme, so this is obviously a big part of IDF culture. I'm of two minds on how applicable this is to the American military. On the one hand, I feel that the Israeli military is just a more entrepreneurial military than any military I know of or that we've studied. I mean, it's just so much more built around improvisation. The fact that when you're being promoted in the Israeli military, your subordinates have input, or can have input, in those decisions. So it's a very entrepreneurial, start-up military. There are very few bosses. The only way you can cultivate that culture and ethos is if you have very few bosses, because the moment you have a lot of bosses, you have a lot of people who need to justify their existence, and they justify their existence by giving commands. I saw this on military bases I've worked on and when I've been in government -- the U.S. military is top-heavy, and you have a lot of people standing around giving orders to sort of justify their existence. We do believe, though, that the American military is changing, it is becoming more entrepreneurial -- not nearly as much as the Israelis, and quite frankly it should never be as entrepreneurial as the Israelis because the Americans have to fight different kinds of wars than the Israelis. Israelis fight all their wars in their own neighborhood, it's a different dynamic. You really need Fed-Ex logistics more than you need Fraud Sciences, which is one of the start-ups we profiled.

JG: We know that Israel excels at innovation, but why is there no Nokia in Israel, a huge manufacturer of hi-tech products?
DS: This is a big debate within the Israeli business world, where's our Nokia?

JG: Why can't they seem to scale-up?

DS: Some people say it's a real problem in Israel, that they've created this sort of radical, very experiment-oriented business community, but they're not training serious, senior, high-level managers who can build not just start-ups that pop into Nasdaq or get bought by some American company, but can actually become an institution over the long run. Some people argue, who cares? Why do we need it? We're doing well. If you do what you're good at it--

JG: From your personal perspective, which is better for Israel? To have the thousand little innovators?

DS: Absolutely. You're in a constant mode of creative destruction and it's such a perfect fit for the Israeli culture.

JG: Spontaneity is an appropriate word. You tell the joke in your book about the Israeli who asks a girl out, and she says, "'What time?" The assumption in Israel is that everything is meant to happen today.

DS: This is a very big part of why we believe the Israelis survived and navigated so well the crisis of 2008. If you think about it, one could have argued that 2008 should have been a disaster for Israel because two things happened: one, export markets -- which is the entire Israeli economy, because there is no domestic market -- basically shut down. And two, so much of the Israeli economy has been fueled by global venture capital, which shrunk dramatically. A lot of venture capital just dried up. Loss of export markets and loss of access to venture capital should have basically destroyed the Israeli economy. But Israelis survived for a number of reasons, but most important was the fact that they wake up every day and say, "Alright, we're not quitting." These start-ups were working for nothing, and saying, "We'll figure it out, we'll get through this. They wake up every day and say, "Let's solve new problems and let's be resilient."

JG: Can the hi-tech industry solve the problem of the economic disenfranchisement of Arab citizens of Israel? Did you find much integration of Arabs into this high-tech industry? If not, is there a way to bring them in?

DS: There's not a lot of it happening.

JG: Because a lot of these human capital networks are built in the army?

DS: We found a few really interesting stories of Israeli-Arab doctors and researchers who are working with Israeli. Where it's happening, it's pretty amazing. There was one amazing story in nanotechnology happening at Hebrew University that I wanted to write about, it was a great start-up between an Israeli-Arab and an Israeli-Jew, but for security reasons for the Israeli-Arab, we couldn't write about it. We talked about changing his name, but people would have been able to piece his identity together.

The bigger problem is that there's a level of discrimination, let's be honest. But an even bigger problem is they just don't have the network and the entrepreneurial training that one gets in the IDF and they don't have the IDF-based network. So it's a major impediment.

JG: There was a fascinating statistic you have in the book, about how many more thousands of patents get awarded to Israel than to most Arab states, which accumulate very small numbers of patents. What explains that?

DS: In the Gulf, they're spending a lot of money to try to create this atmosphere of innovation. Whenever I go to the Gulf, it's all they want to talk about, they're so intrigued by the Israeli model. But everything about the economic strategy of these Gulf countries is about spending money. It's all about building fancy schools. Yes, Israel spends a lot on research and development, but they've also developed some very interesting ways to focus companies and universities on how to absorb R&D money. It's not just about throwing money at the companies and throwing money at the universities, but it's about teaching these institutions how to absorb it. Ricardo Hausmann, a former Venezuelan development minister who's now at Harvard, is the author of this Leap Frog theory about how developing economies truly do take off, and Israel is one of his case studies. He said that the key to economies that do take off is that they are innovation-based. How do you teach people to use money smartly, how to take well-thought-out gambles?

JG: The implication is that the Arab state-system suppresses development and creativity.

DS: Absolutely. I would say there are two issues we try to deal with that often get conflated. There's innovation and there's entrepreneurialism, and people mix them up. There are many parts of the world, many countries in the world, that are very entrepreneurial--

JG: But they're selling somebody else's things.

DS: Right, or they're bazaars. And then there are many parts of the world that are very innovative, and not entrepreneurial at all, and so what's unique about Israel is this combination of entrepreneurialism and innovation. That's the turbo charge, because you have a combination of these very scrappy, small start-ups that are coming up with ideas to turn industries upside-down. Now, in the Arab world, I actually think there's as much of an entrepreneurial culture as there is anywhere, but there are no seeds of innovation because for innovation, you need some basic things that are missing. One, women. You just can't compete if you're immediately losing half of your brains, so that's a killer. Two, immigrants. I don't mean temporary laborers from South Asia. These are people who can never truly participate in every aspect of the society. Even elite academics who are brought in, they're writing big checks to them, but these academics are depressed because they're treated like second-class citizens. The third thing is a tolerance for questioning. There's no tolerance for experimentation in these countries.

JG: In a way you're talking about the rougher side of Israeli society, a high tolerance for insults and offense.

DS: I have a friend in New York who's an executive of a major commercial real estate company, and they were involved in a potential transaction that was huge. And they lost it, they got outbid and outmaneuvered by a competitor, and my friend happened to be reading the galleys for our book when this happened, and he said to his colleagues, you know, let's do something we've never done before, let's actually do a debrief. It didn't hit him until he read how many American companies, large and small, just don't do that, sit down and be really critical, not for the purposes of having it documented, for deciding whose fault it was, but figuring out how to make it better.

JG: Go to one final thing, something that struck me when I was reading this book. You have a boycott movement in Europe, but in the U.S., too, you have forces that want to delegitimize Israel. I realized in reading this that it would be quite something to go tell Intel or Google or IBM to divest from Israel.

DS: They'll never do it. I mean, it's impossible. What various companies told us is that if they had to shut down operations in India tomorrow, they could survive because it's basically a lot of outsourcing and a lot of call centers. They said if we had to shut down our operations in Ireland, we could survive. But what one person after another told us is that the one place in the world that would devastating for them to have shut down would be Israel, because they put so much of their mission-critical work and R&D in Israel. The Intel story we tell is amazing, this key chip that was central to Intel taking off was designed and then manufactured in Israel, so it would be devastating to these companies to lose Israel. And one more thing -- the most interesting data point on all of this is that European venture capitalists invest more in Israel than they do in any single European economy.

JG: Is that true?

DS: Yes and, to me, that says it all. For all the ranting from Europe about boycotts and attempts at boycotts, that's not what European capital is doing. In terms of the U.S., this is even more true. I don't want to oversimplify, but who do think is more important to Barack Obama: The head of J Street or Eric Schmidt at Google? And if Eric Schmidt said that his company would be devastated if Israel came off-line -- and we interviewed Schmidt and he talked about the importance of Israel -- then I think I know the answer.

JG: But people can move away from Israel. Isn't this one of the root fears of an Iranian bomb, not that Iran will drop a bomb on Israel, but that investors, thinking that Israel lives under this Iranian nuclear threat, might think twice about coming to Israel.

DS: That's one fear, and another fear is that a lot of these Israeli talents will say, 'What do I need this for? Why do I need to be living under a nuclear cloud? That just may be the tipping point for a real brain-drain.

JG: I had this conversation once with Ehud Barak, in which he said that he hoped that the brightest young American Jews will look to Israel not as a place to go on a free trip or a place to bring their kid eventually for a Bar Mitzvah, but as a place to invest in and a place to even come and work because the opportunities are so great.

DS: For the longest time, American Jews would not invest in Israeli start-ups. They would give to UJA and they'd give to all these other philanthropic organizations, but they kept a firewall up between their business activities and their philanthropic activities. I think for the last three to five years you are, for the first time, really seeing American Jewish investors investing in Israel.

Hussein Ibish on the Fantasy World of One-Staters

Tue,03 Nov 2009 16:08:43 GMT

Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, which is the leading American group advocating for an independent Palestine alongside Israel, has a new book out, "What's Wrong With the One-State Agenda?" which does a comprehensive job of demolishing the arguments made by those who think that Israel should be eliminated and replaced by a single state of Jews and Palestinians. He has performed an important service with this book by noting one overwhelming truth about this debate: Virtually no one in Israel wants a single-state between the river and the sea. It's useful to remember this salient fact when listening to the ostensibly reality-based arguments of the one-staters.

I spoke to Ibish about his arguments last week, shortly after he spoke at the J Street conference. Here is an edited version of our conversation:

Jeffrey Goldberg: What were your impressions of the conference?

Hussein Ibish: It was impressive as a first step. My impression is that there's still quite a bit of message-cohesion and message-formulation to be done. It seemed to me to be an insufficiently coherent group of people. The range of people was so large.

JG: You mean on the Zionist spectrum?

HI: I mean people ranging from the sort of centrist-center left, all the way to post-Zionists, anti-Zionists, who were there, too. It's not ultimately a group that's going to form, I think, a functional coalition. Right now, they're finding their feet. This is normal, it's inevitable -- but at a certain point, I think they have to clarify what they are, who their constituency is, what they stand for, who they are, who they're not. They've been more successful in creating a space for themselves as a new voice that is compelling, but at other moments it's looked like where they were simply positioning themselves as the alternative to AIPAC. And my sense of things is that, initially, that they would look too much to their rivals. But sooner rather than later, they're going to have to just move on and start to define themselves in a much more coherent and pro-active way, not just in contrast to the traditional Jewish organizations but also to distinguish themselves from people in the Jewish community whose criticism of Israel makes them anathema to the mainstream of the community. They can't go there and I think they've tried not to go there.

JG: You can't be Zionist and non-Zionist at the same time, in other words.

HI: Exactly. I think it's essential for them. For us, it's not important.

JG: Well, isn't it important to have a pro-Israel, pro-two-state organization in Washington that's credibly Jewish?

HI: It is. But I believe that all of the mainstream organizations are moving in that direction. I think begrudgingly, without enthusiasm, I think they're all getting there, because I think ultimately the only organization that I can think of that is absolutely opposed to a two-state agreement are on the far right, the Zionist Organization of America, which is in favor of the occupation without reservations and, on the left, Jewish Voices for Peace, which is a one-state group all the way and without reservation. It seems to me everybody else occupies some space in the middle without being one-staters and without being flag-waving pro-settlers.

Now, the question is, from our point of view, what's really important is that the Jewish community have a range of dynamic organizations that are effective in advocating for peace based on two states, number one. And number two, that we can work with everybody who is in favor of a two-state solution without any other preconditions. I mean, we don't want to get involved in intra-Jewish rivalries. We want to work with everyone who wants peace based on two states. It's as simple as that. We don't have a huge stake in where J Street ultimately positions itself, but I will say this: The more mainstream it can become, the more powerful and important it will be. I think they should be as mainstream as possible, they should avoid the impression they sometimes give that they're perhaps not being sensitive to fears about Israel's security. There's a real appetite for a more robust, more aggressively pro-peace organization in the Jewish community. But from our perspective, the only people we don't want to talk to are the one-staters and the pro-occupation groups.

JG: But the one-staters are a very marginal group. I think one of the interesting things you do in your book is show very coolly, calmly, the essential ridiculousness of one-state advocacy based on the simple fact that in order to have a successful one-state plan, you need Israeli Jews to want it, and today, not even one percent of Israeli Jews want it.

HI: You could put all of them in a small auditorium.

JG: I don't think you need an auditorium. Talk about these guys, the Tony Judts --

HI: I don't want to be too hard on Judt. Judt put out this argument and then he immediately admitted that it was utopian, that it wasn't serious and he was just doing a thought experiment. And since then, he basically has more or less withdrawn from the conversation Judt has not been a person who suggests that this is a realistic plan and a serious proposal for the future.

There are two fundamental flaws with pro-Palestinian strategic thinking that focuses on the idea of abandoning two states and going for a single state. The first is the question of feasibility, and it's hard to argue with that. Obviously anyone who is familiar with this sees the difficulty, and I would be the first to say that success is not assured by any means. Even a two-state agreement looks, at the moment, like something of a long shot. The difference between the two-state solution and everything else is that yes, it's a long shot, but it would work. And if we could conceivably get it, if we did get it, it would solve the conflict.

The fundamental argument that the one-staters seem to be making, which is that we can't possibly get Israel to end the occupation and relinquish their control of the 22 percent of Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza) but we will inevitably succeed in getting them to relinquish one hundred percent of the territory under their control. This is a problem of logic. The second thing is that once you've realized this, obviously what you've done is set yourself the task of convincing Jewish Israelis to voluntarily do this. The idea of coercing the Israelis into this through military force is absurd, and it could only really be done through voluntary persuasion. What the one-staters argue, actually, is that they don't have to do that. What they're going to do, they say, is bring the Israelis to their knees.

JG: South Africa style?
HI: Well, South Africa style, except we don't have a South Africa equation here.

JG: But they believe they do.

HI: They believe that through the application of what they call BDS - Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions - globally that they can crush the will of the Israelis and break the Zionist movement. To me, even if you believe that boycotts were plausible, which I don't, certainly I don't think the American government and institutions and corporations would participate.

JG: You have to move from the American consensus that supports supplying Israel with the best weaponry to not just a military cutoff but a complete cutoff and boycott. It's very hard to picture.

HI: Anyone who thinks that is plausible in the foreseeable future doesn't understand the nature of the American relationship with Israel. The commitment of the U.S., not just the government but American society, is to the survival and security of the Israeli state. And then there's another aspect, which is the extent to which Israeli institutions, organizations and corporations are interwoven at a very fundamental level with many of those in the U.S.

JG: Right, Intel and Google --

HI: I'm talking about corporate, governmental, intelligence, military, industrial, scientific ties. The point is that you can only take talk of boycott and sanctions seriously if you really don't understand any of this. And if you don't understand any of this, then you're living in a fantasy world. So here's the thing: Obviously the only real task for one-staters is to convince Jewish Israelis to agree to their solution. But instead of trying to do that, they engage in the most hyperbolic discourse about the badness of Zionism, the badness of Jewish Israelis, the rightness and primacy of not just a Palestinian narrative, but the most strident traditional Palestinian narrative, and the most tendentious Palestinian narrative, the one that places lame for the conflict entirely on the side of the Israelis, that casts Israel as the usurper and what they call in one-state circles now the "temporary racist usurping entity." These are the ones, by the way, who won't talk about my book. There's a refusal to acknowledge or read my book. I've nicknamed my book "the temporary racist usurping book."

These people are trapped in the language of the Fifties and Sixties. You're talking about a worldview is anachronistic in the most fundamental sense. It doesn't recognize any of the changes that have taken place since then. For example, the strategic situation that's emerged in the Middle East, where the Arab states and the Arabs generally have a lot of other things to worry about other than Israel. This is a world in which a lot of Gulf states are extremely concerned about Iraq, and where there are Arab states -- Jordan and Egypt -- that have treaties with Israel, where Syria has a motive to be civil with Israel that is unpleasant but completely stable, and where it's a very different environment than simply the Arabs and Israelis are enemies. The other thing that they've missed completely, and this is sort of the amazing thing, is the total transformation in American official policy toward the Palestinians over the past 20 years. Twenty-one years ago, there was no contact ever between the U.S. and the PLO. No contact, zero, and no Palestinian statehood is the consensus American foreign policy and it is a national security priority under Obama. People in the House, key positions like the chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Howard Berman, chair of the Subcommittee on the Middle East, Gary Ackerman, Nita Lowey on Appropriations - all of them Jewish American members of Congress, stalwart supporters of Israel, and all of them committed to peace based on two states. And all of them, by the way, who were on the host committee of the American Task Force on Palestine gala last week.

JG: You've reached the Promised Land.

HI: Except that we haven't achieved the results.

JG: Yes, there's that. But you're on the road.

HI: Exactly. The transformation in American attitudes is almost mind-boggling, an official American attitude on ending the occupation, which has been the traditional goal of the Palestinians. And at this very moment, a group of Palestinians turns around and says, 'Sorry, not good enough, we want it all. Not only is a single Palestinian state not achievable, it's not desirable, it's not acceptable, it's not enough, we want it all.'

JG: Who are the leaders of the movement?

HI: People like Ali Abunimah, Joseph Massad, Ghada Karmi, Omar Barghouti.

JG: And you think they're succumbing to fantastic dreams. This is the traditional criticism of Palestinian politics over the past sixty years, that it's very hard to separate out the dreams from--

HI: It goes back further than sixty years. It's an article of Palestinian nationalist faith that is almost one hundred years old, which is that demography is destiny, demography is power. This notion that if we just sit here, on the land, have children, are steadfast and don't agree to anything, then political power ultimately will flow to us. In the twenties, they believed if we do that, then, just by virtue of our presence in the land, our numbers, our demography, Israel will never be established. After Israel was established, it was just, "Well if we're steadfast and we don't agree, then Israel will be reversed." Then it was, "Well if we just do this, then independence will come in the occupied territories." Now the latest version is if we're just steadfast, we can create a South Africa-like model and we will reverse the war of 1948 at the ballot.

JG: But I have to tell you that for people like me, this is a real worry. This goes with the argument that the settlements are the vanguard of one-statism.

HI: Now there is some truth to this. I think it's useful for people like (Ehud) Olmert or people like yourself to point out that with the occupation going the way it is, there won't be a Palestinian state, and then Israel will be in a situation where it is neither meaningfully Jewish nor meaningfully democratic. I think you could claim that already, if you talk about the de facto Israeli state rather than Israel in its normally perceived borders, that is already the case and it will be increasingly so. Now here's the thing: The alternative, though, is not going to be a single state in the foreseeable future. It's possible we could get there, but it won't be a solution, it will be an outcome. There's a big difference. An outcome of a horrible, brutal, bloody civil conflict that drags on for generations, because even though this demographic issue and the legitimacy issues are crises for Israel, I don't think they result in the dissolution of the Israeli state

JG: In other words, most Israeli Jews would rather have a Jewish state than a democratic state.

HI: Yes, it's obvious. And I think that what you would get is a protracted civil war that is essentially an intensification of the civil war we've had. So I do say the single state is a potential eventuality, but it would be the outcome of a horrible scenario. Look, the idea that if the current round of talks breaks down and Obama gives up and the U.S. gives up and we all give up, then the alternative is a Gandhian non-violent struggle of sanctions and boycotts that will somehow bring Israel to its knees, that is not the way it's going to go. We know the way it's going to go.

JG: Each intifada is more violent than the last.

HI: And more religious. You'll end up with two sets of bearded fanatics on both sides fighting over holy places and God. It will be a complete disaster. And I think the Israelis will end up ultimately dealing with forces not only beyond its borders, but beyond its comprehension in the long run. This has the possibility of turning into not an ethno-national war but a religious war between the Muslims and the Jews over the holy places with the whole concept of Palestine gone and the Jewish population of Israel in a very unenviable situation, protected in the end only by its nuclear weapons. It's a nightmare.

JG: So you have three scenarios. One, the one-state solution: Somehow the Jews and the Arabs decide, even though their narratives completely contradict each other, that we'll be like Belgium, where we don't have to really like each other but we'll be fine. The second alternative is the one you described of basically endless war. The third is the two-state solution. But, sorry to say it, we don't seem that close right now. You have an Israeli government who seems extremely hesitant to pull down any settlements, you have a Hamas government in Gaza, just for starters.

HI: What you do with Hamas, in my view, is you make the situation such that Hamas has to choose, and you do this by creating progress and by creating momentum - and there are two ways of creating momentum. One is diplomatically, which right now, seems difficult. The other is through the Fayyad plan, which is state building in the occupied territories. That would have a very powerful effect. It is extremely important that we use that idea as a means of gaining momentum, that the Israelis do not block it, that the U.S. protect it politically, and that the Arabs, Europeans and the Israelis support it technically and financially. This is a way of really moving forward in a manner that is complimentary and not contradictory to the diplomatic process, and I think people who suggest that this is some kind of capitulation or some kind of collaboration are dead wrong. This is a very powerful way of effectively resisting the occupation without doing anything violent. Israelis may fool themselves into thinking that this is just economic peace, but it's not; it's Palestinians preparing for independence.

Now with regard to Hamas, I definitely don't think it would be wise for the West to open up dialogue with Hamas under the present circumstances. I think that would simply reward them and it would benefit them in their competition with the PLO and there's a stark choice that Palestinians are facing between two strategies: an Islamist violent strategy and a secular nationalist negotiation strategy. I think it's very important to bolster the second and to make the first appear what it actually is: Non-functional.

Yes on Goldblog

Mon,02 Nov 2009 23:31:13 GMT

Andrew's mad at me because I didn't post this on my blog. Obviously, as I told Mother Jones, I wasn't meaning to imply that Trita Parsi is a paid agent of the Iranian regime, or somesuch. I was implying that he has made himself the AIPAC of Iran in Washington. My bad. On the larger question of whether Trita Parsi functions as a lobbyist for the Iranian regime, based on what I know, I'd have to say yes: He has argued consistently against any sanctions against Iran, and an end to sanctions is obviously what the Iranian regime wants. So he is working on behalf of a stated interest of the Iranian government. Yes, he also criticizes Iran's human rights abuses, but it's been suggested recently that it is possible to lobby for a country while criticizing it at the same time. The reason I'm for sanctions is that they represent one of the only possible ways to stop an Israeli (or American, for that matter) attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. An end to sanctions means either a potentially-catastrophic attack or a nuclear-armed Iran, neither which is acceptable to me, and, I presume, to Andrew.

One more thing -- a thank you to Mother Jones's Nick Baumann for this clarifcation: "I don't think Goldberg's a neocon, and I hope this post doesn't imply that he is." I would like to add, nevertheless, that some of my best friends are neocons.

And one more final thing: To those Goldblog readers who have asked me to respond to Andrew's intemperate attack on Israel today, you'll have to pardon me but I have the flu and therefore no energy for any of this right now. Suffice it to say that I know Andrew loves Israel, and he's a Zionist, so I don't actually know how to explain this current level of hostility, but one day I'm going to have the two of us invited to speak together at my synagogue (don't worry, Andrew, it's within bike-distance!) so we can hash this out.

Matt Yglesias is Very Upset

Mon,02 Nov 2009 19:07:47 GMT

(UPDATE BELOW)

A friend of mine e-mailed me this weekend me to say that I upset Matt Yglesias by nominating him for one of Andrew Sullivan's Yglesias Awards. I had praised Yglesias for recognizing that J Street's conference attracted a certain number of anti-Zionists (or "un-Zionists" in J.J. Goldberg's phrase), and I think Yglesias didn't appreciate such praise by an ultra-Zionist wolf such as myself (and God knows what this post, from Marty Peretz, did to him).

In any case, an answer, of sorts, from Yglesias wasn't long in coming, in the form of this post, attacking me for arguing that Trita Parsi does "leg-work" for the Iranian regime in Washington. I think it's fair to say that Parsi's organization, the National Iranian American Council, functions as a kind of AIPAC for Iran, but this was too much for Yglesias, who calls me shifty and contemptible, etc. etc. All par for the course, including his criticism of me for supporting a war he also initially supported. But then he does something dishonest in his piece, lumping me in with a group of people who support a military strike against Iran:

"Some people, also known as people who know what they're talking about, think an unprovoked US or Israeli preventive military strike on Iran would be a huge gift to the Iranian government and a crushing blow to the opposition. Others, who I hope are liars rather than fools, claim to believe that this is wrong. Parsi is, I know, in the former camp. So it's worth revisiting Jeffrey Goldberg's record as a prognosticator on this sort of question."

Yglesias surely knows that I'm opposed to a military strike on Iran by either the U.S. or Israel for a whole range of reasons. I've been publicly and vocally opposed to a strike for some time. My opposition to military action against Iran can be learned by reading this and this and this, just for starters. I've spoken to Jewish groups inclined to support such an attack and told them why it's a bad idea. I've argued with Israeli cabinet officials about a strike. I suppose that next I could take an ad out on Yglesias's blog trumpeting my opposition to a strike. I'm going to e-mail Yglesias to ask him to acknowledge in his post that I am, in fact, in the Parsi camp(!) when it comes to attacking Iran. It's fine to attack me for things I believe, but this particular bit of criticism by Yglesias is ridiculous.

UPDATE: Yglesias has graciously updated his post to include the previously-mentioned relevant information.

"J Street Should Fight the Left as Well as the Right"

Fri,30 Oct 2009 20:19:14 GMT

Goldblog reader Howard Deutsch writes:

AIPAC types are worked up about J Street because while J Street has claimed to be "pro-Israel" and "pro-peace," they have, to an outsider's view, spent a lot of their energy arguing with Israel's American supporters on the right (AIPAC) or Israel's policies during the Kadima government (Cast Lead, where they were to the left of Meretz). Meanwhile, as Jon Chait noted, plenty of people who clearly don't consider themselves pro-Israel in any way that I would recognize somehow gladly identify with and endorse J Street.

If J Street spent similar amounts of energy countering anti-Israel forces on the left as they did countering pro-Israel forces on the right, there might not be less acrimony (we are talking about political folks here), but I would at least find them to be an organization whose core beliefs and activities matched their self-described characterization. You shouldn't, e.g., have to push hard for a grudging repudiation of Walt and Mearsheimer - J Street should be doing that as part of their mission to represent a mainstream pro-Israel position. Even if it means [gasp!] making common cause with AIPAC.

The Taboo That Won't Shut Up, Cont'd

Fri,30 Oct 2009 19:15:31 GMT

Further proof -- as if further proof is needed -- that it is forbidden to stake out an anti-Israel position in American public life: Jon Stewart featured the other night as guests a pro-Palestinian Palestinian and a pro-Palestinian Jew. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the Zionists remove him from his job. Just like they did Megan McArdle.

An Iran "Immune to Rational Self Interest"

Fri,30 Oct 2009 19:10:59 GMT

An important column from Yossi Klein Halevi:

In the last few years, Israelis have been asking themselves two questions with increasing urgency: Should we attack Iran if all other options fail? And can we inflict sufficient damage to justify the consequences?

As sanctions efforts faltered, most Israelis came to answer the first question affirmatively. A key moment in coalescing that resolve occurred in December 2006, when the Iranian regime sponsored an "International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust," a two day meeting of Holocaust deniers. For Israelis, that event ended the debate over whether a nuclear Iran could be deterred by the threat of counter-force. A regime that assembles the world's crackpots to deny the most documented atrocity in history--at the very moment it is trying to fend off sanctions and convince the international community of its sanity--may well be immune to rational self-interest.

Ron Rosenbaum vs. Hannah Arendt

Fri,30 Oct 2009 18:32:04 GMT

Not much of a contest. I found this last comment extremely relevant:

One can still hear this Arendtian shame about ethnicity these days. So parochial! One can hear the echo of Arendt's fear of being judged as "merely Jewish" in some, not all, of those Jews so eager to dissociate themselves from the parochial concerns of other Jews for Israel. The desire for universalist approval makes them so disdainful of any "ethnic" fellow feeling. After all, to such unfettered spirits, it's so banal.

Have a Frozen Chosen

Fri,30 Oct 2009 18:31:38 GMT

Serious Eats picked this beer as its favorite American brown ale: (h/t Jay Brodsky)

He'Brew Messiah Bold New York, 5.65% ABV
Don't be put off by the puns on the label--this could really be "the beer you've been waiting for." This nutty-scented, deep ruby-brown beer is everything we liked about the other brown ales without their flaws. Deeply flavored but not heavy, smooth and mellow but not sweet: this beer is balanced, rich, and complex. A hoppy brightness peeks out from under the coffee, cinnamon, and walnut flavors.

Does Time Warner Understand the Role of Journalists?

Fri,30 Oct 2009 15:56:21 GMT

Earlier this month, at the Atlantic-sponsored Washington Ideas Forum, I interviewed Jeff Bewkes, the chief of Time Warner, about the future of the magazine business, among other things. He is an obviously competent leader, perhaps even a visionary leader -- but a visionary leader of an entertainment company, not necessarily of a journalism company. The news out of our session came when he promised that Time Warner would still be in the magazine business in five years, but I thought our exchange about firing journalists, printed below, was more revealing, not only in light of the recent announcement that Time Inc. is cutting even more jobs, but because it raised a question in my mind about whether Bewkes truly understood that particular responsibilities -- not to shareholders, but to American democracy -- come with being a publisher.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Last year, Time Inc.... laid off 600 people. At what point do you do damage to journalism, and, therefore, to democracy, and at what point do you simply say, "This business doesn't work for us because we can't make the money that we need to please our shareholders."

Jeff Bewkes: No, the challenge for businesses... is to figure out what you need to redesign, including cutting operations and plants and duplicated data centers and human beings that are working in one role that you don't need in the new design of the product, without destroying or hurting the quality of the journalism or the movies. Last year, we also cut 700 people at New Line whom we valued very highly, who were making very successful films, and we had to make more efficient our Warner and New Line film production. The result of it is that we had a tremendous number of New Line hit films this year.

Goldberg: But the societal consequence of laying off people, as hard as that is, from a movie studio is not the same as the societal consequence of laying off professional news-gatherers.

Bewkes: Not all the people being laid off are news-gatherers. If you go out fifty years, the number of people in jobs, in any industry -- whether it's mining, farming, news production and dissemination, movie making -- is going to change. The production method is going to change, the nature of who's in what job will change. We do need to keep evolving it. The important thing is that we keep serving the role of having healthy, independent businesses that can provide quality journalism and quality entertainment.

Return of the Khazars

Fri,30 Oct 2009 15:20:40 GMT

The thesis of a new book, The Invention of the Jewish People, by Tel Aviv University's Shlomo Sand, is actually quite old: That "Jewish peoplehood" is a rather big lie. Sand writes that the Jews are the descendants of converts -- specifically North African Berbers and Turkic Khazars -- not Israelites, and never inherited their homeland of Israel. We've been down this road before, with Arthur Koestler, author of the discredited "The Thirteenth Tribe." Sand acknowledged to Tablet's Evan Goldstein that his book, could provide fodder for those who are trying to delegitimize Israel:

While Sand is quick--and arguably disingenuous--to portray his personal politics as "very moderate," he doesn't flinch from describing his work on Jewish historiography and Israel as "radical" and "courageous." Verso has used adjectives like "bold" and "ambitious" to promote his book. But Hebrew University historian Israel Bartal, among others, has pointed out that Sand's politics have undermined the credibility of his scholarship. "Sand's desire for Israel to become a state 'representing all its citizens' is certainly worthy of a serious discussion," Bartal wrote in Haaretz, "but the manner in which he attempts to connect a political platform with the history of the Jewish people from its very beginnings to the present day is bizarre and incoherent."

Goldstein asked me for my thoughts on the book and here's what I told him:

"Sand is dropping manufactured facts into a world that in many cases is ready, willing, and happy to believe the absolute worst conspiracy theories about Jews and to use those conspiracy theories to justify physically hurting Jews. It is nothing new."

Why Can't We All Just Get Along?

Fri,30 Oct 2009 14:29:07 GMT

Goldblog reader Jason Snyder asks an interesting question:

Before asking J Street (or its supporters) to stop referring to it as the "pro-peace lobby," perhaps AIPAC should stop referring to itself as "America's Pro-Israel Lobby." After all, everyone thinks that their organization is the most "pro-Israel."

But I'd like to ask a larger question -- why does there have to be such acrimony between J Street and AIPAC? AIPAC's supporters, in particular, seem especially offended by J Street and what it stands for. Isn't there room for diversity of opinion on questions where clearly no one has the correct answer yet? I understand the concern that some of those who support J Street do so for, perhaps, less than staunchly pro-Israel reasons, but is there really no room on the spectrum of opinion for those who think the settlements are an obstacle to peace or that Likud does not have all the answers?

What the Internet Can't Do

Fri,30 Oct 2009 13:56:26 GMT

David Wolpe:

Judaism so treasures words one might think you could get a righteous person out of a book. Yet beginning with the bible Judaism taught that laws come to life in people. Role models speak louder than rules.
Chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary Solomon Schechter famously explained to the incoming student and future Chancellor Louis Finkelstein that the purpose of coming to the seminary was not to learn a fact or law; he could learn those elsewhere. The purpose was to study with great men. Speaking of his years as a student my father told me far less about what he learned than about the people with whom he learned. They were not perfect, but they were passionate, learned, marvelously eccentric and they brought the tradition to life.
To the extent that the Internet and the proliferation of long distance learning deprive us of being in the presence of charismatic, kind, scholarly people, it will be a tremendous loss. When a Hasid said that he traveled miles just to see how his master tied his shoes, he was expressing this beautiful idea. What we learn from a great teacher cannot be put into a book, because it is in a look, an inflection, a quirk of personality or a tossed off comment. The greatest human lessons are found in the power of presence.