1. http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/28303?in=21:40&out=28:42
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/opinion/16dowd.html
3. Me:
I only listened to the first bit of this on Elena Kagan, because her nomination interests me--as in, as a Canadian lawyer, I'll take some time off from my work to watch her confirmation hearing, which will be for me a holiday doing something I like. And I read Dowd's piece, which, unlike Mr. Laarman, I didn't find hilarious, but, rather, irritating.
I agree with Ms Butler, and contra some like Andrew Sullivan, who is public intellectual creep number one, that Kagan's sexuality ought to be relevant to nothing public. And so I found Dowd's little column virtually prurient. Her twitting those concerned with Kagan's sexuality serves to do nothing so much as feed this particular irrelevant beast.
For Dowd's column to have resonance she has to privilege, and thus give meaning and legitimacy to, the very vapidities, irrelevancies and sexual obsessiveness, she means to deride. If these things weren't the butt of her failed attempt at withering irony, they could be more easily be shuffled off certain centre stages—like the Times.
Dowd is precis
ely a discredit to the very point she pretends she wants to make; and I contend she does not know herself
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Marriage, Jane Austen, Flaubert, William Carlos Williams and me
Settle Down Now
What makes marriage preferable to single life, anyway?
February 24, 2010 | 12:00 am
Now that Valentine’s Day is safely around the corner and all the romantic breezes have blown out to sea, let’s take a cold, hard look at Lori Gottlieb, the marriage maven of the post-Sex and the City era. Savvy enough to publish a book about marriage in time for V-Day and reap the subsequent media blitz, Gottlieb has suffered from poorer timing in her love life. Two years ago, she lamented her ill-advised dating strategy in The Atlantic: Rather than “settle for” (read: marry) one of her numerous boyfriends during her twenties or thirties, she kept holding out for “something better,” convinced she had not yet met her “soul mate.” But still alone at age 40, with a sperm-donated baby and no husband prospects on her horizon, Gottlieb doubted the wisdom of her choice. “Marrying Mr. Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re looking for a stable, reliable life companion,” she wrote. “Madame Bovary might not see it that way, but if she’d remained single, I’ll bet she would have been even more depressed than she was while living with her "tedious but caring" husband.
Now she’s spun the article into one of those books whose argument doesn’t go much further than the title: Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. Women today, Gottlieb explains, have unrealistic expectations of the qualities they want in a mate, bringing a checklist 30 items long to the dating table and automatically excluding anyone who doesn’t perfectly conform. (He’s blond; she prefers tall, dark, and handsome. Next!) If you really want to get married, she writes, you should stop looking for qualities immediately attractive in a boyfriend—passion, intensity, brilliance—and open your mind to men who on the surface might be less scintillating but in the long run would make better partners.
What’s interesting about all this isn’t the dating advice Gottlieb offers, which is nothing new. Among the old standards she falls back on is the wisdom of the arranged marriage, in which partners unite owing to a meeting of values rather than minds or hearts and fall in love later (ideally). While her evidence is largely anecdotal, buffered with statistics from the National Marriage Project and various psychological studies, her research methods are clever. At the book’s start, she interviews a group of single women in their late 30s and early 40s. A friend tells Gottlieb, “Even if he’s not the love of your life, make sure he’s someone you respect intellectually, [who] makes you laugh, appreciates you. … I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway).” But it’s not “settling” to marry a guy who is intelligent, funny, appreciative, and so on, if you connect with him intellectually and emotionally—as many of these women, even Gottlieb herself, say they did with their boyfriends. To marry a man you “adore,” even if sparks didn’t fly at the first meeting, sounds like a rational start for a happy relationship, not a radical way to readjust your priorities. What is settling is to accept a vision of marriage utterly different from the one you thought you wanted. This happens to be exactly what Gottlieb originally suggested, perhaps inadvertently, in her Atlantic article. Charles Bovary, after all, wasn’t “tedious but caring"; he didn’t respect Emma, make her laugh, or appreciate her. To suggest that the Bovary marriage might have had a happier ending if Emma had just readjusted her expectations is like saying Werther could have been cured by a little Prozac.
Gottlieb never devotes her considerable analytic skills to the most obvious question: Why does she assume that being married is better than being single? In the article, she acknowledged that marriages might not always be ideal, and even admitted the possibility that her life alone “is better (if far more difficult) than the life I would have in a comfortable but tepid marriage.” But she made it clear that she’d still rather be unhappily married than on her own. “My married friends with kids don’t spend that much time with their husbands anyway (between work and child care), and in many cases, their biggest complaint seems to be that they never see each other,” she explained. “So if you rarely see your husband—but he’s a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own—how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?” But I would venture that rarely seeing your husband isn’t what most women envision when they think about marriage. We can take out the trash and set up the baby gear ourselves; that’s not why people want partners.
In Gottlieb’s unashamedly marriage-boosting book, I counted all of two references to unhappy marriages. Marriage is simply presumed to be a good, better by definition than being single. There is no awareness of domestic violence and other abuse—not to mention other far more minor grievances that seem petty on the surface but erode a person’s well-being: the daily squabbles, the claustrophobia, the loneliness of discovering that the person you thought would be your constant companion no longer has the interest or ability to meet your needs. In ten years, will Gottlieb’s comfortably, tepidly married subjects reunite for the sequel, Divorce Him? That’s a book I’d be curious to read.
Ruth Franklin is a senior editor of The New Republic.
Me:
...Jane Austen dealt with these themes. And in the cloistered social and class contexts out of which she wrote of marriage as: economic bargain, expansion of family empire, social placement and attaining sinecure, she could still portray an ideal of marriage grounded on love as the coming togther of mature, well matched and complemetary sensibilities.
Flaubert's vision is so mordant that he makes Austen’s idea of marriage based on love, or any idea of marriage based on love, an impossibility. In him there seems only sentimental vacuity, base exploitation of it, or the sheer hum drum of matches based on calculated need, where personal compromise, sacrifice and self suppression in exchange for financial security and stability are marriage's grounds. From an oppressive and and almost totalitarian provincial conventionality and the sentimental, unrealizable, romantic dream of its escape, comes the inevitable tragedy that befalls Emma Bovary and her husband too in his unreal and perverse idealization of her.
What I find missing in the discussion here is, what I would argue, love, as complementary difference, as a necessary condition of, as someone put it, being married well...
Marriage
So different, this man
And this woman:
A stream flowing
In a field.
William Carlos Williams
What makes marriage preferable to single life, anyway?
February 24, 2010 | 12:00 am
Now that Valentine’s Day is safely around the corner and all the romantic breezes have blown out to sea, let’s take a cold, hard look at Lori Gottlieb, the marriage maven of the post-Sex and the City era. Savvy enough to publish a book about marriage in time for V-Day and reap the subsequent media blitz, Gottlieb has suffered from poorer timing in her love life. Two years ago, she lamented her ill-advised dating strategy in The Atlantic: Rather than “settle for” (read: marry) one of her numerous boyfriends during her twenties or thirties, she kept holding out for “something better,” convinced she had not yet met her “soul mate.” But still alone at age 40, with a sperm-donated baby and no husband prospects on her horizon, Gottlieb doubted the wisdom of her choice. “Marrying Mr. Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re looking for a stable, reliable life companion,” she wrote. “Madame Bovary might not see it that way, but if she’d remained single, I’ll bet she would have been even more depressed than she was while living with her "tedious but caring" husband.
Now she’s spun the article into one of those books whose argument doesn’t go much further than the title: Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. Women today, Gottlieb explains, have unrealistic expectations of the qualities they want in a mate, bringing a checklist 30 items long to the dating table and automatically excluding anyone who doesn’t perfectly conform. (He’s blond; she prefers tall, dark, and handsome. Next!) If you really want to get married, she writes, you should stop looking for qualities immediately attractive in a boyfriend—passion, intensity, brilliance—and open your mind to men who on the surface might be less scintillating but in the long run would make better partners.
What’s interesting about all this isn’t the dating advice Gottlieb offers, which is nothing new. Among the old standards she falls back on is the wisdom of the arranged marriage, in which partners unite owing to a meeting of values rather than minds or hearts and fall in love later (ideally). While her evidence is largely anecdotal, buffered with statistics from the National Marriage Project and various psychological studies, her research methods are clever. At the book’s start, she interviews a group of single women in their late 30s and early 40s. A friend tells Gottlieb, “Even if he’s not the love of your life, make sure he’s someone you respect intellectually, [who] makes you laugh, appreciates you. … I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway).” But it’s not “settling” to marry a guy who is intelligent, funny, appreciative, and so on, if you connect with him intellectually and emotionally—as many of these women, even Gottlieb herself, say they did with their boyfriends. To marry a man you “adore,” even if sparks didn’t fly at the first meeting, sounds like a rational start for a happy relationship, not a radical way to readjust your priorities. What is settling is to accept a vision of marriage utterly different from the one you thought you wanted. This happens to be exactly what Gottlieb originally suggested, perhaps inadvertently, in her Atlantic article. Charles Bovary, after all, wasn’t “tedious but caring"; he didn’t respect Emma, make her laugh, or appreciate her. To suggest that the Bovary marriage might have had a happier ending if Emma had just readjusted her expectations is like saying Werther could have been cured by a little Prozac.
Gottlieb never devotes her considerable analytic skills to the most obvious question: Why does she assume that being married is better than being single? In the article, she acknowledged that marriages might not always be ideal, and even admitted the possibility that her life alone “is better (if far more difficult) than the life I would have in a comfortable but tepid marriage.” But she made it clear that she’d still rather be unhappily married than on her own. “My married friends with kids don’t spend that much time with their husbands anyway (between work and child care), and in many cases, their biggest complaint seems to be that they never see each other,” she explained. “So if you rarely see your husband—but he’s a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own—how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?” But I would venture that rarely seeing your husband isn’t what most women envision when they think about marriage. We can take out the trash and set up the baby gear ourselves; that’s not why people want partners.
In Gottlieb’s unashamedly marriage-boosting book, I counted all of two references to unhappy marriages. Marriage is simply presumed to be a good, better by definition than being single. There is no awareness of domestic violence and other abuse—not to mention other far more minor grievances that seem petty on the surface but erode a person’s well-being: the daily squabbles, the claustrophobia, the loneliness of discovering that the person you thought would be your constant companion no longer has the interest or ability to meet your needs. In ten years, will Gottlieb’s comfortably, tepidly married subjects reunite for the sequel, Divorce Him? That’s a book I’d be curious to read.
Ruth Franklin is a senior editor of The New Republic.
Me:
...Jane Austen dealt with these themes. And in the cloistered social and class contexts out of which she wrote of marriage as: economic bargain, expansion of family empire, social placement and attaining sinecure, she could still portray an ideal of marriage grounded on love as the coming togther of mature, well matched and complemetary sensibilities.
Flaubert's vision is so mordant that he makes Austen’s idea of marriage based on love, or any idea of marriage based on love, an impossibility. In him there seems only sentimental vacuity, base exploitation of it, or the sheer hum drum of matches based on calculated need, where personal compromise, sacrifice and self suppression in exchange for financial security and stability are marriage's grounds. From an oppressive and and almost totalitarian provincial conventionality and the sentimental, unrealizable, romantic dream of its escape, comes the inevitable tragedy that befalls Emma Bovary and her husband too in his unreal and perverse idealization of her.
What I find missing in the discussion here is, what I would argue, love, as complementary difference, as a necessary condition of, as someone put it, being married well...
Marriage
So different, this man
And this woman:
A stream flowing
In a field.
William Carlos Williams
Saturday, May 22, 2010
Kirchik on Beinart
Curing the Israel Estrangement Syndrome
Peter Beinart misdiagnoses the root causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict and misunderstands American Jews' relationship with Israel.
BY JAMES KIRCHICK | MAY 21, 2010
Peter Beinart's recent essay denouncing the "American Jewish establishment" is drawing a great deal of controversy not for what it says -- attacks on the pro-Israel community in the New York Review of Books are a dime a dozen -- but for who wrote it. The New Republic, which Beinart used to edit, is not known for producing writers who pen harsh criticisms of the Israel lobby, much less ones claiming , "Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral."
Beinart's thesis is nothing new; liberal American Jews have long complained about what they claim is the right-wing bias of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other pro-Israel groups, only to see their own attempts at founding organizations to speak on behalf of the supposedly silent majority -- J Street being just the latest incarnation -- fail.
More... But Beinart has never been part of American Jewry's leftist faction; up until recently, he was a prominent spokesperson for the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party. That his piece appears in a publication that is typically the home of anti-Zionist or far-left polemics does not detract, however, from the significance of the essay to the intracommunal Jewish debate over Israel.
Beinart largely bases his claim of American liberal Jewish estrangement from Zionism on a two-year-old study completed by Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California, Davis, which found that "non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders." But that study contained numerous flaws, many of which were debunked in a paper released by researchers at Brandeis University. "As American Jews grow older, they tend to become more emotionally attached to Israel," concluded the Brandeis study, meaning that a static survey of young Jews is not necessarily indicative of future beliefs. It also found that "general political orientation on a continuum from 'extremely liberal' to 'extremely conservative' is not related to attachment to Israel." (Further problems with the original Cohen paper were highlighted at the time by the Jerusalem Post's Shmuel Rosner).
From the very beginning, Beinart creates a false dichotomy between peace-loving, liberal Jewish Zionists, and racist, warmongering Orthodox ones. "Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel," he writes. "And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included." He is aghast at the rightward turn in Israeli politics, spending much time agonizing over hard-line Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's rise to power. He writes of his discovery of Benjamin Netanyahu's 1993 book A Place Among the Nations -- in which the current prime minister rejects the creation of a Palestinian state -- as if this information was new and at all relevant to the current debate.
All this comes across as slightly amateurish to people who actually follow Israeli politics on a semiregular basis. Yes, Netanyahu opposed the creation of a Palestinian state in a book published 17 years ago. But he, as well as the overwhelming majority of the Israeli public, supports the creation of a Palestinian state today. Beinart obsesses over the Israeli right -- citing, among others, the reactionary views of Effie Eitam, an ex-cabinet minister who last held office six years ago -- at the expense of sober analysis. Beinart's treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict occurs in a vacuum: He bemoans the excesses of the Israeli right but ignores that the Arab and Muslim states have continuously produced political leaders near-uniformly characterized by authoritarianism, fascism, anti-Semitism, or some combination of the three.
Most telling about Beinart's essay is what's missing. Like many liberal observers of the conflict, Beinart portrays Israelis as the sole drivers of history, with the Arabs relegated to the role of passive, background characters. Liberal Zionists, he says, "see average Palestinians as decent people betrayed by bad leaders," and not, say, active agents who have played some part in their own misfortune. The actions of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran are not discussed in the 5,000-word piece until four paragraphs from the end.
There is no mention that Palestinians voted Hamas into power in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. There is similarly no mention of the murderous anti-Semitism spewed in Palestinian schools, television, radio, and newspapers, or the medieval propaganda sponsored by Iran, Saudi Arabia, or even Egypt. And, perhaps most tellingly, there is no mention of the poll, conducted just last month by An-Najah National University in the West Bank, which found that 77 percent of Palestinians oppose a two-state solution.
The foundational error in Beinart's piece is a grievous misunderstanding for why the Arab-Israeli conflict persists to this day: Arab intransigence. Beinart ignores the many strides that Israeli leaders have made for peace -- especially in the past decade, when the American Jewish establishment allegedly fell under the sway of right-wing extremists. Beinart mentions in passing former Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer in 2000 to the Palestinians, which included the entire Gaza Strip and nearly all of the West Bank. But he doesn't consider Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat's rejection of the deal and subsequent initiation of the second intifada. Indeed, Arafat's name does not appear once in the essay.
Beinart's concessions to Israeli fears are similarly perfunctory. "Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran," he writes, while failing to note that the region's Arab regimes worry just as much. Indeed, this sentence is as far as Beinart goes in attempting to explain the region's complicated politics. There is no appreciation of the regional Cold War pitting Iran and Syria, along with their terrorist proxies, against Israel and the status quo ante Arab governments. Such nuances get in the way of a narrative that seeks to blame American Jews and not, say, Iranian mullahs or Syrian autocrats for the lack of a Palestinian state. But Israel's security -- and the entire region's stability -- requires something more substantive than Beinart's myopic approach, which sees little worth analyzing beyond the views emanating out of Likud headquarters.
While Beinart is a sharp analyst of U.S. domestic politics, he fails to appreciate how Israel's repeated, spurned attempts at peace have resulted in the utter collapse of the Israeli left. Although he quotes former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's statement that Israel could become an "apartheid state" should the occupation persist, he doesn't mention that Olmert offered the Palestinians essentially the same proposal as Barak, only to have it rejected out of hand.
As for former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's unilateral evacuation of settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Beinart only describes the dismantling as "proposed." He doesn't explain that Sharon, with overwhelming support from an Israeli public hungry for peace, actually went through with the task. In return for the withdrawal, Israel was greeted by Hamas's violent takeover of Gaza in 2007 and a hail of rockets that terrorized southern Israeli cities. (In line with his obsessive cataloguing of the most egregious examples of Israeli right-wing rhetoric, Beinart does find the space to quote the spiritual leader of the Orthodox Shas Party urging "God strike [Sharon] down" for the withdrawal. Yet he neglects to mention that the same rabbi recently called for a complete stop to settlement construction in Jerusalem in order to improve Israel's relationship with the United States.)
At the end of the day, if Beinart truly thinks that the Israeli government is to blame for the current impasse, his problem does not lie with Israel's defenders in the United States. Rather, his dispute lies with the Israeli electorate, which, after all, voted the Israeli government into power. But rather than confront this reality -- that his own prescriptions for the Middle East are wildly out of step with the Israeli people -- Beinart targets those in his own country who have loudly criticized the Obama administration's bungled diplomatic attempts to pressure Israel.
Like his latter-day opposition to the Iraq war, Beinart is late to joining the anti-"Jewish establishment" bandwagon. But for all his hand-wringing about the rightward turn in Israeli politics, he offers few suggestions as to how American Jews can alleviate the situation other than the pious instruction that they demonstrate concern "by talking frankly about Israel's current government, by no longer averting our eyes." He concludes his essay by quoting approvingly the words of former Knesset Speaker Avrum Burg -- a man who has compared Israel to pre-Nazi Germany, suggested revoking the law of return (which allows diaspora Jews to become Israeli citizens), and called upon all Israelis to obtain foreign passports. If this is what Beinart means by "talking frankly" about Israel, one wishes he were as vigilant about those seeking to destroy it.
Peter Beinart misdiagnoses the root causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict and misunderstands American Jews' relationship with Israel.
BY JAMES KIRCHICK | MAY 21, 2010
Peter Beinart's recent essay denouncing the "American Jewish establishment" is drawing a great deal of controversy not for what it says -- attacks on the pro-Israel community in the New York Review of Books are a dime a dozen -- but for who wrote it. The New Republic, which Beinart used to edit, is not known for producing writers who pen harsh criticisms of the Israel lobby, much less ones claiming , "Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral."
Beinart's thesis is nothing new; liberal American Jews have long complained about what they claim is the right-wing bias of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other pro-Israel groups, only to see their own attempts at founding organizations to speak on behalf of the supposedly silent majority -- J Street being just the latest incarnation -- fail.
More... But Beinart has never been part of American Jewry's leftist faction; up until recently, he was a prominent spokesperson for the hawkish wing of the Democratic Party. That his piece appears in a publication that is typically the home of anti-Zionist or far-left polemics does not detract, however, from the significance of the essay to the intracommunal Jewish debate over Israel.
Beinart largely bases his claim of American liberal Jewish estrangement from Zionism on a two-year-old study completed by Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California, Davis, which found that "non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders." But that study contained numerous flaws, many of which were debunked in a paper released by researchers at Brandeis University. "As American Jews grow older, they tend to become more emotionally attached to Israel," concluded the Brandeis study, meaning that a static survey of young Jews is not necessarily indicative of future beliefs. It also found that "general political orientation on a continuum from 'extremely liberal' to 'extremely conservative' is not related to attachment to Israel." (Further problems with the original Cohen paper were highlighted at the time by the Jerusalem Post's Shmuel Rosner).
From the very beginning, Beinart creates a false dichotomy between peace-loving, liberal Jewish Zionists, and racist, warmongering Orthodox ones. "Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel," he writes. "And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included." He is aghast at the rightward turn in Israeli politics, spending much time agonizing over hard-line Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's rise to power. He writes of his discovery of Benjamin Netanyahu's 1993 book A Place Among the Nations -- in which the current prime minister rejects the creation of a Palestinian state -- as if this information was new and at all relevant to the current debate.
All this comes across as slightly amateurish to people who actually follow Israeli politics on a semiregular basis. Yes, Netanyahu opposed the creation of a Palestinian state in a book published 17 years ago. But he, as well as the overwhelming majority of the Israeli public, supports the creation of a Palestinian state today. Beinart obsesses over the Israeli right -- citing, among others, the reactionary views of Effie Eitam, an ex-cabinet minister who last held office six years ago -- at the expense of sober analysis. Beinart's treatment of the Arab-Israeli conflict occurs in a vacuum: He bemoans the excesses of the Israeli right but ignores that the Arab and Muslim states have continuously produced political leaders near-uniformly characterized by authoritarianism, fascism, anti-Semitism, or some combination of the three.
Most telling about Beinart's essay is what's missing. Like many liberal observers of the conflict, Beinart portrays Israelis as the sole drivers of history, with the Arabs relegated to the role of passive, background characters. Liberal Zionists, he says, "see average Palestinians as decent people betrayed by bad leaders," and not, say, active agents who have played some part in their own misfortune. The actions of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran are not discussed in the 5,000-word piece until four paragraphs from the end.
There is no mention that Palestinians voted Hamas into power in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections. There is similarly no mention of the murderous anti-Semitism spewed in Palestinian schools, television, radio, and newspapers, or the medieval propaganda sponsored by Iran, Saudi Arabia, or even Egypt. And, perhaps most tellingly, there is no mention of the poll, conducted just last month by An-Najah National University in the West Bank, which found that 77 percent of Palestinians oppose a two-state solution.
The foundational error in Beinart's piece is a grievous misunderstanding for why the Arab-Israeli conflict persists to this day: Arab intransigence. Beinart ignores the many strides that Israeli leaders have made for peace -- especially in the past decade, when the American Jewish establishment allegedly fell under the sway of right-wing extremists. Beinart mentions in passing former Prime Minister Ehud Barak's offer in 2000 to the Palestinians, which included the entire Gaza Strip and nearly all of the West Bank. But he doesn't consider Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat's rejection of the deal and subsequent initiation of the second intifada. Indeed, Arafat's name does not appear once in the essay.
Beinart's concessions to Israeli fears are similarly perfunctory. "Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran," he writes, while failing to note that the region's Arab regimes worry just as much. Indeed, this sentence is as far as Beinart goes in attempting to explain the region's complicated politics. There is no appreciation of the regional Cold War pitting Iran and Syria, along with their terrorist proxies, against Israel and the status quo ante Arab governments. Such nuances get in the way of a narrative that seeks to blame American Jews and not, say, Iranian mullahs or Syrian autocrats for the lack of a Palestinian state. But Israel's security -- and the entire region's stability -- requires something more substantive than Beinart's myopic approach, which sees little worth analyzing beyond the views emanating out of Likud headquarters.
While Beinart is a sharp analyst of U.S. domestic politics, he fails to appreciate how Israel's repeated, spurned attempts at peace have resulted in the utter collapse of the Israeli left. Although he quotes former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's statement that Israel could become an "apartheid state" should the occupation persist, he doesn't mention that Olmert offered the Palestinians essentially the same proposal as Barak, only to have it rejected out of hand.
As for former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's unilateral evacuation of settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005, Beinart only describes the dismantling as "proposed." He doesn't explain that Sharon, with overwhelming support from an Israeli public hungry for peace, actually went through with the task. In return for the withdrawal, Israel was greeted by Hamas's violent takeover of Gaza in 2007 and a hail of rockets that terrorized southern Israeli cities. (In line with his obsessive cataloguing of the most egregious examples of Israeli right-wing rhetoric, Beinart does find the space to quote the spiritual leader of the Orthodox Shas Party urging "God strike [Sharon] down" for the withdrawal. Yet he neglects to mention that the same rabbi recently called for a complete stop to settlement construction in Jerusalem in order to improve Israel's relationship with the United States.)
At the end of the day, if Beinart truly thinks that the Israeli government is to blame for the current impasse, his problem does not lie with Israel's defenders in the United States. Rather, his dispute lies with the Israeli electorate, which, after all, voted the Israeli government into power. But rather than confront this reality -- that his own prescriptions for the Middle East are wildly out of step with the Israeli people -- Beinart targets those in his own country who have loudly criticized the Obama administration's bungled diplomatic attempts to pressure Israel.
Like his latter-day opposition to the Iraq war, Beinart is late to joining the anti-"Jewish establishment" bandwagon. But for all his hand-wringing about the rightward turn in Israeli politics, he offers few suggestions as to how American Jews can alleviate the situation other than the pious instruction that they demonstrate concern "by talking frankly about Israel's current government, by no longer averting our eyes." He concludes his essay by quoting approvingly the words of former Knesset Speaker Avrum Burg -- a man who has compared Israel to pre-Nazi Germany, suggested revoking the law of return (which allows diaspora Jews to become Israeli citizens), and called upon all Israelis to obtain foreign passports. If this is what Beinart means by "talking frankly" about Israel, one wishes he were as vigilant about those seeking to destroy it.
Chait on Beinart
A Reply To Peter Beinart
Jonathan Chait May 17, 2010
Not long ago, I ran into an AIPAC staffer at a social gathering. We debated the Middle East for a bit, and continued the discussion over lunch. I told him that I thought the political estrangement of liberalism and support for Israel posed a long-term existential threat, and that his organization was contributing to the problem. We agreed to disagree.
Former TNR editor Peter Beinart has a sharp, attention-grabbing essay in The New York Review of Books making this case not just against AIPAC but most of the mainstream American Jewish organizations. Indeed, he goes much further. Those groups, he argues, have abandoned liberalism on the Middle East and are responsible for a generation of young Jews who hold no connection to Israel.
Peter is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known. His essay is a call to arms to the American Jewish leadership that needs to be heeded. At the same time, the qualities that make it an effective call to arms also make it fall short as a description of reality.
In its intellectual style, Peter’s piece reminded me of another attention-grabbing essay he wrote – “A Fighting Faith,” his 2004 manifesto in TNR urging Democrats to purge their anti-interventionist wing. Both essays exude an almost masochistic “tough love” toward groups which Peter (and I) feel affinity, urging them to adopt positions that Peter (and I) share or else face political annihilation. Both also suffer from analytical shortcomings – Peter’s latest less so than his last one – that leave me a bit intellectually queasy.
First, both reflect Peter’s highly idealistic conception of the world, in which political setbacks are the consequence of a failure to confront difficult truths, and intellectuals themselves hold a decisive place in the course of events. Peter’s 2004 essay argued that liberals had lost the presidency, and would continue to lose the presidency, because they had failed to confront the anti-war tendency within their base:
[L]iberals don't have a sympathetic White House to enact liberal anti-totalitarianism policies. But, unless liberals stop glossing over fundamental differences in the name of unity, they never will.
Likewise, his current piece places the blame for the lack of Zionist passion among secular Jews upon the failure of the Jewish leadership to confront Israel’s right-wing lurch:
This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s.
You can see the polemical imperative of such warnings. But a bit of reflection makes clear that they bear little relationship to reality. Democrats managed to sweep the two elections that came after “A Fighting Faith” without undergoing anything like the rigorous ideological cleansing Peter prescribed. I suspect that young Jews’ indifference toward Israel is overwhelmingly a function of their weakening ties to Judaism itself. Peter argues for such reforms as bringing pro-peace Israeli students to campus. I suspect that such things, or even a dramatically more liberal turn by the American Jewish establishment, would have little effect on the opinion of young Jews. Sometimes virtue must be its own reward.
Second, Peter can over-react to the most recent political setback, all the better to lend urgency to his call to arms. 2004 was not just another electoral setback, but a harbinger of existential crisis for the Democratic Party:
Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11 era, American liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.
In the same vein, Peter now paints Israel as falling almost inexorably into the grip of the far right. “The Netanyahu coalition,” he writes, “is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society.” There is certainly some truth to this – Russian immigration and the higher Orthodox birthrate have altered the face of the Israeli electorate. On the other hand, it was not that long ago that left-of-center parties governed Israel. Demography does not work that rapidly. Though he concedes that Israeli government can move in and out of power quickly, the tone of his essay has the same two-minutes-to-midnight urgency. I hope that, just as he rethought the stridency of “A Fighting Faith,” he’ll eventually look back on this piece as somewhat overwrought.
Finally, and most seriously, the stridency and clarity of Peter’s argument comes at the cost of shaving off the rough edges of reality that would otherwise intrude. Just as he once all-too-quickly dismissed the flaws of George W. Bush’s foreign policy for the good of urging Democrats to move rightward, he seems to have again temporarily blinded himself to counter-argument. Peter, for instance, twice writes that Palestinians “wanted peace, but had been ill-served by their leaders.” It’s an odd contrast with his description of the Israeli polity, every problem with which he portrays as reflective of a deep cancer on the Israeli soul. Moreover, if you examine the respective public opinion, it’s not actually true – most Palestinians want to undo the Jewish state altogether, while most Israelis accept the need for a two-state solution.
Peter describes at length Bibi Netanyahu’s 1993 book making the case against statehood for Palestinians. It’s a disgusting expression of a classical Jewish paranoia in which any threat to Israel is tantamount to Nazism -- which, by the way, Leon Wieseltier masterfully dissected in 2002. The trouble is that Peter repeatedly passes off lines from the book as Netanyahu’s current viewpoint, which it isn’t. (He now accepts Palestinian statehood.) Now, Netanyahu is a slippery character, and one could make the case that he lacks the true desire to follow through on his new stance, and I wouldn’t dispute that. But to make this case is at least to acknowledge that Israeli politics have changed since 1993 such that Netanyahu’s old rejectionism is no longer tenable. That acknowledgement would complicate, and reduce the urgency of, Peter’s clarion call.
More disturbingly, Peter adopts the habit, associated with Israel’s most strident critics, of portraying any response to Israel’s critics as an act of coercion rather than an expression of disagreement:
Not only does the organized American Jewish community mostly avoid public criticism of the Israeli government, it tries to prevent others from leveling such criticism as well. In recent years, American Jewish organizations have waged a campaign to discredit the world’s most respected international human rights groups.
It’s true that American Jewish groups have fiercely attacked some human rights groups. But if this is an attempt to “prevent criticism,” then Peter’s essay is an attempt to prevent support of Israel. As for the substance of these complaints, Peter flicks them away in a line (“Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are not infallible.”) But there are deep problems with both the obsessive focus on, and the particulars of, their critiques of Israel. Moshe Halbertal and Ben Birnbaum published thoughtful, balanced, and generally devastating analyses of the Goldstone Report and Human Rights Watch. I have yet to see anybody on the left mount a convincing rebuttal. American Jews should pay more attention to human rights violations in Israel, but they’d be more likely to treat such claims seriously if they had less genuine reason to dismiss them as unfair.
Here, of course, we find ourselves on the precipice of the murky question of which side to blame. The funny thing is that Peter and I probably agree almost entirely on the objective state of reality. Liberal Zionism is being squeezed on both ends by opponents who seek to define it out of existence. Conservatives wish to define Zionism as a conservative idea, so that any sympathizer of Israel must support the Republican Party. Left-wing critics of Israel, likewise, have found their most potent rhetorical tool to be describing any supporter of the U.S.-Israel alliance, from Likudniks to Meretz Party doves, as neoconservatives, so as to brand support for Israel as right-wing and unacceptable. Peter and I both find this pincer campaign threatening at an elemental level. He focuses more of his ire on the right-wing half, I direct more against the left.
I don’t begrudge Peter his choice. As I said, somebody needs to grab the American Jewish leadership by the lapels and shake some sense into it. I believe the urgency of Peter’s appeal led him to focus on his target so single-mindedly as to impair his formidable analytic powers. I hope that, as with “A Fighting Faith,” he’ll eventually see the need to usefully complicate his argument.
Jonathan Chait May 17, 2010
Not long ago, I ran into an AIPAC staffer at a social gathering. We debated the Middle East for a bit, and continued the discussion over lunch. I told him that I thought the political estrangement of liberalism and support for Israel posed a long-term existential threat, and that his organization was contributing to the problem. We agreed to disagree.
Former TNR editor Peter Beinart has a sharp, attention-grabbing essay in The New York Review of Books making this case not just against AIPAC but most of the mainstream American Jewish organizations. Indeed, he goes much further. Those groups, he argues, have abandoned liberalism on the Middle East and are responsible for a generation of young Jews who hold no connection to Israel.
Peter is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever known. His essay is a call to arms to the American Jewish leadership that needs to be heeded. At the same time, the qualities that make it an effective call to arms also make it fall short as a description of reality.
In its intellectual style, Peter’s piece reminded me of another attention-grabbing essay he wrote – “A Fighting Faith,” his 2004 manifesto in TNR urging Democrats to purge their anti-interventionist wing. Both essays exude an almost masochistic “tough love” toward groups which Peter (and I) feel affinity, urging them to adopt positions that Peter (and I) share or else face political annihilation. Both also suffer from analytical shortcomings – Peter’s latest less so than his last one – that leave me a bit intellectually queasy.
First, both reflect Peter’s highly idealistic conception of the world, in which political setbacks are the consequence of a failure to confront difficult truths, and intellectuals themselves hold a decisive place in the course of events. Peter’s 2004 essay argued that liberals had lost the presidency, and would continue to lose the presidency, because they had failed to confront the anti-war tendency within their base:
[L]iberals don't have a sympathetic White House to enact liberal anti-totalitarianism policies. But, unless liberals stop glossing over fundamental differences in the name of unity, they never will.
Likewise, his current piece places the blame for the lack of Zionist passion among secular Jews upon the failure of the Jewish leadership to confront Israel’s right-wing lurch:
This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s.
You can see the polemical imperative of such warnings. But a bit of reflection makes clear that they bear little relationship to reality. Democrats managed to sweep the two elections that came after “A Fighting Faith” without undergoing anything like the rigorous ideological cleansing Peter prescribed. I suspect that young Jews’ indifference toward Israel is overwhelmingly a function of their weakening ties to Judaism itself. Peter argues for such reforms as bringing pro-peace Israeli students to campus. I suspect that such things, or even a dramatically more liberal turn by the American Jewish establishment, would have little effect on the opinion of young Jews. Sometimes virtue must be its own reward.
Second, Peter can over-react to the most recent political setback, all the better to lend urgency to his call to arms. 2004 was not just another electoral setback, but a harbinger of existential crisis for the Democratic Party:
Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11 era, American liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.
In the same vein, Peter now paints Israel as falling almost inexorably into the grip of the far right. “The Netanyahu coalition,” he writes, “is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society.” There is certainly some truth to this – Russian immigration and the higher Orthodox birthrate have altered the face of the Israeli electorate. On the other hand, it was not that long ago that left-of-center parties governed Israel. Demography does not work that rapidly. Though he concedes that Israeli government can move in and out of power quickly, the tone of his essay has the same two-minutes-to-midnight urgency. I hope that, just as he rethought the stridency of “A Fighting Faith,” he’ll eventually look back on this piece as somewhat overwrought.
Finally, and most seriously, the stridency and clarity of Peter’s argument comes at the cost of shaving off the rough edges of reality that would otherwise intrude. Just as he once all-too-quickly dismissed the flaws of George W. Bush’s foreign policy for the good of urging Democrats to move rightward, he seems to have again temporarily blinded himself to counter-argument. Peter, for instance, twice writes that Palestinians “wanted peace, but had been ill-served by their leaders.” It’s an odd contrast with his description of the Israeli polity, every problem with which he portrays as reflective of a deep cancer on the Israeli soul. Moreover, if you examine the respective public opinion, it’s not actually true – most Palestinians want to undo the Jewish state altogether, while most Israelis accept the need for a two-state solution.
Peter describes at length Bibi Netanyahu’s 1993 book making the case against statehood for Palestinians. It’s a disgusting expression of a classical Jewish paranoia in which any threat to Israel is tantamount to Nazism -- which, by the way, Leon Wieseltier masterfully dissected in 2002. The trouble is that Peter repeatedly passes off lines from the book as Netanyahu’s current viewpoint, which it isn’t. (He now accepts Palestinian statehood.) Now, Netanyahu is a slippery character, and one could make the case that he lacks the true desire to follow through on his new stance, and I wouldn’t dispute that. But to make this case is at least to acknowledge that Israeli politics have changed since 1993 such that Netanyahu’s old rejectionism is no longer tenable. That acknowledgement would complicate, and reduce the urgency of, Peter’s clarion call.
More disturbingly, Peter adopts the habit, associated with Israel’s most strident critics, of portraying any response to Israel’s critics as an act of coercion rather than an expression of disagreement:
Not only does the organized American Jewish community mostly avoid public criticism of the Israeli government, it tries to prevent others from leveling such criticism as well. In recent years, American Jewish organizations have waged a campaign to discredit the world’s most respected international human rights groups.
It’s true that American Jewish groups have fiercely attacked some human rights groups. But if this is an attempt to “prevent criticism,” then Peter’s essay is an attempt to prevent support of Israel. As for the substance of these complaints, Peter flicks them away in a line (“Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are not infallible.”) But there are deep problems with both the obsessive focus on, and the particulars of, their critiques of Israel. Moshe Halbertal and Ben Birnbaum published thoughtful, balanced, and generally devastating analyses of the Goldstone Report and Human Rights Watch. I have yet to see anybody on the left mount a convincing rebuttal. American Jews should pay more attention to human rights violations in Israel, but they’d be more likely to treat such claims seriously if they had less genuine reason to dismiss them as unfair.
Here, of course, we find ourselves on the precipice of the murky question of which side to blame. The funny thing is that Peter and I probably agree almost entirely on the objective state of reality. Liberal Zionism is being squeezed on both ends by opponents who seek to define it out of existence. Conservatives wish to define Zionism as a conservative idea, so that any sympathizer of Israel must support the Republican Party. Left-wing critics of Israel, likewise, have found their most potent rhetorical tool to be describing any supporter of the U.S.-Israel alliance, from Likudniks to Meretz Party doves, as neoconservatives, so as to brand support for Israel as right-wing and unacceptable. Peter and I both find this pincer campaign threatening at an elemental level. He focuses more of his ire on the right-wing half, I direct more against the left.
I don’t begrudge Peter his choice. As I said, somebody needs to grab the American Jewish leadership by the lapels and shake some sense into it. I believe the urgency of Peter’s appeal led him to focus on his target so single-mindedly as to impair his formidable analytic powers. I hope that, as with “A Fighting Faith,” he’ll eventually see the need to usefully complicate his argument.
Beinart on American Jewry on Israel
The Failure of the American Jewish EstablishmentJune 10, 2010
by Peter Beinart
In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.
The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn’t. “Six times we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness and connection to Israel,” he reported. “Six times the topic of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish youth used the word ‘they‘ rather than ‘us‘ to describe the situation.”
That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising. In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California at Davis, that “non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much less attached to Israel than their elders,” with many professing “a near-total absence of positive feelings.” In 2008, the student senate at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America, rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish state.
Luntz’s task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When he probed the students’ views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs. First, “they reserve the right to question the Israeli position.” These young Jews, Luntz explained, “resist anything they see as ‘group think.’” They want an “open and frank” discussion of Israel and its flaws. Second, “young Jews desperately want peace.” When Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled “Proof that Israel Wants Peace,” and listed offers by various Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, “some empathize with the plight of the Palestinians.” When Luntz displayed ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their own Muslim friends.
Most of the students, in other words, were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been working against for most of their lives.
Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster—indeed, have actively opposed—a Zionism that challenges Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.
Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism in the United States—so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel—is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts where Luntz’s students wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel’s current government, by no longer averting our eyes.
Since the 1990s, journalists and scholars have been describing a bifurcation in Israeli society. In the words of Hebrew University political scientist Yaron Ezrahi, “After decades of what came to be called a national consensus, the Zionist narrative of liberation [has] dissolved into openly contesting versions.” One version, “founded on a long memory of persecution, genocide, and a bitter struggle for survival, is pessimistic, distrustful of non-Jews, and believing only in Jewish power and solidarity.” Another, “nourished by secularized versions of messianism as well as the Enlightenment idea of progress,” articulates “a deep sense of the limits of military force, and a commitment to liberal-democratic values.” Every country manifests some kind of ideological divide. But in contemporary Israel, the gulf is among the widest on earth.
As Ezrahi and others have noted, this latter, liberal-democratic Zionism has grown alongside a new individualism, particularly among secular Israelis, a greater demand for free expression, and a greater skepticism of coercive authority. You can see this spirit in “new historians” like Tom Segev who have fearlessly excavated the darker corners of the Zionist past and in jurists like former Supreme Court President Aharon Barak who have overturned Knesset laws that violate the human rights guarantees in Israel’s “Basic Laws.” You can also see it in former Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s apparent willingness to relinquish much of the West Bank in 2000 and early 2001.
But in Israel today, this humane, universalistic Zionism does not wield power. To the contrary, it is gasping for air. To understand how deeply antithetical its values are to those of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, it’s worth considering the case of Effi Eitam. Eitam, a charismatic ex–cabinet minister and war hero, has proposed ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank. “We’ll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs from here and remove Israeli Arabs from [the] political system,” he declared in 2006. In 2008, Eitam merged his small Ahi Party into Netanyahu’s Likud. And for the 2009–2010 academic year, he is Netanyahu’s special emissary for overseas “campus engagement.” In that capacity, he visited a dozen American high schools and colleges last fall on the Israeli government’s behalf. The group that organized his tour was called “Caravan for Democracy.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman once shared Eitam’s views. In his youth, he briefly joined Meir Kahane’s now banned Kach Party, which also advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israeli soil. Now Lieberman’s position might be called “pre-expulsion.” He wants to revoke the citizenship of Israeli Arabs who won’t swear a loyalty oath to the Jewish state. He tried to prevent two Arab parties that opposed Israel’s 2008–2009 Gaza war from running candidates for the Knesset. He said Arab Knesset members who met with representatives of Hamas should be executed. He wants to jail Arabs who publicly mourn on Israeli Independence Day, and he hopes to permanently deny citizenship to Arabs from other countries who marry Arab citizens of Israel.
You don’t have to be paranoid to see the connection between Lieberman’s current views and his former ones. The more you strip Israeli Arabs of legal protection, and the more you accuse them of treason, the more thinkable a policy of expulsion becomes. Lieberman’s American defenders often note that in theory he supports a Palestinian state. What they usually fail to mention is that for him, a two-state solution means redrawing Israel’s border so that a large chunk of Israeli Arabs find themselves exiled to another country, without their consent.
Lieberman served as chief of staff during Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister. And when it comes to the West Bank, Netanyahu’s own record is in its way even more extreme than his protégé’s. In his 1993 book, A Place among the Nations, Netanyahu not only rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, he denies that there is such a thing as a Palestinian. In fact, he repeatedly equates the Palestinian bid for statehood with Nazism. An Israel that withdraws from the West Bank, he has declared, would be a “ghetto-state” with “Auschwitz borders.” And the effort “to gouge Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] out of Israel” resembles Hitler’s bid to wrench the German-speaking “Sudeten district” from Czechoslovakia in 1938. It is unfair, Netanyahu insists, to ask Israel to concede more territory since it has already made vast, gut-wrenching concessions. What kind of concessions? It has abandoned its claim to Jordan, which by rights should be part of the Jewish state.
On the left of Netanyahu’s coalition sits Ehud Barak’s emasculated Labor Party, but whatever moderating potential it may have is counterbalanced by what is, in some ways, the most illiberal coalition partner of all, Shas, the ultra-Orthodox party representing Jews of North African and Middle Eastern descent. At one point, Shas—like some of its Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox counterparts—was open to dismantling settlements. In recent years, however, ultra-Orthodox Israelis, anxious to find housing for their large families, have increasingly moved to the West Bank, where thanks to government subsidies it is far cheaper to live. Not coincidentally, their political parties have swung hard against territorial compromise. And they have done so with a virulence that reflects ultra-Orthodox Judaism’s profound hostility to liberal values. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas’s immensely powerful spiritual leader, has called Arabs “vipers,” “snakes,” and “ants.” In 2005, after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed dismantling settlements in the Gaza Strip, Yosef urged that “God strike him down.” The official Shas newspaper recently called President Obama “an Islamic extremist.”
Hebrew University Professor Ze’ev Sternhell is an expert on fascism and a winner of the prestigious Israel Prize. Commenting on Lieberman and the leaders of Shas in a recent Op-Ed in Haaretz, he wrote, “The last time politicians holding views similar to theirs were in power in post–World War II Western Europe was in Franco’s Spain.” With their blessing, “a crude and multifaceted campaign is being waged against the foundations of the democratic and liberal order.” Sternhell should know. In September 2008, he was injured when a settler set off a pipe bomb at his house.
Israeli governments come and go, but the Netanyahu coalition is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society: an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone to anti-Arab racism. In 2009, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis (and 77 percent of recent immigrants from the former USSR) support encouraging Arabs to leave the country. Attitudes are worst among Israel’s young. When Israeli high schools held mock elections last year, Lieberman won. This March, a poll found that 56 percent of Jewish Israeli high school students—and more than 80 percent of religious Jewish high school students—would deny Israeli Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset. An education ministry official called the survey “a huge warning signal in light of the strengthening trends of extremist views among the youth.”
The writer David Grossman, right, protesting with Palestinians and Israelis against the eviction of Palestinian families from the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, April 9, 2010
You might think that such trends, and the sympathy for them expressed by some in Israel’s government, would occasion substantial public concern—even outrage—among the leaders of organized American Jewry. You would be wrong. In Israel itself, voices from the left, and even center, warn in increasingly urgent tones about threats to Israeli democracy. (Former Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak have both said that Israel risks becoming an “apartheid state” if it continues to hold the West Bank. This April, when settlers forced a large Israeli bookstore to stop selling a book critical of the occupation, Shulamit Aloni, former head of the dovish Meretz Party, declared that “Israel has not been democratic for some time now.”) But in the United States, groups like AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference patrol public discourse, scolding people who contradict their vision of Israel as a state in which all leaders cherish democracy and yearn for peace.
The result is a terrible irony. In theory, mainstream American Jewish organizations still hew to a liberal vision of Zionism. On its website, AIPAC celebrates Israel’s commitment to “free speech and minority rights.” The Conference of Presidents declares that “Israel and the United States share political, moral and intellectual values including democracy, freedom, security and peace.” These groups would never say, as do some in Netanyahu’s coalition, that Israeli Arabs don’t deserve full citizenship and West Bank Palestinians don’t deserve human rights. But in practice, by defending virtually anything any Israeli government does, they make themselves intellectual bodyguards for Israeli leaders who threaten the very liberal values they profess to admire.
After Israel’s elections last February, for instance, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-chairman of the Presidents’ Conference, explained that Avigdor Lieberman’s agenda was “far more moderate than the media has presented it.” Insisting that Lieberman bears no general animus toward Israeli Arabs, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that “He’s not saying expel them. He’s not saying punish them.” (Permanently denying citizenship to their Arab spouses or jailing them if they publicly mourn on Israeli Independence Day evidently does not qualify as punishment.) The ADL has criticized anti-Arab bigotry in the past, and the American Jewish Committee, to its credit, warned that Lieberman’s proposed loyalty oath would “chill Israel’s democratic political debate.” But the Forward summed up the overall response of America’s communal Jewish leadership in its headline “Jewish Leaders Largely Silent on Lieberman’s Role in Government.”
Not only does the organized American Jewish community mostly avoid public criticism of the Israeli government, it tries to prevent others from leveling such criticism as well. In recent years, American Jewish organizations have waged a campaign to discredit the world’s most respected international human rights groups. In 2006, Foxman called an Amnesty International report on Israeli killing of Lebanese civilians “bigoted, biased, and borderline anti-Semitic.” The Conference of Presidents has announced that “biased NGOs include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Christian Aid, [and] Save the Children.” Last summer, an AIPAC spokesman declared that Human Rights Watch “has repeatedly demonstrated its anti-Israel bias.” When the Obama administration awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson, former UN high commissioner for human rights, the ADL and AIPAC both protested, citing the fact that she had presided over the 2001 World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. (Early drafts of the conference report implicitly accused Israel of racism. Robinson helped expunge that defamatory charge, angering Syria and Iran.)
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are not infallible. But when groups like AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference avoid virtually all public criticism of Israeli actions—directing their outrage solely at Israel’s neighbors—they leave themselves in a poor position to charge bias. Moreover, while American Jewish groups claim that they are simply defending Israel from its foes, they are actually taking sides in a struggle within Israel between radically different Zionist visions. At the very moment the Anti-Defamation League claimed that Robinson harbored an “animus toward Israel,” an alliance of seven Israeli human rights groups publicly congratulated her on her award. Many of those groups, like B’Tselem, which monitors Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, and the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights, have been at least as critical of Israel’s actions in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank as have Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
All of which raises an uncomfortable question. If American Jewish groups claim that Israel’s overseas human rights critics are motivated by anti- Israeli, if not anti-Semitic, bias, what does that say about Israel’s domestic human rights critics? The implication is clear: they must be guilty of self-hatred, if not treason. American Jewish leaders don’t generally say that, of course, but their allies in the Netanyahu government do. Last summer, Israel’s vice prime minister, Moshe Ya’alon, called the anti-occupation group Peace Now a “virus.” This January, a right-wing group called Im Tirtzu accused Israeli human rights organizations of having fed information to the Goldstone Commission that investigated Israel’s Gaza war. A Knesset member from Netanyahu’s Likud promptly charged Naomi Chazan, head of the New Israel Fund, which supports some of those human rights groups, with treason, and a member of Lieberman’s party launched an investigation aimed at curbing foreign funding of Israeli NGOs.
To their credit, Foxman and other American Jewish leaders opposed the move, which might have impaired their own work. But they are reaping what they sowed. If you suggest that mainstream human rights criticism of Israel’s government is motivated by animus toward the state, or toward Jews in general, you give aid and comfort to those in Israel who make the same charges against the human rights critics in their midst.
In the American Jewish establishment today, the language of liberal Zionism—with its idioms of human rights, equal citizenship, and territorial compromise—has been drained of meaning. It remains the lingua franca in part for generational reasons, because many older American Zionists still see themselves as liberals of a sort. They vote Democratic; they are unmoved by biblical claims to the West Bank; they see average Palestinians as decent people betrayed by bad leaders; and they are secular. They don’t want Jewish organizations to criticize Israel from the left, but neither do they want them to be agents of the Israeli right.
These American Zionists are largely the product of a particular era. Many were shaped by the terrifying days leading up to the Six-Day War, when it appeared that Israel might be overrun, and by the bitter aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, when much of the world seemed to turn against the Jewish state. In that crucible, Israel became their Jewish identity, often in conjunction with the Holocaust, which the 1967 and 1973 wars helped make central to American Jewish life. These Jews embraced Zionism before the settler movement became a major force in Israeli politics, before the 1982 Lebanon war, before the first intifada. They fell in love with an Israel that was more secular, less divided, and less shaped by the culture, politics, and theology of occupation. And by downplaying the significance of Avigdor Lieberman, the settlers, and Shas, American Jewish groups allow these older Zionists to continue to identify with that more internally cohesive, more innocent Israel of their youth, an Israel that now only exists in their memories.
But these secular Zionists aren’t reproducing themselves. Their children have no memory of Arab armies massed on Israel’s border and of Israel surviving in part thanks to urgent military assistance from the United States. Instead, they have grown up viewing Israel as a regional hegemon and an occupying power. As a result, they are more conscious than their parents of the degree to which Israeli behavior violates liberal ideals, and less willing to grant Israel an exemption because its survival seems in peril. Because they have inherited their parents’ liberalism, they cannot embrace their uncritical Zionism. Because their liberalism is real, they can see that the liberalism of the American Jewish establishment is fake.
To sustain their uncritical brand of Zionism, therefore, America’s Jewish organizations will need to look elsewhere to replenish their ranks. They will need to find young American Jews who have come of age during the West Bank occupation but are not troubled by it. And those young American Jews will come disproportionately from the Orthodox world.
Because they marry earlier, intermarry less, and have more children, Orthodox Jews are growing rapidly as a share of the American Jewish population. According to a 2006 American Jewish Committee (AJC) survey, while Orthodox Jews make up only 12 percent of American Jewry over the age of sixty, they constitute 34 percent between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. For America’s Zionist organizations, these Orthodox youngsters are a potential bonanza. In their yeshivas they learn devotion to Israel from an early age; they generally spend a year of religious study there after high school, and often know friends or relatives who have immigrated to Israel. The same AJC study found that while only 16 percent of non-Orthodox adult Jews under the age of forty feel “very close to Israel,” among the Orthodox the figure is 79 percent. As secular Jews drift away from America’s Zionist institutions, their Orthodox counterparts will likely step into the breach. The Orthodox “are still interested in parochial Jewish concerns,” explains Samuel Heilman, a sociologist at the City University of New York. “They are among the last ones who stayed in the Jewish house, so they now control the lights.”
But it is this very parochialism—a deep commitment to Jewish concerns, which often outweighs more universal ones—that gives Orthodox Jewish Zionism a distinctly illiberal cast. The 2006 AJC poll found that while 60 percent of non-Orthodox American Jews under the age of forty support a Palestinian state, that figure drops to 25 percent among the Orthodox. In 2009, when Brandeis University’s Theodore Sasson asked American Jewish focus groups about Israel, he found Orthodox participants much less supportive of dismantling settlements as part of a peace deal. Even more tellingly, Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated Jews tended to believe that average Palestinians wanted peace, but had been ill-served by their leaders. Orthodox Jews, by contrast, were more likely to see the Palestinian people as the enemy, and to deny that ordinary Palestinians shared any common interests or values with ordinary Israelis or Jews.
Orthodox Judaism has great virtues, including a communal warmth and a commitment to Jewish learning unmatched in the American Jewish world. (I’m biased, since my family attends an Orthodox synagogue.) But if current trends continue, the growing influence of Orthodox Jews in America’s Jewish communal institutions will erode even the liberal-democratic veneer that today covers American Zionism. In 2002, America’s major Jewish organizations sponsored a large Israel solidarity rally on the Washington Mall. Up and down the east coast, yeshivas shut down for the day, swelling the estimated Orthodox share of the crowd to close to 70 percent. When the then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the rally that “innocent Palestinians are suffering and dying as well,” he was booed.
Palestinian boys standing on the rubble of buildings demolished by the Israeli army near the Israeli settlement of Netzarim, Gaza Strip, July 2004. The settlement was the last to be emptied as part of Ariel Sharon’s disengagement plan in August 2005.
America’s Jewish leaders should think hard about that rally. Unless they change course, it portends the future: an American Zionist movement that does not even feign concern for Palestinian dignity and a broader American Jewish population that does not even feign concern for Israel. My own children, given their upbringing, could as easily end up among the booers as among Luntz’s focus group. Either prospect fills me with dread.
In 2004, in an effort to prevent weapons smuggling from Egypt, Israeli tanks and bulldozers demolished hundreds of houses in the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. Watching television, a veteran Israeli commentator and politician named Tommy Lapid saw an elderly Palestinian woman crouched on all fours looking for her medicines amid the ruins of her home. He said she reminded him of his grandmother.
In that moment, Lapid captured the spirit that is suffocating within organized American Jewish life. To begin with, he watched. In my experience, there is an epidemic of not watching among American Zionists today. A Red Cross study on malnutrition in the Gaza Strip, a bill in the Knesset to allow Jewish neighborhoods to bar entry to Israeli Arabs, an Israeli human rights report on settlers burning Palestinian olive groves, three more Palestinian teenagers shot—it’s unpleasant. Rationalizing and minimizing Palestinian suffering has become a kind of game. In a more recent report on how to foster Zionism among America’s young, Luntz urges American Jewish groups to use the word “Arabs, not Palestinians,” since “the term ‘Palestinians’ evokes images of refugee camps, victims and oppression,” while “‘Arab’ says wealth, oil and Islam.”
Of course, Israel—like the United States—must sometimes take morally difficult actions in its own defense. But they are morally difficult only if you allow yourself some human connection to the other side. Otherwise, security justifies everything. The heads of AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference should ask themselves what Israel’s leaders would have to do or say to make them scream “no.” After all, Lieberman is foreign minister; Effi Eitam is touring American universities; settlements are growing at triple the rate of the Israeli population; half of Israeli Jewish high school students want Arabs barred from the Knesset. If the line has not yet been crossed, where is the line?
What infuriated critics about Lapid’s comment was that his grandmother died at Auschwitz. How dare he defile the memory of the Holocaust? Of course, the Holocaust is immeasurably worse than anything Israel has done or ever will do. But at least Lapid used Jewish suffering to connect to the suffering of others. In the world of AIPAC, the Holocaust analogies never stop, and their message is always the same: Jews are licensed by their victimhood to worry only about themselves. Many of Israel’s founders believed that with statehood, Jews would rightly be judged on the way they treated the non-Jews living under their dominion. “For the first time we shall be the majority living with a minority,” Knesset member Pinchas Lavon declared in 1948, “and we shall be called upon to provide an example and prove how Jews live with a minority.”
But the message of the American Jewish establishment and its allies in the Netanyahu government is exactly the opposite: since Jews are history’s permanent victims, always on the knife-edge of extinction, moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only responsibility is to survive. As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable 2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, “Victimhood sets you free.”
This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s. Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable, may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood—a drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967—strikes most of today’s young American Jews as farce.
But there is a different Zionist calling, which has never been more desperately relevant. It has its roots in Israel’s Independence Proclamation, which promised that the Jewish state “will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets,” and in the December 1948 letter from Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and others to The New York Times, protesting right-wing Zionist leader Menachem Begin’s visit to the United States after his party’s militias massacred Arab civilians in the village of Deir Yassin. It is a call to recognize that in a world in which Jewish fortunes have radically changed, the best way to memorialize the history of Jewish suffering is through the ethical use of Jewish power.
For several months now, a group of Israeli students has been traveling every Friday to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, where a Palestinian family named the Ghawis lives on the street outside their home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to make room for Jewish settlers. Although repeatedly arrested for protesting without a permit, and called traitors and self-haters by the Israeli right, the students keep coming, their numbers now swelling into the thousands. What if American Jewish organizations brought these young people to speak at Hillel? What if this was the face of Zionism shown to America’s Jewish young? What if the students in Luntz’s focus group had been told that their generation faces a challenge as momentous as any in Jewish history: to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth?
“Too many years I lived in the warm embrace of institutionalized elusiveness and was a part of it,” writes Avraham Burg. “I was very comfortable there.” I know; I was comfortable there too. But comfortable Zionism has become a moral abdication. Let’s hope that Luntz’s students, in solidarity with their counterparts at Sheikh Jarrah, can foster an uncomfortable Zionism, a Zionism angry at what Israel risks becoming, and in love with what it still could be. Let’s hope they care enough to try.
—May 12, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
A Word from the Kraut: Love the Kraut
May 21, 2010
The Fruits of Weakness
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- It is perfectly obvious that Iran's latest uranium maneuver, brokered by Brazil and Turkey, is a ruse. Iran retains more than enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. And it continues enriching at an accelerated pace and to a greater purity (20 percent). Which is why the French foreign ministry immediately declared that the trumpeted temporary shipping of some Iranian uranium to Turkey will do nothing to halt Iran's nuclear program.
It will, however, make meaningful sanctions more difficult. America's proposed Security Council resolution is already laughably weak -- no blacklisting of Iran's central bank, no sanctions against Iran's oil and gas industry, no nonconsensual inspections on the high seas. Yet Turkey and Brazil -- both current members of the Security Council -- are so opposed to sanctions that they will not even discuss the resolution. And China will now have a new excuse to weaken it further.
But the deeper meaning of the uranium-export stunt is the brazenness with which Brazil and Turkey gave cover to the mullahs' nuclear ambitions and deliberately undermined U.S. efforts to curb Iran's program.
The real news is that already notorious photo: the president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently anti-American leader in the world.
That picture -- a defiant, triumphant take-that-Uncle-Sam -- is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there's no cost in lining up with America's enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement.
They've watched President Obama's humiliating attempts to appease Iran, as every rejected overture is met with abjectly renewed U.S. negotiating offers. American acquiescence reached such a point that the president was late, hesitant and flaccid in expressing even rhetorical support for democracy demonstrators who were being brutally suppressed and whose call for regime change offered the potential for the most significant U.S. strategic advance in the region in 30 years.
They've watched America acquiesce to Russia's re-exerting sway over Eastern Europe, over Ukraine (pressured by Russia last month into extending for 25 years its lease of the Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol) and over Georgia (Russia's de facto annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is no longer an issue under the Obama "reset" policy).
They've watched our appeasement of Syria, Iran's agent in the Arab Levant -- sending our ambassador back to Syria even as it tightens its grip on Lebanon, supplies Hezbollah with Scuds, and intensifies its role as the pivot of the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance. The price for this ostentatious flouting of the U.S. and its interests? Ever more eager U.S. "engagement."
They've observed the administration's gratuitous slap at Britain over the Falklands, its contemptuous treatment of Israel, its undercutting of the Czech Republic and Poland, and its indifference to Lebanon and Georgia. And in Latin America, they see not just U.S. passivity as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez organizes his anti-American "Bolivarian" coalition while deepening military and commercial ties with Iran and Russia. They saw active U.S. support in Honduras for a pro-Chavez would-be dictator seeking unconstitutional powers in defiance of the democratic institutions of that country.
This is not just an America in decline. This is an America in retreat -- accepting, ratifying and declaring its decline, and inviting rising powers to fill the vacuum.
Nor is this retreat by inadvertence. This is retreat by design and, indeed, on principle. It's the perfect fulfillment of Obama's adopted Third World narrative of American misdeeds, disrespect and domination from which he has come to redeem us and the world. Hence his foundational declaration at the U.N. General Assembly last September that "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation" (guess who's been the dominant nation for the last two decades?) and his dismissal of any "world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another." (NATO? The West?)
Given Obama's policies and principles, Turkey and Brazil are acting rationally. Why not give cover to Ahmadinejad and his nuclear ambitions? As the U.S. retreats in the face of Iran, China, Russia and Venezuela, why not hedge your bets? There's nothing to fear from Obama, and everything to gain by ingratiating yourself with America's rising adversaries. After all, they actually believe in helping one's friends and punishing one's enemies.
The Fruits of Weakness
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- It is perfectly obvious that Iran's latest uranium maneuver, brokered by Brazil and Turkey, is a ruse. Iran retains more than enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. And it continues enriching at an accelerated pace and to a greater purity (20 percent). Which is why the French foreign ministry immediately declared that the trumpeted temporary shipping of some Iranian uranium to Turkey will do nothing to halt Iran's nuclear program.
It will, however, make meaningful sanctions more difficult. America's proposed Security Council resolution is already laughably weak -- no blacklisting of Iran's central bank, no sanctions against Iran's oil and gas industry, no nonconsensual inspections on the high seas. Yet Turkey and Brazil -- both current members of the Security Council -- are so opposed to sanctions that they will not even discuss the resolution. And China will now have a new excuse to weaken it further.
But the deeper meaning of the uranium-export stunt is the brazenness with which Brazil and Turkey gave cover to the mullahs' nuclear ambitions and deliberately undermined U.S. efforts to curb Iran's program.
The real news is that already notorious photo: the president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently anti-American leader in the world.
That picture -- a defiant, triumphant take-that-Uncle-Sam -- is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there's no cost in lining up with America's enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement.
They've watched President Obama's humiliating attempts to appease Iran, as every rejected overture is met with abjectly renewed U.S. negotiating offers. American acquiescence reached such a point that the president was late, hesitant and flaccid in expressing even rhetorical support for democracy demonstrators who were being brutally suppressed and whose call for regime change offered the potential for the most significant U.S. strategic advance in the region in 30 years.
They've watched America acquiesce to Russia's re-exerting sway over Eastern Europe, over Ukraine (pressured by Russia last month into extending for 25 years its lease of the Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol) and over Georgia (Russia's de facto annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is no longer an issue under the Obama "reset" policy).
They've watched our appeasement of Syria, Iran's agent in the Arab Levant -- sending our ambassador back to Syria even as it tightens its grip on Lebanon, supplies Hezbollah with Scuds, and intensifies its role as the pivot of the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance. The price for this ostentatious flouting of the U.S. and its interests? Ever more eager U.S. "engagement."
They've observed the administration's gratuitous slap at Britain over the Falklands, its contemptuous treatment of Israel, its undercutting of the Czech Republic and Poland, and its indifference to Lebanon and Georgia. And in Latin America, they see not just U.S. passivity as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez organizes his anti-American "Bolivarian" coalition while deepening military and commercial ties with Iran and Russia. They saw active U.S. support in Honduras for a pro-Chavez would-be dictator seeking unconstitutional powers in defiance of the democratic institutions of that country.
This is not just an America in decline. This is an America in retreat -- accepting, ratifying and declaring its decline, and inviting rising powers to fill the vacuum.
Nor is this retreat by inadvertence. This is retreat by design and, indeed, on principle. It's the perfect fulfillment of Obama's adopted Third World narrative of American misdeeds, disrespect and domination from which he has come to redeem us and the world. Hence his foundational declaration at the U.N. General Assembly last September that "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation" (guess who's been the dominant nation for the last two decades?) and his dismissal of any "world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another." (NATO? The West?)
Given Obama's policies and principles, Turkey and Brazil are acting rationally. Why not give cover to Ahmadinejad and his nuclear ambitions? As the U.S. retreats in the face of Iran, China, Russia and Venezuela, why not hedge your bets? There's nothing to fear from Obama, and everything to gain by ingratiating yourself with America's rising adversaries. After all, they actually believe in helping one's friends and punishing one's enemies.
Nice Change for a Change
Poetry and the Making of Language: How Verse Forms Create Something New
William Carlos Williams
October 30, 1955 | 11:00 pm
The New Republic, October 31, 1955
The American language has had one strike on it from the start: it is a language entirely separate from that which is taught us in our schools, namely the King's English.
How can we Americans be proud, as the English are of their magnificent language, concerning a language we cannot even name. In fact one of our most illustrious poets has been quoted recently, as denying the very existence of such a language as ours. To fight for it all these years has been an up-hill battle.
We have not been looking in the right place for the evidence we require to establish that there is an American language of unguessed importance to us and to the world, hidden in every phrase we utter.
We have had our Noah Websters with their redefinition of terms after American models but the English could only laugh at that, saying that if we want to speak incorrectly it will only brand us as yokels which we thus reveal ourselves to be. Even a cultured poet Ezra Pound in a recent translation from Sophocles felt himself moved to adopt a Cockney accent to show that the speaker was a vulgar person.
Lowell in his Bigelow Papers was similarly disturbed.
But lists of words had nothing to do with it, even a study such as Mr. Mencken made of our speech, comprehensive and revealing as it proved to be. It was truly amazing how much our language had strayed from the course of the language of Shakespeare but what of that? Could you look for a people separated from the "mother country" by an ocean and the intimate habits of several centuries to do anything else? The Greeks had their modes of speeches which differed when their cities were no more than a few miles from each other but something far more fundamental has happened this time.
The English language had come long since to a point of stasis as far, especially, as the structure of its verse is concerned. The very magnificence of the tradition which reached its peak in Shakespeare, finally reaffirmed that.
The practice of the poem has been the determining factor in determining the character that any language has taken. The whole character of any people has been fixed there. It will be the same today. Whatever America has to say that is new emotionally and intellectually will be found after the passage, of time, if Americans are to be of any importance in the world, by what they have marked upon the poems. Since the poem is formally the place where language most carries the mark of any race that uses it, the poem is most important for us to note.
In language which we know, for lack of a better term, as the American, though the structure of the poem may seem to have nothing to do with the matter, what we do with our poetic opportunities nevertheless will determine how our language is to be formed.
A new age is dawning with its opportunities and temptations but the English face it with tools they rely on because they have used them and found them trustworthy and fully able to meet any situation before this which has arisen. The language of this people is among the first of their tools. When America began consciously to form itself, it adopted as a matter of course this foreign language and taught it in its schools. It was a language, a beautiful language, of which, unfortunately we could not know the antecedents by any direct observation.
It was a mark of our ignorance to talk incorrectly by British standards. As a consequence our wealthy and marriageable women slighted us, and who can blame them?—to gain foreign, preferably British, titles. Following suit, our writers and our painters abandoned us.
There were certain wrong-headed writers who persisted in habits which marked them of the local breed but knew, for the most part, no more than the rest of us what they were doing. That it was the use of a new language, the dawn of a new way of speaking was slow to make itself felt.
That was because a language based on the intellectual, as well as a physical conception, formerly had never been conceived. All languages had merely grown by accretion from the language which had preceded it. But upon a language stock with which we are familiar, we imagine a new principle of its physical organization, we come to something which promises much that is novel.
It was a language of heroic proportions we were abandoning, comparable to the deeds of its kings and queens of the long yellow locks. The men when they died were consigned to the flames ahorseback on ships which were towed to sea to burn until they foundered.
The American language is much more importantly a modern language facing an old, than its name indicates. It is moreover a modern language facing a deeply entrenched language of great beauty which because of that is loved in the word. To attack in view of those circumstances is difficult, and yet where except in the rigidity of its established rules is a language such as the English to be attacked.
A variable poetic foot is aimed right at the bowels of English verse. Theoretically, such an attack is correct, if correctly used, would make it appear, as it is, mediaeval. The measurement of the poetic line of the future has to be expanded so as to take a larger grip of its material.
The grammar of the term, variable foot, is simply what it describes itself to be: a poetic foot that is not fixed but varies with the demands of the language, keeping the measured emphasis as it may occur in the line. Its characteristic, where it differs from the fixed foot with which we are familiar, is that it ignores the counting of the number of syllables in the line, which is the mark of the usual scansion, for a measure more of the ear, a more sensory counting. As in counting the breaths of a phrase, following speech in any language, they occur, keeping the same rhythmic structure, whatever it may be, dactylic, anapestic, amphibrachic, to which they have been dedicated.
The advantage of this practice over the old mode of measuring is that without inversion it permits the poet to use the language he naturally speaks, provided he has it well under control and does not lose the measured order of the words.
The older poets, using the fixed foot, were able to make it fill the same or at least a similar purpose with outstanding effectiveness and still keep the chosen meter. This means, of the variable foot, gives them another weapon. Shakespeare's later practice of dividing his line shows a tendency toward prose rhythms which gives him some of his most impressive effects which may be interpreted as presaging the advent of the variable foot.
The point of all this is that the dominance of the old, for Americans, the old English verse, has at last been broken by a verse-form of new dimensions. It opens a realm of structural possibilities to the poets, a new concept of the poetic foot which lays the whole field wide open. Thus a new idea of measurement is asserted in the forms of the verse itself. This has not been the case heretofore when deadly blank verse, echo of an echo, has been the only acceptable style of composition.
A new language stemming conjointly and without prejudice from all the old and the more recent is what is called for. It seems an impossible demand. It is only by a new and hitherto neglected because virtually unknown measure, that it can be accomplished. A measure that all languages can recognize, a common denominator according to whose terms by which no matter how diverse they will have at least that term in common.
The whole course of a prosody such as that of the English language was locally self determined. It has finally crystallized and in its present form can be seen now to be a wholly adventitious occurrence by no means to be thought of as final, once the incentive and means to change it can be discovered.
The only measured form of language, I think I have made clear, is its poetry. Therefore ineffective as it may appear to be as a weapon, in the public eye, it is only by attacking there, as Pound has correctly surmised, that our actions can have a lasting effect.
On that basis alone will a new language, let us presume it to be the American language, be fit to trust its organization. A relatively stable meter escapes the confining strictures of a merely regional application of, let us say, English. At the same time it liberates each language it faces to its own particulars, its specific meanings but not to an exclusive degree.
The variable foot is quite the ideal measure for poetry written for the stage in our day. It continues where Shakespeare himself left off, escaping the present cultish trend and, without sacrifice, his vigor, humor and beauty of line. It is a real opportunity which the modern dramatist faces. Let us see how his imagination measures up to it.
William Carlos Williams
October 30, 1955 | 11:00 pm
The New Republic, October 31, 1955
The American language has had one strike on it from the start: it is a language entirely separate from that which is taught us in our schools, namely the King's English.
How can we Americans be proud, as the English are of their magnificent language, concerning a language we cannot even name. In fact one of our most illustrious poets has been quoted recently, as denying the very existence of such a language as ours. To fight for it all these years has been an up-hill battle.
We have not been looking in the right place for the evidence we require to establish that there is an American language of unguessed importance to us and to the world, hidden in every phrase we utter.
We have had our Noah Websters with their redefinition of terms after American models but the English could only laugh at that, saying that if we want to speak incorrectly it will only brand us as yokels which we thus reveal ourselves to be. Even a cultured poet Ezra Pound in a recent translation from Sophocles felt himself moved to adopt a Cockney accent to show that the speaker was a vulgar person.
Lowell in his Bigelow Papers was similarly disturbed.
But lists of words had nothing to do with it, even a study such as Mr. Mencken made of our speech, comprehensive and revealing as it proved to be. It was truly amazing how much our language had strayed from the course of the language of Shakespeare but what of that? Could you look for a people separated from the "mother country" by an ocean and the intimate habits of several centuries to do anything else? The Greeks had their modes of speeches which differed when their cities were no more than a few miles from each other but something far more fundamental has happened this time.
The English language had come long since to a point of stasis as far, especially, as the structure of its verse is concerned. The very magnificence of the tradition which reached its peak in Shakespeare, finally reaffirmed that.
The practice of the poem has been the determining factor in determining the character that any language has taken. The whole character of any people has been fixed there. It will be the same today. Whatever America has to say that is new emotionally and intellectually will be found after the passage, of time, if Americans are to be of any importance in the world, by what they have marked upon the poems. Since the poem is formally the place where language most carries the mark of any race that uses it, the poem is most important for us to note.
In language which we know, for lack of a better term, as the American, though the structure of the poem may seem to have nothing to do with the matter, what we do with our poetic opportunities nevertheless will determine how our language is to be formed.
A new age is dawning with its opportunities and temptations but the English face it with tools they rely on because they have used them and found them trustworthy and fully able to meet any situation before this which has arisen. The language of this people is among the first of their tools. When America began consciously to form itself, it adopted as a matter of course this foreign language and taught it in its schools. It was a language, a beautiful language, of which, unfortunately we could not know the antecedents by any direct observation.
It was a mark of our ignorance to talk incorrectly by British standards. As a consequence our wealthy and marriageable women slighted us, and who can blame them?—to gain foreign, preferably British, titles. Following suit, our writers and our painters abandoned us.
There were certain wrong-headed writers who persisted in habits which marked them of the local breed but knew, for the most part, no more than the rest of us what they were doing. That it was the use of a new language, the dawn of a new way of speaking was slow to make itself felt.
That was because a language based on the intellectual, as well as a physical conception, formerly had never been conceived. All languages had merely grown by accretion from the language which had preceded it. But upon a language stock with which we are familiar, we imagine a new principle of its physical organization, we come to something which promises much that is novel.
It was a language of heroic proportions we were abandoning, comparable to the deeds of its kings and queens of the long yellow locks. The men when they died were consigned to the flames ahorseback on ships which were towed to sea to burn until they foundered.
The American language is much more importantly a modern language facing an old, than its name indicates. It is moreover a modern language facing a deeply entrenched language of great beauty which because of that is loved in the word. To attack in view of those circumstances is difficult, and yet where except in the rigidity of its established rules is a language such as the English to be attacked.
A variable poetic foot is aimed right at the bowels of English verse. Theoretically, such an attack is correct, if correctly used, would make it appear, as it is, mediaeval. The measurement of the poetic line of the future has to be expanded so as to take a larger grip of its material.
The grammar of the term, variable foot, is simply what it describes itself to be: a poetic foot that is not fixed but varies with the demands of the language, keeping the measured emphasis as it may occur in the line. Its characteristic, where it differs from the fixed foot with which we are familiar, is that it ignores the counting of the number of syllables in the line, which is the mark of the usual scansion, for a measure more of the ear, a more sensory counting. As in counting the breaths of a phrase, following speech in any language, they occur, keeping the same rhythmic structure, whatever it may be, dactylic, anapestic, amphibrachic, to which they have been dedicated.
The advantage of this practice over the old mode of measuring is that without inversion it permits the poet to use the language he naturally speaks, provided he has it well under control and does not lose the measured order of the words.
The older poets, using the fixed foot, were able to make it fill the same or at least a similar purpose with outstanding effectiveness and still keep the chosen meter. This means, of the variable foot, gives them another weapon. Shakespeare's later practice of dividing his line shows a tendency toward prose rhythms which gives him some of his most impressive effects which may be interpreted as presaging the advent of the variable foot.
The point of all this is that the dominance of the old, for Americans, the old English verse, has at last been broken by a verse-form of new dimensions. It opens a realm of structural possibilities to the poets, a new concept of the poetic foot which lays the whole field wide open. Thus a new idea of measurement is asserted in the forms of the verse itself. This has not been the case heretofore when deadly blank verse, echo of an echo, has been the only acceptable style of composition.
A new language stemming conjointly and without prejudice from all the old and the more recent is what is called for. It seems an impossible demand. It is only by a new and hitherto neglected because virtually unknown measure, that it can be accomplished. A measure that all languages can recognize, a common denominator according to whose terms by which no matter how diverse they will have at least that term in common.
The whole course of a prosody such as that of the English language was locally self determined. It has finally crystallized and in its present form can be seen now to be a wholly adventitious occurrence by no means to be thought of as final, once the incentive and means to change it can be discovered.
The only measured form of language, I think I have made clear, is its poetry. Therefore ineffective as it may appear to be as a weapon, in the public eye, it is only by attacking there, as Pound has correctly surmised, that our actions can have a lasting effect.
On that basis alone will a new language, let us presume it to be the American language, be fit to trust its organization. A relatively stable meter escapes the confining strictures of a merely regional application of, let us say, English. At the same time it liberates each language it faces to its own particulars, its specific meanings but not to an exclusive degree.
The variable foot is quite the ideal measure for poetry written for the stage in our day. It continues where Shakespeare himself left off, escaping the present cultish trend and, without sacrifice, his vigor, humor and beauty of line. It is a real opportunity which the modern dramatist faces. Let us see how his imagination measures up to it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)