By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president's earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.
There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama's pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents. Namely, a tone and presence that said: This is the Americans' leader, a man of them, for them, the nation's voice and champion. Mr. Obama wasn't lacking in concern about the oil spill. What he lacked was that voice—and for good reason.
Those qualities to be expected in a president were never about rhetoric; Mr. Obama had proved himself a dab hand at that on the campaign trail. They were a matter of identification with the nation and to all that binds its people together in pride and allegiance. These are feelings held deep in American hearts, unvoiced mostly, but unmistakably there and not only on the Fourth of July.
A great part of America now understands that this president's sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.
One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchill—a gift from Tony Blair—by packing it back off to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind. Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.
Far greater strangeness has since flowed steadily from Washington. The president's appointees, transmitters of policy, go forth with singular passion week after week, delivering the latest inversion of reality. Their work is not easy, focused as it is on a current prime preoccupation of this White House—that is, finding ways to avoid any public mention of the indisputable Islamist identity of the enemy at war with us. No small trick that, but their efforts go forward in public spectacles matchless in their absurdity—unnerving in what they confirm about our current guardians of law and national security.
Consider the hapless Eric Holder, America's attorney general, confronting the question put to him by Rep. Lamar Smith (R., Texas) of the House Judicary Committee on May 13.
Did Mr. Holder think that in the last three terrorist attempts on this soil, one of them successful (Maj. Nidal Hasan's murder of 13 soldiers at Fort Hood, preceded by his shout of "Allahu Akbar!"), that radical Islam might have played any role at all? Mr. Holder seemed puzzled by the question. "People have different reasons" he finally answered—a response he repeated three times. He didn't want "to say anything negative about any religion."
And who can forget the exhortations on jihad by John Brennan, Mr. Obama's chief adviser on counterterrorism? Mr. Brennan has in the past charged that Americans lack sensitivity to the Muslim world, and that we have particularly failed to credit its peace-loving disposition. In a May 26 speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Brennan held forth fervently, if not quite comprehensibly, on who our enemy was not: "Our enemy is not terrorism because terrorism is just a tactic. Our enemy is not terror because terror is a state of mind, and as Americans we refuse to live in fear."
He went on to announce, sternly, that we do not refer to our enemies as Islamists or jihadists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam. How then might we be permitted to describe our enemies? One hint comes from another of Mr. Brennan's pronouncements in that speech: That "violent extremists are victims of political, economic and social forces."
Yes, that would work. Consider the news bulletins we could have read: "Police have arrested Faisal Shahzad, victim of political, economic and social forces living in Connecticut, for efforts to set off a car bomb explosion in Times Square." Plotters in Afghanistan and Yemen, preparing for their next attempt at mass murder in America, could only have listened in wonderment. They must have marvelled in particular on learning that this was the chief counterterrorism adviser to the president of the United States.
Long after Mr. Obama leaves office, it will be this parade of explicators, laboring mightily to sell each new piece of official reality revisionism—Janet Napolitano and her immortal "man-caused disasters'' among them—that will stand most memorably as the face of this administration.
It is a White House that has focused consistently on the sensitivities of the world community—as it is euphemistically known—a body of which the president of the United States frequently appears to view himself as a representative at large.
It is what has caused this president and his counterterrorist brain trust to deem it acceptable to insult Americans with nonsensical evasions concerning the enemy we face. It is this focus that caused Mr. Holder to insist on holding the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in lower Manhattan, despite the rage this decision induced in New Yorkers, and later to insist if not there, then elsewhere in New York. This was all to be a dazzling exhibition for that world community—proof of Mr. Obama's moral reclamation program and that America had been delivered from the darkness of the Bush years.
It was why this administration tapped officials like Michael Posner, assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Among his better known contributions to political discourse was a 2005 address in which he compared the treatment of Muslim-Americans in the United States after 9/11 with the plight of the Japanese-Americans interned in camps after Pearl Harbor. During a human-rights conference held in China this May, Mr. Posner cited the new Arizona immigration law by way of assuring the Chinese, those exemplary guardians of freedom, that the United States too had its problems with discrimination.
So there we were: America and China, in the same boat on human rights, two buddies struggling for reform. For this view of reality, which brought withering criticism in Congress and calls for his resignation, Mr. Posner has been roundly embraced in the State Department as a superbly effective representative.
It is no surprise that Mr. Posner—like numerous of his kind—has found a natural home in this administration. His is a sensibility and political disposition with which Mr. Obama is at home. The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.
They are attitudes to be found everywhere, but never before in a president of the United States. Mr. Obama may not hold all, or the more extreme, of these views. But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America's moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.
The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good. A country governed by leaders too principled to speak the name of its mortal enemy needs every infusion of reality it can get.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Gadi Taub's Critical Take
S.O.S.
Israel faces an existential crisis—and Benjamin Netanyahu is making things worse.
Gadi Taub
June 9, 2010 | 12:00 am
There once was a very successful campaign in Israel for road safety. Its slogan was, “On the road, don’t be right, be smart." The day after the flotilla raid last week, more than one pundit in the Israeli press brought up the slogan. We’re right, they said, but why can’t we also be smart?
The raid was by no means smart. Israel blindly stepped into a p.r. campaign orchestrated by Turkey and Hamas, doing enormous damage to its own international image and credibility. But the raid was not an isolated incident. Rather, it is only the latest example of how Benjamin Netanyahu’s prime ministership is steadily eroding Israel’s legitimacy.
Why do Israelis believe they’re right on the flotilla specifically and Gaza more generally? Because Israel evacuated Gaza to the last inch, and Hamas, which controls Gaza, kept shooting rockets at Israel’s civilians. Because Hamas is not only calling for the murder of every single Jew—its covenant is by no means ambiguous on that—but also arming as best it can for this holy cause. Under these conditions, and despite Hamas’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist, Israel still actively sustains Gaza. Israel’s hospitals accept tens of thousands of Gazans for medical treatment; it lets food and medicine daily through its checkpoints on Gaza’s boarders; and it supplies Gaza with electricity and gas. No other country in the world sustains a government bent on its destruction in such a way. (Egypt, with which Gaza shares a border, takes no such responsibility.) Given all this, as Israel sees it, stopping a Turkish attempt to open an arms importation route to Gaza was right.
But this does not make the raid smart. The “humanitarian mission” carried on the flotilla was not a move in a military game, nor was it a court case in which complicated judicial arguments count. It was a gambit in the game of p.r., played in front of a worldwide, hardly informed TV audience, and mediated, more often than not, by hostile media. It is easy to see how Israel could have handled the situation: It should've just let the flotilla pass. The whole hot-air balloon would have been deflated. The world audience, if it had noticed the affair at all, would have been left with a few snippets of the “peace activists” chanting anti-Semitic slogans to the wind, then hugging Hamas officials. That’s it. (There was a similar attempt to pull off a p.r. stunt under Ehud Olmert's administration. Olmert let the “peace mission” through. No one remembers it now.)
This is not hindsight wisdom. In the days before the incident, many commentators (myself included) kept saying Israel should just let the flotilla sail to Gaza. But Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Ehud Barak thought they knew better. After all, both served in elite army units, and commando raids are their expertise. But, apparently, statesmanship is not.
In large part, this is why the flotilla's shockwaves in Israel are so enormous. Israelis have been plagued of late by a creeping fear that their leadership is incompetent—that Netanyahu and Barak just don’t understand the basic parameters of the political map. For a country that’s so small, in the midst of a huge and hostile region, this is no niggling fear. Now, the flotilla incident has confirmed that, under its current leadership, Israel indeed faces a deep crisis of power and perception. The problem isn't just that Netanyahu and Barak failed to see the meaning of a Turkey and Hamas p.r. stunt; it is that they have failed to see the larger picture.
Israelis are stunned by the fact that the world has grown to think of Hamas as the righteous victim and of Israel as the evil aggressor. This perception of Israel is false and malicious, but it does not mean that Israel bears no responsibility for it. Yes, there is a lot of anti-Semitism in the world. Yes, there are unfair biases against the Jewish state. But Israel has been feeding them. So long as Israel’s government continues to settle in the West Bank, no one—not even Israel’s American friends—will believe that Netanyahu seeks peace. So long as Israel seems to be bent on making its occupation permanent, on holding a whole population under military rule without basic political rights indefinitely, it will be increasingly ostracized by the international community.
Today, Israel is not the belligerent party in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is Israel that has offered partition, and the Palestinians who have consistently refused it. Netanyahu inherited a winning hand. He could have put a peace plan on the table, leaving the Palestinians to refuse it. He could have declared that Israel wanted to withdraw from the West Bank and would do so if its security was guaranteed by an agreement with the Palestinians or a third party. He could have offered state housing help for those who would leave the settlements even before an agreement. Instead, he mumbled something half-heartedly about two states, and then moved on to fight for enlarging settlements.
Settlements, clearly, are the keys to all this. Further settlement is what energizes the campaign to delegitimize Israel. And, for the first time since its war of independence, Israel is in real danger of destruction. Zionism’s success depended, as Theodore Herzl understood, on international recognition. It will not survive without it. If Israel clings to its settlement policy, it will sink along with its West Bank occupation.
Zionism rested its moral claims on the right of all peoples to self-determination. Settlement and occupation run against its grain, and this is why they undermine international support for Israel. Had Netanyahu realized this—as Peres, Rabin, Sharon, Olmert, and Livni have before him—he would not have appointed a foreign minister who is himself a settler; he would not have rested his coalition on ultra-orthodox fanatics and modern orthodox messianics; he would have not entangled himself in a senseless quarrel with Israel’s best friends over enlarging the settlements. Instead, he would have taken the lead in putting an end to the occupation, with or without Palestinian consent. But he didn't.
Israelis' fear that their country is drifting into an abyss under Netanyahu's leadership—or lack thereof—is by no means unjustified. The flotilla may have been a ship of terrorists. But Netanyahu’s administration seems like a ship of fools.
Israel faces an existential crisis—and Benjamin Netanyahu is making things worse.
Gadi Taub
June 9, 2010 | 12:00 am
There once was a very successful campaign in Israel for road safety. Its slogan was, “On the road, don’t be right, be smart." The day after the flotilla raid last week, more than one pundit in the Israeli press brought up the slogan. We’re right, they said, but why can’t we also be smart?
The raid was by no means smart. Israel blindly stepped into a p.r. campaign orchestrated by Turkey and Hamas, doing enormous damage to its own international image and credibility. But the raid was not an isolated incident. Rather, it is only the latest example of how Benjamin Netanyahu’s prime ministership is steadily eroding Israel’s legitimacy.
Why do Israelis believe they’re right on the flotilla specifically and Gaza more generally? Because Israel evacuated Gaza to the last inch, and Hamas, which controls Gaza, kept shooting rockets at Israel’s civilians. Because Hamas is not only calling for the murder of every single Jew—its covenant is by no means ambiguous on that—but also arming as best it can for this holy cause. Under these conditions, and despite Hamas’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist, Israel still actively sustains Gaza. Israel’s hospitals accept tens of thousands of Gazans for medical treatment; it lets food and medicine daily through its checkpoints on Gaza’s boarders; and it supplies Gaza with electricity and gas. No other country in the world sustains a government bent on its destruction in such a way. (Egypt, with which Gaza shares a border, takes no such responsibility.) Given all this, as Israel sees it, stopping a Turkish attempt to open an arms importation route to Gaza was right.
But this does not make the raid smart. The “humanitarian mission” carried on the flotilla was not a move in a military game, nor was it a court case in which complicated judicial arguments count. It was a gambit in the game of p.r., played in front of a worldwide, hardly informed TV audience, and mediated, more often than not, by hostile media. It is easy to see how Israel could have handled the situation: It should've just let the flotilla pass. The whole hot-air balloon would have been deflated. The world audience, if it had noticed the affair at all, would have been left with a few snippets of the “peace activists” chanting anti-Semitic slogans to the wind, then hugging Hamas officials. That’s it. (There was a similar attempt to pull off a p.r. stunt under Ehud Olmert's administration. Olmert let the “peace mission” through. No one remembers it now.)
This is not hindsight wisdom. In the days before the incident, many commentators (myself included) kept saying Israel should just let the flotilla sail to Gaza. But Netanyahu and Minister of Defense Ehud Barak thought they knew better. After all, both served in elite army units, and commando raids are their expertise. But, apparently, statesmanship is not.
In large part, this is why the flotilla's shockwaves in Israel are so enormous. Israelis have been plagued of late by a creeping fear that their leadership is incompetent—that Netanyahu and Barak just don’t understand the basic parameters of the political map. For a country that’s so small, in the midst of a huge and hostile region, this is no niggling fear. Now, the flotilla incident has confirmed that, under its current leadership, Israel indeed faces a deep crisis of power and perception. The problem isn't just that Netanyahu and Barak failed to see the meaning of a Turkey and Hamas p.r. stunt; it is that they have failed to see the larger picture.
Israelis are stunned by the fact that the world has grown to think of Hamas as the righteous victim and of Israel as the evil aggressor. This perception of Israel is false and malicious, but it does not mean that Israel bears no responsibility for it. Yes, there is a lot of anti-Semitism in the world. Yes, there are unfair biases against the Jewish state. But Israel has been feeding them. So long as Israel’s government continues to settle in the West Bank, no one—not even Israel’s American friends—will believe that Netanyahu seeks peace. So long as Israel seems to be bent on making its occupation permanent, on holding a whole population under military rule without basic political rights indefinitely, it will be increasingly ostracized by the international community.
Today, Israel is not the belligerent party in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is Israel that has offered partition, and the Palestinians who have consistently refused it. Netanyahu inherited a winning hand. He could have put a peace plan on the table, leaving the Palestinians to refuse it. He could have declared that Israel wanted to withdraw from the West Bank and would do so if its security was guaranteed by an agreement with the Palestinians or a third party. He could have offered state housing help for those who would leave the settlements even before an agreement. Instead, he mumbled something half-heartedly about two states, and then moved on to fight for enlarging settlements.
Settlements, clearly, are the keys to all this. Further settlement is what energizes the campaign to delegitimize Israel. And, for the first time since its war of independence, Israel is in real danger of destruction. Zionism’s success depended, as Theodore Herzl understood, on international recognition. It will not survive without it. If Israel clings to its settlement policy, it will sink along with its West Bank occupation.
Zionism rested its moral claims on the right of all peoples to self-determination. Settlement and occupation run against its grain, and this is why they undermine international support for Israel. Had Netanyahu realized this—as Peres, Rabin, Sharon, Olmert, and Livni have before him—he would not have appointed a foreign minister who is himself a settler; he would not have rested his coalition on ultra-orthodox fanatics and modern orthodox messianics; he would have not entangled himself in a senseless quarrel with Israel’s best friends over enlarging the settlements. Instead, he would have taken the lead in putting an end to the occupation, with or without Palestinian consent. But he didn't.
Israelis' fear that their country is drifting into an abyss under Netanyahu's leadership—or lack thereof—is by no means unjustified. The flotilla may have been a ship of terrorists. But Netanyahu’s administration seems like a ship of fools.
Turning Turkish Tables?: A Modest Proposal
The Problem with Playing Defense
Noah Pollak Web Exclusive Commentary
Given past performances, I'd say that Israel and its supporters are doing a better-than-average job of quickly beating back the international lynch mob that loves nothing more than propagating lies about Israel. The key weapon in this fight for truth has been this particular video of the IDF commandos descending onto the deck of the Mavi Marmara and into a hornet's nest of murderous "peace activists."
This kind of after-the-fact truth-telling is good as far as it goes, but it actually doesn't go very far: it is restricted to responding to lies, exaggerations, and accusations. Israel is on the receiving end of a viciously negative political campaign, and as any campaign strategist knows, you don't respond to a negative campaign by expending all your energy trying to explain why the lies aren't true -- you go negative and play offense in return.
What would it look like if the Israeli government played offense? First and foremost, this would require some serious criticism of the Islamist government of Turkey, which masterfully created this crisis and is now denouncing Israel for it. Turkey's thuggish prime minister certainly understands the benefits of being on offense. He says that Israel committed a "massacre" and is guilty of "state terrorism," "piracy," has struck "a blow to world peace and against international law," threatens that "if Israel does not immediately free all the detainees and wounded, the rift in relations with it will widen," and thunders that "Israel will not be able to show itself in the world until it apologizes for what happened and undergoes self-criticism."
Quite a performance! Wouldn't it be remarkable if the Israelis had gotten ahead of the story by making their own accusations and demands? Here are a few ideas of the kind of concrete action the Israelis could take -- if they had the stones to really take a stand.
1. Expel the Turkish ambassador and declare his return contingent on a full, credible, and public Turkish investigation of the terrorist organization that planned and funded the "aid flotilla."
2. Publicly demand reparations from Turkey for the costs of the operation, including the medical bills of the thugs and Jew-haters who have been given such lovely medical care in Israeli hospitals.
3. Demand a UN investigation of why Turkey is funding terrorist organizations that are involved in attacks on Israel.
4. Fund a Kurdish human-rights NGO in Israel -- there are lots of Kurdish Jews who I'm sure would be happy to help -- that raises awareness of the plight of Kurds in Turkey. (Short answer: they are treated horribly.) This organization must publicize the apartheid conditions of Kurdish life in Turkey and churn out op-eds, studies, videos, and press releases denouncing Turkey's brutal and racist treatment of its own minorities.
5. Fund a Turkish-language documentary on the Armenian genocide, upload it to YouTube, and promote it heavily in Turkey. If Erdogan wants to call Israel a criminal and a murderer, there's no reason why Israel shouldn't return the favor on this most sensitive of issues.
The model of hasbara, or public diplomacy, that Israel has employed for decades is premised on the persuasiveness of reason, evidence, context, truth, fairness, and apology. Anyone who has been following events in Israel over the past few years understands how profoundly this strategy has failed. For obvious historic reasons, many Jews have internalized the dangerous belief that the best way to respond to condemnation and lies is to show how unthreatening and willing to criticize and investigate themselves they are. The problem is that not only doesn't this work; it actually invites further attack by rewarding those who defame and incite against the Jewish state.
Israel's hasbara strategy must shift to one that is based on power, self-confidence, and an eagerness to vigorously condemn its defamers. This is the difference between driving the debate and reacting to it, refuting lies and validating them, offense and defense, setting the agenda versus being on the agenda. If the Israelis wish to see a good model for how to set the terms of a controversy, they need only look at the Turkish prime minister's brilliant performance this week.
Noah Pollak Web Exclusive Commentary
Given past performances, I'd say that Israel and its supporters are doing a better-than-average job of quickly beating back the international lynch mob that loves nothing more than propagating lies about Israel. The key weapon in this fight for truth has been this particular video of the IDF commandos descending onto the deck of the Mavi Marmara and into a hornet's nest of murderous "peace activists."
This kind of after-the-fact truth-telling is good as far as it goes, but it actually doesn't go very far: it is restricted to responding to lies, exaggerations, and accusations. Israel is on the receiving end of a viciously negative political campaign, and as any campaign strategist knows, you don't respond to a negative campaign by expending all your energy trying to explain why the lies aren't true -- you go negative and play offense in return.
What would it look like if the Israeli government played offense? First and foremost, this would require some serious criticism of the Islamist government of Turkey, which masterfully created this crisis and is now denouncing Israel for it. Turkey's thuggish prime minister certainly understands the benefits of being on offense. He says that Israel committed a "massacre" and is guilty of "state terrorism," "piracy," has struck "a blow to world peace and against international law," threatens that "if Israel does not immediately free all the detainees and wounded, the rift in relations with it will widen," and thunders that "Israel will not be able to show itself in the world until it apologizes for what happened and undergoes self-criticism."
Quite a performance! Wouldn't it be remarkable if the Israelis had gotten ahead of the story by making their own accusations and demands? Here are a few ideas of the kind of concrete action the Israelis could take -- if they had the stones to really take a stand.
1. Expel the Turkish ambassador and declare his return contingent on a full, credible, and public Turkish investigation of the terrorist organization that planned and funded the "aid flotilla."
2. Publicly demand reparations from Turkey for the costs of the operation, including the medical bills of the thugs and Jew-haters who have been given such lovely medical care in Israeli hospitals.
3. Demand a UN investigation of why Turkey is funding terrorist organizations that are involved in attacks on Israel.
4. Fund a Kurdish human-rights NGO in Israel -- there are lots of Kurdish Jews who I'm sure would be happy to help -- that raises awareness of the plight of Kurds in Turkey. (Short answer: they are treated horribly.) This organization must publicize the apartheid conditions of Kurdish life in Turkey and churn out op-eds, studies, videos, and press releases denouncing Turkey's brutal and racist treatment of its own minorities.
5. Fund a Turkish-language documentary on the Armenian genocide, upload it to YouTube, and promote it heavily in Turkey. If Erdogan wants to call Israel a criminal and a murderer, there's no reason why Israel shouldn't return the favor on this most sensitive of issues.
The model of hasbara, or public diplomacy, that Israel has employed for decades is premised on the persuasiveness of reason, evidence, context, truth, fairness, and apology. Anyone who has been following events in Israel over the past few years understands how profoundly this strategy has failed. For obvious historic reasons, many Jews have internalized the dangerous belief that the best way to respond to condemnation and lies is to show how unthreatening and willing to criticize and investigate themselves they are. The problem is that not only doesn't this work; it actually invites further attack by rewarding those who defame and incite against the Jewish state.
Israel's hasbara strategy must shift to one that is based on power, self-confidence, and an eagerness to vigorously condemn its defamers. This is the difference between driving the debate and reacting to it, refuting lies and validating them, offense and defense, setting the agenda versus being on the agenda. If the Israelis wish to see a good model for how to set the terms of a controversy, they need only look at the Turkish prime minister's brilliant performance this week.
Monday, June 7, 2010
To Me the Hitch Has It Almost All Right
Fighting words
Israel and Turkey: It's Complicated
The flotilla foul-up pits former friends against each other.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, June 7, 2010, at 11:01 AM ET
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I hope that by now the state of Israel regrets its past collaboration with some of the worst elements in modern Turkey. It's not so long since American Jewish lobby groups, and reportedly even the Israeli ambassador in Washington, were successfully lobbying Congress to vote down the resolution condemning the genocide of the Armenians. (The narrow passage of the resolution this year seems to have contributed to the increasingly evident paranoia and megalomania of Turkey's thuggish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.) And, even as Turkish troops occupied one-third of Cyprus and expelled one-third of its Greek population, as well as mounted illegal incursions into Iraq in pursuit of rebel Kurds, the Israeli armed forces happily embarked on joint exercises with them. If this era of unseemly collaboration is over, then so much the better. Even so, there's something slightly hypocritical about the way in which Israeli crowds have suddenly discovered the human rights record and the regional imperial ambitions of their former ally.
Talking of hypocrisy, though, how do you like the way that the words activist and humanitarian have suddenly made their appearance in our media? Activist is employed to describe a core group of Turks and Arabs, very many of them identifiable by name as affiliates or members or emulators of the Muslim Brotherhood. (I suppose in fairness it also covers such figures as the credulous Irishman Denis Halliday, who used to campaign so loudly for the lifting of sanctions on Saddam Hussein.) And humanitarian is used to describe the materials that these worthies are seeking to donate to Hamas. But is it really humanitarian to make contributions to a ruling party that has a totalitarian and racist ideology and is in regular receipt of nonhumanitarian aid from Syria and Iran, two of the most retrograde and aggressive dictatorships in the world?
Those who care about justice and self-government for the Palestinians might want to be helping Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as they build up the institutions of an embryo state on the West Bank. And those who worry about the conditions of the Gazans might want to send convoys of aid to the many United Nations and NGO operations in the Strip that have a proven record of transparency and efficiency. But, from a Muslim Brotherhood or activist perspective, where would the fun be in that? It is only Hamas, with its thrilling violence and hysterical rhetoric, that is truly "authentic." Incidentally, in a little-noticed statement last week, U.N. special regional coordinator Robert Serry denounced a series of raids and lootings mounted by Hamas supporters on the offices of genuinely humanitarian operations in Gaza City and Rafah.
The near-incredible stupidity of the Israeli airborne descent on the good ship Mavi Marmara, by troops well-enough equipped to shoot when panicked but not well-enough prepared to contain or subdue a preplanned riot, has now generated much more coverage and comment than Erdogan's cynical recent decision to become a partner in the nuclear maneuvers of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It has also generated much more coverage and comment than Erdogan's long-term design to de-secularize Turkey, a design in which his recent big-mouth grandstanding on Gaza is a mere theatrical detail. What on earth are self-proclaimed humanitarian activists—as they will soon enough be called at this rate—doing in such an open alliance between one cruel and bankrupt Iranian theocracy, one religio-nationalist Turkish demagogue, and Hamas?
Israeli self-pity over Gaza—"You fire rockets at us! And after all we've done for you!"—may be incredibly unappetizing. An occupation that should never have been allowed in the first place was protracted until it became obviously unbearable for all concerned and then turned into a scuttle. The misery and shame of that history cannot be effaced by mere withdrawal or healed by the delivery of aid. It can only really be canceled by a good-faith agreement to create a Palestinian state. But Hamas is a conscious obstacle to this objective, as it shows by its dependence on foreign dictatorships and by the criminal and violent methods it has used against Fatah and the PLO.
Let me give another case in point: Hamas' charter and many of its official proclamations announce that it endorses the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a dirty anti-Semitic fabrication produced by Christian and czarist extremists and adopted by the Nazis. Would you, if you wanted to help Gaza and the Gazans, knowingly augment the power of such a flat-out racist organization by helping make it the proud and exclusive distributor of food and medicine?
Staying with this fascinating point for a moment: What if the international community put one simple question to the Hamas leadership? We will consider lifting the sanctions if you will renounce a barbaric and discredited concoction of lies that identifies all Jews everywhere as targets for murder. (The name notwithstanding, the Protocols have nothing to say about Palestine.) And what if the journalistic community—just once—was to ask a similar question of the "activists"? Do you endorse the Protocols: Yes or no? We would instantly be much closer to understanding what was meant by humanitarian.
While we wait for this puncturing of the current balloon of propaganda, we might as well savor the ironies. As well as being the two most intimate allies of the United States in the region, Turkey and Israel possess large and educated populations that want in their way to be part of "the West." They also both suffer from mediocre and banana-republic-type leaders, who are willing prisoners of clerical extremists in their own second-rate regimes. Turkey cannot be thought of as European until it stops lying about Armenia, gets its invading troops out of Cyprus, and grants full rights to its huge Kurdish population. Israel will never be accepted as a state for Jews, let alone as a Jewish state, until it ceases to govern other people against their will. The flotilla foul-up, pitting former friends against each other, only serves to obscure these unignorable facts.
Israel and Turkey: It's Complicated
The flotilla foul-up pits former friends against each other.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, June 7, 2010, at 11:01 AM ET
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I hope that by now the state of Israel regrets its past collaboration with some of the worst elements in modern Turkey. It's not so long since American Jewish lobby groups, and reportedly even the Israeli ambassador in Washington, were successfully lobbying Congress to vote down the resolution condemning the genocide of the Armenians. (The narrow passage of the resolution this year seems to have contributed to the increasingly evident paranoia and megalomania of Turkey's thuggish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.) And, even as Turkish troops occupied one-third of Cyprus and expelled one-third of its Greek population, as well as mounted illegal incursions into Iraq in pursuit of rebel Kurds, the Israeli armed forces happily embarked on joint exercises with them. If this era of unseemly collaboration is over, then so much the better. Even so, there's something slightly hypocritical about the way in which Israeli crowds have suddenly discovered the human rights record and the regional imperial ambitions of their former ally.
Talking of hypocrisy, though, how do you like the way that the words activist and humanitarian have suddenly made their appearance in our media? Activist is employed to describe a core group of Turks and Arabs, very many of them identifiable by name as affiliates or members or emulators of the Muslim Brotherhood. (I suppose in fairness it also covers such figures as the credulous Irishman Denis Halliday, who used to campaign so loudly for the lifting of sanctions on Saddam Hussein.) And humanitarian is used to describe the materials that these worthies are seeking to donate to Hamas. But is it really humanitarian to make contributions to a ruling party that has a totalitarian and racist ideology and is in regular receipt of nonhumanitarian aid from Syria and Iran, two of the most retrograde and aggressive dictatorships in the world?
Those who care about justice and self-government for the Palestinians might want to be helping Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad as they build up the institutions of an embryo state on the West Bank. And those who worry about the conditions of the Gazans might want to send convoys of aid to the many United Nations and NGO operations in the Strip that have a proven record of transparency and efficiency. But, from a Muslim Brotherhood or activist perspective, where would the fun be in that? It is only Hamas, with its thrilling violence and hysterical rhetoric, that is truly "authentic." Incidentally, in a little-noticed statement last week, U.N. special regional coordinator Robert Serry denounced a series of raids and lootings mounted by Hamas supporters on the offices of genuinely humanitarian operations in Gaza City and Rafah.
The near-incredible stupidity of the Israeli airborne descent on the good ship Mavi Marmara, by troops well-enough equipped to shoot when panicked but not well-enough prepared to contain or subdue a preplanned riot, has now generated much more coverage and comment than Erdogan's cynical recent decision to become a partner in the nuclear maneuvers of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It has also generated much more coverage and comment than Erdogan's long-term design to de-secularize Turkey, a design in which his recent big-mouth grandstanding on Gaza is a mere theatrical detail. What on earth are self-proclaimed humanitarian activists—as they will soon enough be called at this rate—doing in such an open alliance between one cruel and bankrupt Iranian theocracy, one religio-nationalist Turkish demagogue, and Hamas?
Israeli self-pity over Gaza—"You fire rockets at us! And after all we've done for you!"—may be incredibly unappetizing. An occupation that should never have been allowed in the first place was protracted until it became obviously unbearable for all concerned and then turned into a scuttle. The misery and shame of that history cannot be effaced by mere withdrawal or healed by the delivery of aid. It can only really be canceled by a good-faith agreement to create a Palestinian state. But Hamas is a conscious obstacle to this objective, as it shows by its dependence on foreign dictatorships and by the criminal and violent methods it has used against Fatah and the PLO.
Let me give another case in point: Hamas' charter and many of its official proclamations announce that it endorses the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a dirty anti-Semitic fabrication produced by Christian and czarist extremists and adopted by the Nazis. Would you, if you wanted to help Gaza and the Gazans, knowingly augment the power of such a flat-out racist organization by helping make it the proud and exclusive distributor of food and medicine?
Staying with this fascinating point for a moment: What if the international community put one simple question to the Hamas leadership? We will consider lifting the sanctions if you will renounce a barbaric and discredited concoction of lies that identifies all Jews everywhere as targets for murder. (The name notwithstanding, the Protocols have nothing to say about Palestine.) And what if the journalistic community—just once—was to ask a similar question of the "activists"? Do you endorse the Protocols: Yes or no? We would instantly be much closer to understanding what was meant by humanitarian.
While we wait for this puncturing of the current balloon of propaganda, we might as well savor the ironies. As well as being the two most intimate allies of the United States in the region, Turkey and Israel possess large and educated populations that want in their way to be part of "the West." They also both suffer from mediocre and banana-republic-type leaders, who are willing prisoners of clerical extremists in their own second-rate regimes. Turkey cannot be thought of as European until it stops lying about Armenia, gets its invading troops out of Cyprus, and grants full rights to its huge Kurdish population. Israel will never be accepted as a state for Jews, let alone as a Jewish state, until it ceases to govern other people against their will. The flotilla foul-up, pitting former friends against each other, only serves to obscure these unignorable facts.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
Words on the Tombstone
I propose the following as fitting words on the tombstone of Wieseltier's wrought exercise in hand wringing:
"From Frum:
'...Enforcement works. The last of the Gaza flotilla rejected a deal negotiated between Israel and Ireland to dock at Ashdod and submit there to inspection. It tried to break the blockade instead. The vessel was intercepted by Israeli forces – and this time there was no violence. The blockade runners surrendered to arrest. Prediction: there will be no second flotilla...'"
"From Frum:
'...Enforcement works. The last of the Gaza flotilla rejected a deal negotiated between Israel and Ireland to dock at Ashdod and submit there to inspection. It tried to break the blockade instead. The vessel was intercepted by Israeli forces – and this time there was no violence. The blockade runners surrendered to arrest. Prediction: there will be no second flotilla...'"
Flotilla: Symbols as against the Real World
Wieseltier:
Operation Make the World Hate Us
The assault on the 'Mavi Marmara' was wrong, and a gift to Israel's enemies.
Leon Wieseltier
June 3, 2010 | 11:16 am
.Israel does not need enemies: it has itself. Or more precisely: it has its government. The Netanyahu-Barak government has somehow found a way to lose the moral high ground, the all-important war for symbols and meanings, to Hamas. That is quite an accomplishment. Operation Make the World Hate Us, it might have been called.
I leave it to others to make the operational criticisms of the Israeli action, and will say only that even my amateurish understanding of the tactical challenge posed by the interdiction of the boats suffices to suggest that there were other ways to do this. I also will not pretend to a perfect grasp of what happened on board the Mavi Marmara. I have pondered the videos that both sides have released, and concluded that the Israeli soldiers sliding down that rope had no intention of attacking the people on board and that the people on board had no way of being confident of this. I cannot expect Palestinians and their supporters to believe the best about the Israeli army. (This is what Israeli hardliners call “the restoration of deterrence.”) I do not doubt that some of the activists on the ship welcomed a confrontation with Israel, but the Israelis should not have obliged them. In any event, what took place on that deck looks to me like a tragic misunderstanding. Yet there was no reason to think that anything else would have transpired.
The important point is that the killing of civilians on the Mavi Marmara—I understand that they were “armed” with metal bars and a knife, but still they were civilians, and soldiers are trained to respond unlethally to the recklessness of a mob—cannot be extenuated by reference to “asymmetrical warfare” and Israel’s right to defend itself. This was not warfare, at least of the physical sort. Israel was not under attack. A headline in The Washington Post yesterday reported that “Israel says Free Gaza Movement poses threat to Jewish state.” Such a claim is absurd. It is true that the movement has grown in recent years, and is now troublesome to Israel’s policy in Gaza; and it is also true that the Turkish charity that sponsored the “Freedom Flotilla” has ties to Islamicist groups. But this is hardly what Israel likes to call, in the Iranian context, and there quite plausibly, an “existential threat.” The extension of the definition of a security threat to include hostile activities that have little or no bearing upon security is an ominous development.
It is also the inevitable consequence of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cunning pronouncement last year that Israel is now endangered by “the Iran threat, the missile threat, and the threat I call the Goldstone threat.” The equivalence was morally misleading, and therefore dangerous. Ideological warfare is not military warfare. I have studied the entirety of the Goldstone Report, and whereas I do not doubt (and wrote in this magazine in the days before Goldstone) that Operation Cast Lead caused the unjustifiable death of non-combatants, I also do not doubt that the Goldstone Report, which was nastily indifferent to Israel’s security predicament and to the ethical challenges of Israeli self-defense, was an instrument in a broad campaign of delegitimation against Israel—and yet the threat of delegitimation is not like the threat of destruction. It is different in kind. A commando operation is not an appropriate response to an idea. “This was no Love Boat,” Netanyahu said yesterday. “It was a hate boat.” He is right, but so what? The threat of delegitimation is not a military problem and it does not have a military solution. And the attempt to give it a military solution has now had the awful consequence of making the threat still greater. The assault on the Mavi Marmara was a stupid gift to the delegitimators.
You do not have to be a general to grasp these distinctions. In fact, judging by Israel’s recent history, it might help not to be one. But the militarization of the Israeli government’s understanding of Israel’s situation—this has been the most sterile period for diplomacy in all of Israel’s history—is not all that led to the debacle at sea. Rules of military engagement that allow soldiers to fire on political activists (I leave aside the question of their humanitarianism for a moment) may signify something still deeper and even more troubling. It is hard not to conclude from this Israeli action, and also from other Israeli actions in recent years, that the Israeli leadership simply does not care any longer about what anybody thinks. It does not seem to care about what even the United States—its only real friend, even in the choppy era of Obama—thinks. This is not defiance, it is despair. The Israeli leadership seems to have given up any expectation of fairness and sympathy from the world. It is behaving as if it believes, in the manner of the most perilous Jewish pessimism, that the whole world hates the Jews, and that is all there is to it. This is the very opposite of the measured and empirical attitude, the search for strategic opportunity, the enlistment of imagination in the service of ideals and interests, that is required for statecraft.
The complication—the one that deprives anybody who acknowledges it of membership in any of the gangs of commentary—is that there is a partial basis in the actually existing world for a degree of Israeli pessimism. There are leaders, states, organizations, and peoples whose hostility to the Jewish state is irrational and absolute and in some cases murderous. Things are said critically about Israel that wildly burst the bounds of thoughtful criticism. The language in which Israel is described by some governments and international organizations is lurid and grotesque and foul. Anti-Semitic tropes—the conspiracy theory about the Jews, most conspicuously—are regularly encountered in otherwise respectable places. The analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that absolves the Palestinians of any significant role in it is widespread. I do not see how any of this can be denied, or shunted aside, or explained entirely in terms of Israeli behavior. But it is emphatically not the whole picture, except for those Israelis and Jews whose political interests and ideological inclinations prefer it to be the whole picture. For there are forces in Israel, and in its government, that have a use for Jewish hopelessness.
There is a verse in Numbers that Jewish pessimists like to cite: “the people shall dwell alone, and not be reckoned among the nations.” It is Balaam’s divinely inspired description of the Israelites—Balaam, who came to curse and stayed to bless. But I have always regarded it as a curse, this promise of loneliness. I have heard it intoned lachrymosely and proudly—in our time Jewish pride has a disturbingly parasitic relationship with Jewish lachrymosity—all my life. It chills me to the bone. It is a locution for prophets, not prime ministers. The Jews cannot dwell alone. In fact, their history shows that they never did dwell alone. It is not a tale of insularity and isolation. The apartness of the Jews was never a complete secession from their environment. The engagement of the Jews with the world was a matter not only of practical necessity, but also of theological conviction. And not even the darkest and most dire adversity succeeded in driving them entirely into themselves.
When, in the modern era, the Zionists concluded, quite correctly, that the Jews must extract themselves from anti-Semitic societies and establish a society of their own, a sovereign one, in the land of Israel, it was in part to “normalize” them by making them “reckoned among the nations,” and therefore like other nations. Zionism was a reversal of Balaam’s phony blessing. The state was not supposed to be a bunker, even if it had enemies. But Netanyahu is a creature of the bunker. He talks about peace, but not like a man who hungers for it. He takes no steps toward peace except as the consequence of a crisis—a crisis not with the Palestinians but with the Americans. He liturgically intones his warnings, some of them true, about the external dangers facing Israel, and mistakes brutishness for toughness, and offers nothing. He is a gray, muddling, reactive figure. His preferred strategy for his country is: one quiet week after another unto eternity. His problem is that there are not many quiet weeks.
But about those activists: a great deal of bathetic rubbish has been written about them. Insofar as they were bringing food and medicine to Gaza, they were humanitarians; but insofar as they were striking a blow for the government of Gaza, they were anti-humanitarians. A real “Freedom Flotilla” would have sailed for Gaza to liberate it from its rulers. For Hamas stifles Gaza from within even as Israel stifles it from without. It oppresses the Palestininans who live under its sway and has brought them ruin. When did it become progressive to support a theocracy? Consider the case of Henning Mankell, the Swedish writer of thrillers (and the son-in-law of Ingmar Bergman) who was a passenger on one of the boats in the “Freedom Flotilla.” In his youth he took part in anti-Vietnam and anti-apartheid demonstrations, presumably in the spirit of secular reason. For a while he lived in Norway and participated in the activities of a radical Maoist party: let us call that secular unreason. Now he does the work of Hamas and its mullahs. Last year Mankell attended the Palestine Festival of Literature in east Jerusalem—or would have attended it, if the Israeli authorities had not idiotically closed it down. When he returned to Sweden, he wrote that “there is a straight line between Soweto, Sharpeville, and what recently happened [I presume he was referring to the war] in Gaza.” And: “Is it strange that some [Palestinians] in pure desperation, when they cannot see any other way out, decide to become suicide bombers? Not really. Maybe it is strange that there are not more of them.” And: “The state of Israel in its current form has no future. Moreover, those who advocate a two-state solution have not got it right. … The question is whether it will be possible to talk sense into the Israelis in order for them to willingly accept the end of their own apartheid state.” This man has rights, at sea and on land, but he can hardly be lauded as a champion of peace and reconciliation. You are not for co-existence if you advocate the disappearance of one of the terms. (Consider, analogously, the recent adventures of Noam Chomsky in the region. It was widely noted that the Israelis, again idiotically, turned him away at the Allenby Bridge. It was less widely noted that a few days later a reporter for The New York Times accidentally discovered him in Lebanon at the home of Nabil Qaouk, the deputy head of Hezbollah, which is not what Voltaire had in mind.)
And yet the screw must be turned again: the anti-Israeli virulence of Henning Mankell and his maritime comrades does not make Israel’s assault on the Mavi Marmara more just or more wise. Now the Israeli government may find it impossible not to modify or even to lift the blockade of Gaza—an outcome that no decent person can decry, as long as Hamas does not exploit the respite to acquire weapons or what it needs to make them, and the past is not encouraging in this regard. Netanyahu will do what he can to get past the mess, hoping that the approach of the midterm elections in the United States will rescue him from the pressure, and the deadening hand of the status quo will be back. And Israel will be known to more and more people—in a wounding misrepresentation—mainly for cruelty.
Me:
A central part of Wieseltier’s argument is that Israel’s interdiction, gone terribly badly, exemplifies its currently incompetent politics under Netanyahu, which incompetence feeds the world’s hatred of Israel, based as that politics is--according to Wieseltier—on the overly binary, virtual conclusion “…that the whole world hates the Jews, and that is all there is to it.”
So, incompetent leadership, instanced by the interdiction, fails to make necessary distinctions amongst existential threats, the Free Gaza Movement, delegitimation, and the “Goldstone threat”. Wieseltier’s version of Israeli political reasoning appears to be: perilous Jewish pessimism washes away the need to discriminate amongst different kinds of threats and that, therefore, starting from this premise of perilousness, all threats are part of the same seamless anti Israeli whole:
“This was no Love Boat,” Netanyahu said yesterday. “It was a hate boat.” He is right, but so what? The threat of delegitimation is not a military problem and it does not have a military solution. And the attempt to give it a military solution has now had the awful consequence of making the threat still greater. The assault on the Mavi Marmara was a stupid gift to the delegitimators.”
A big problem with this argument—the argument that there are specific and different trees in the anti Israeli forest— as instanced at least by the interdiction is the inclination not to see the forest, for all its admittedly very different trees. Seeing the forest as context, Israel’s interdiction makes sense and Wieseltier’s tree-bound parsing does not. To try to test what I suggest, I’ll deal with a big brunt of Wieseltier’s argument as built out of the points he makes in his second and third paragraphs, which form the core of his argument from interdiction, and which he then expands outwards. In those paragraphs he says the following:
1. while the young Israeli soldiers intended no mayhem, those on board the Mavi Marmara had no expectation of that non-intention. Rather, they likely expected mayhem, even as the “activists” on board welcomed a confrontation;
2. and even though the “activists” welcomed a confrontation, Israel should not have obliged them;
3. what eventuated was a “tragic misunderstanding”; and its happening was inevitable;
4. beyond this inevitable tragic outcome, the “important point” is the civilian dead, albeit “‘armed’ with metal bars and a knife”;
5. neither self defence—neither Israel’s nor the young soldiers’—nor assymetricality can accommodate any justification for these dead civilians. After all, “This was not warfare, at least of the physical sort”;
6. the proposition that the Free Gaza Movement imperils Israel is absurd, even as it’s troublesome; and it is not what Israel likes to refer to as an existential threat; and, coup de grace,
7. “The extension of the definition of a security threat to include hostile activities that have little or no bearing upon security is an ominous development.”
But how do these points and the overarching argument that emerges from them stand up in context?
That context is this: Israel is at war with an Iranian backed Hamas, an Islamist group bent on Israel’s destruction; when Israel left Gaza and Gaza was under Fatah’s governance, such as it was, it employed no embargo; but after Hamas violently and murderously wrested control of Gaza from Fatah, it embarked on bombing and rocketing Israel, limited, in large part, by the limits of its weaponry; Israel then took steps to protect its citizenry, Jew and Arab alike, including the embargo to staunch the inflow of war materials, as did Egypt, with the embargo being legal under international law; to be functional the embargo at a minimum entails inspecting shipments and extracting war materials and then letting through non war materials; the Free Gaza Movement has no concern for the security threat to Israel, which the broken embargo makes real; and, so, with some succor from Turkey and operationally driven by a jihadist organization with ties to al-Qaeda, and with some useful idiots on board, the Mavi Marmara became the vessel with which either to break the embargo or, hopefully, die trying; Israeli attempts to forestall the sailing, and then its pleas, warnings, offers after inspection to deliver any humanitarian cargo, and threats fell on purposefully deaf ears as the jihadis had a twofold purpose, to which the delivery of humanitarian goods was sheer pretext:
1. run the embargo and thereby help lay a foundation for breaking it by breaking Israeli resolve; and / or
2. foment an incident leading to “civilian death”, world condemnation and increased international pressure, more Goldstoneism, and finally the imposition of terms on Israel in tandem with the intensification of its status as a pariah among nations.
Given this context, what do Wieseltier’s paragraphs two and three points, and the argument they raise, come to?
Following my numbering of Wieseltier’s points I say against them:
1. Those driving the embargo breaking operation calculated the young Israeli soldiers’ reaction to an attack on them of unexpected ferocity. The real point here is the opposite of Wieseltier’s. The jihadis baited the young soldiers’ reaction in expectation of it. It was the soldiers, armed with paint guns, and their command, who did not expect the ferocity of the attack. (The deaths of any useful idiots on board form another issue. But they put themselves in harm’s way by accompanying, and trying to facilitate, the war like act of breaking the embargo. And here again, as in Cast Lead, jihad was only too ready to use civilian shields and deaths for its own strategic and tactical purposes.)
2(a) The notion that Israel shouldn’t have obliged the “activists” is pious coming from a secluded literary editor with nothing more threatening him than the D.C. traffic, the occasional scuffle with Andrew Sullivan and other like perils. The corollary to the bromide of Wieseltier’s prescription was the maiming and death of Israel’s young soldiers and Israel's display of feckless weakness, both sacrifices on the altar of Wieseltier’s acontextual abstraction. On board, things were real, even without Andrew Sullivan. Without any fighting back, the “activists” and the “civilians”—about who, the “civilians”, more soon—would have maimed and murdered to any extent possible.
2(b) If by non-obliging, Wieseltier means the initial higher command decision to interdict in the first place, what would the consequences of not-obliging have been: allowing the ship to break the embargo with impunity; creating a kind of template for the further breaking of it; rendering the embargo dysfunctional; the unimpeded inflow of war material; the consequences of that for Israeli citizens, Jew and Arab alike; Hamas enabled to do its relatively unencumbered will?
3. So, stipulating for argument’s sake the operational failures of the interdiction, the locution “tragic misunderstanding” is precious. Putting to the analytical side the tragedy of the loss of life as a necessary condition of war, “tragic misunderstanding” as formulated here by Wieseltier isn’t only precious, it has the vice of smuggling in an implicit and inapposite moral equivalence, a tragedy of misunderstanding on both sides.
But against that implicit moral equivalence, there is in this incident, misunderstandings granted, a clear immoral hierarchy and an equally clear moral hierarchy. Those clarities ought not to be occluded. Paramount evil resided in the jihadist driven project only too willing to lay life—Israeli and Jihadist and “armed” civilian—to waste in furtherance of its ends. Morally, in context, Israel has nothing for which to apologize, whatever mistakes it operationally made. The leap from those mistakes to the railing against the justice and wisdom of the interdiction and the included issue of the young Israeli soldiers defending themselves against maiming and death, granting even possibly some disproportion in the immediate circumstances, trashes context and makes no case. The intended interdiction and included self defence were neither, to invert Wiesletier, unjust or unwise.
4. It is hard to understand both Wieseltier’s notion of civilians “‘armed’ with metal bars and a knife” and their deaths being the “important point”. The important point, I argue, is, rather, to understand how context informs where to draw the moral lines here. With those drawn lines understood, then one can go forward to deal with Wieseltier’s concern over “Operation Make the World Hate Us.” As to the "'armed' civilians”: not only are their deaths not the “important point”, but, more, I feel Wieseltier is uncharacteristically disingenuous in under describing them to argue his bad thesis for at least two reasons:
1. so armed, and with maiming and killing on their minds, these "civilians" lost their civilianality and became part of the machinery of a war like effort to break the embargo; and
2. more generally, Wieseltier makes a hash of any meaningful distinction between fighters and non fighters by assimilating these armed to civilians.
5. So, in precise antithesis to Wieseltier, in context, self defence—which is to say the young soldiers’ and Israel’s too—and asymmetricality provide an understanding of the deaths of those armed who attacked. The battle on board was, in context, warfare, or, at least, akin to warfare. And young Israeli soldiers being beaten, stabbed, thrown overboard, and shot at comes within my definition of “the physical sort.”
6. Acts furthering the Free Gaza Movement are not in themselves, obviously, existential threats to Israel. But, in context, they are more than “troublesome”. In context, these acts carry within them the seeds of breaking the embargo, allowing, I repeat, thereby the inflow of war material to Hamas who will use same to kill Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike. Interdiction was a proportionate response to the unrelenting determination of the Jihadists to run the embargo, for as wrong as the interdiction may have gone. Any possible stepping, by the young Israeli soldiers, over the line of proportionality is understandable in the circumstances and was done in pursuit of a lawful objective.
7. Finally, Wieseltier is just flat wrong when he concludes that the interdiction was not undertaken in relation to a threat to Israel’s security. In context, the attempt at running the Mavi Marmara through the embargo was nothing but. It may be that not seeing that, as Wieseltier does not, is an ominous development
Operation Make the World Hate Us
The assault on the 'Mavi Marmara' was wrong, and a gift to Israel's enemies.
Leon Wieseltier
June 3, 2010 | 11:16 am
.Israel does not need enemies: it has itself. Or more precisely: it has its government. The Netanyahu-Barak government has somehow found a way to lose the moral high ground, the all-important war for symbols and meanings, to Hamas. That is quite an accomplishment. Operation Make the World Hate Us, it might have been called.
I leave it to others to make the operational criticisms of the Israeli action, and will say only that even my amateurish understanding of the tactical challenge posed by the interdiction of the boats suffices to suggest that there were other ways to do this. I also will not pretend to a perfect grasp of what happened on board the Mavi Marmara. I have pondered the videos that both sides have released, and concluded that the Israeli soldiers sliding down that rope had no intention of attacking the people on board and that the people on board had no way of being confident of this. I cannot expect Palestinians and their supporters to believe the best about the Israeli army. (This is what Israeli hardliners call “the restoration of deterrence.”) I do not doubt that some of the activists on the ship welcomed a confrontation with Israel, but the Israelis should not have obliged them. In any event, what took place on that deck looks to me like a tragic misunderstanding. Yet there was no reason to think that anything else would have transpired.
The important point is that the killing of civilians on the Mavi Marmara—I understand that they were “armed” with metal bars and a knife, but still they were civilians, and soldiers are trained to respond unlethally to the recklessness of a mob—cannot be extenuated by reference to “asymmetrical warfare” and Israel’s right to defend itself. This was not warfare, at least of the physical sort. Israel was not under attack. A headline in The Washington Post yesterday reported that “Israel says Free Gaza Movement poses threat to Jewish state.” Such a claim is absurd. It is true that the movement has grown in recent years, and is now troublesome to Israel’s policy in Gaza; and it is also true that the Turkish charity that sponsored the “Freedom Flotilla” has ties to Islamicist groups. But this is hardly what Israel likes to call, in the Iranian context, and there quite plausibly, an “existential threat.” The extension of the definition of a security threat to include hostile activities that have little or no bearing upon security is an ominous development.
It is also the inevitable consequence of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cunning pronouncement last year that Israel is now endangered by “the Iran threat, the missile threat, and the threat I call the Goldstone threat.” The equivalence was morally misleading, and therefore dangerous. Ideological warfare is not military warfare. I have studied the entirety of the Goldstone Report, and whereas I do not doubt (and wrote in this magazine in the days before Goldstone) that Operation Cast Lead caused the unjustifiable death of non-combatants, I also do not doubt that the Goldstone Report, which was nastily indifferent to Israel’s security predicament and to the ethical challenges of Israeli self-defense, was an instrument in a broad campaign of delegitimation against Israel—and yet the threat of delegitimation is not like the threat of destruction. It is different in kind. A commando operation is not an appropriate response to an idea. “This was no Love Boat,” Netanyahu said yesterday. “It was a hate boat.” He is right, but so what? The threat of delegitimation is not a military problem and it does not have a military solution. And the attempt to give it a military solution has now had the awful consequence of making the threat still greater. The assault on the Mavi Marmara was a stupid gift to the delegitimators.
You do not have to be a general to grasp these distinctions. In fact, judging by Israel’s recent history, it might help not to be one. But the militarization of the Israeli government’s understanding of Israel’s situation—this has been the most sterile period for diplomacy in all of Israel’s history—is not all that led to the debacle at sea. Rules of military engagement that allow soldiers to fire on political activists (I leave aside the question of their humanitarianism for a moment) may signify something still deeper and even more troubling. It is hard not to conclude from this Israeli action, and also from other Israeli actions in recent years, that the Israeli leadership simply does not care any longer about what anybody thinks. It does not seem to care about what even the United States—its only real friend, even in the choppy era of Obama—thinks. This is not defiance, it is despair. The Israeli leadership seems to have given up any expectation of fairness and sympathy from the world. It is behaving as if it believes, in the manner of the most perilous Jewish pessimism, that the whole world hates the Jews, and that is all there is to it. This is the very opposite of the measured and empirical attitude, the search for strategic opportunity, the enlistment of imagination in the service of ideals and interests, that is required for statecraft.
The complication—the one that deprives anybody who acknowledges it of membership in any of the gangs of commentary—is that there is a partial basis in the actually existing world for a degree of Israeli pessimism. There are leaders, states, organizations, and peoples whose hostility to the Jewish state is irrational and absolute and in some cases murderous. Things are said critically about Israel that wildly burst the bounds of thoughtful criticism. The language in which Israel is described by some governments and international organizations is lurid and grotesque and foul. Anti-Semitic tropes—the conspiracy theory about the Jews, most conspicuously—are regularly encountered in otherwise respectable places. The analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that absolves the Palestinians of any significant role in it is widespread. I do not see how any of this can be denied, or shunted aside, or explained entirely in terms of Israeli behavior. But it is emphatically not the whole picture, except for those Israelis and Jews whose political interests and ideological inclinations prefer it to be the whole picture. For there are forces in Israel, and in its government, that have a use for Jewish hopelessness.
There is a verse in Numbers that Jewish pessimists like to cite: “the people shall dwell alone, and not be reckoned among the nations.” It is Balaam’s divinely inspired description of the Israelites—Balaam, who came to curse and stayed to bless. But I have always regarded it as a curse, this promise of loneliness. I have heard it intoned lachrymosely and proudly—in our time Jewish pride has a disturbingly parasitic relationship with Jewish lachrymosity—all my life. It chills me to the bone. It is a locution for prophets, not prime ministers. The Jews cannot dwell alone. In fact, their history shows that they never did dwell alone. It is not a tale of insularity and isolation. The apartness of the Jews was never a complete secession from their environment. The engagement of the Jews with the world was a matter not only of practical necessity, but also of theological conviction. And not even the darkest and most dire adversity succeeded in driving them entirely into themselves.
When, in the modern era, the Zionists concluded, quite correctly, that the Jews must extract themselves from anti-Semitic societies and establish a society of their own, a sovereign one, in the land of Israel, it was in part to “normalize” them by making them “reckoned among the nations,” and therefore like other nations. Zionism was a reversal of Balaam’s phony blessing. The state was not supposed to be a bunker, even if it had enemies. But Netanyahu is a creature of the bunker. He talks about peace, but not like a man who hungers for it. He takes no steps toward peace except as the consequence of a crisis—a crisis not with the Palestinians but with the Americans. He liturgically intones his warnings, some of them true, about the external dangers facing Israel, and mistakes brutishness for toughness, and offers nothing. He is a gray, muddling, reactive figure. His preferred strategy for his country is: one quiet week after another unto eternity. His problem is that there are not many quiet weeks.
But about those activists: a great deal of bathetic rubbish has been written about them. Insofar as they were bringing food and medicine to Gaza, they were humanitarians; but insofar as they were striking a blow for the government of Gaza, they were anti-humanitarians. A real “Freedom Flotilla” would have sailed for Gaza to liberate it from its rulers. For Hamas stifles Gaza from within even as Israel stifles it from without. It oppresses the Palestininans who live under its sway and has brought them ruin. When did it become progressive to support a theocracy? Consider the case of Henning Mankell, the Swedish writer of thrillers (and the son-in-law of Ingmar Bergman) who was a passenger on one of the boats in the “Freedom Flotilla.” In his youth he took part in anti-Vietnam and anti-apartheid demonstrations, presumably in the spirit of secular reason. For a while he lived in Norway and participated in the activities of a radical Maoist party: let us call that secular unreason. Now he does the work of Hamas and its mullahs. Last year Mankell attended the Palestine Festival of Literature in east Jerusalem—or would have attended it, if the Israeli authorities had not idiotically closed it down. When he returned to Sweden, he wrote that “there is a straight line between Soweto, Sharpeville, and what recently happened [I presume he was referring to the war] in Gaza.” And: “Is it strange that some [Palestinians] in pure desperation, when they cannot see any other way out, decide to become suicide bombers? Not really. Maybe it is strange that there are not more of them.” And: “The state of Israel in its current form has no future. Moreover, those who advocate a two-state solution have not got it right. … The question is whether it will be possible to talk sense into the Israelis in order for them to willingly accept the end of their own apartheid state.” This man has rights, at sea and on land, but he can hardly be lauded as a champion of peace and reconciliation. You are not for co-existence if you advocate the disappearance of one of the terms. (Consider, analogously, the recent adventures of Noam Chomsky in the region. It was widely noted that the Israelis, again idiotically, turned him away at the Allenby Bridge. It was less widely noted that a few days later a reporter for The New York Times accidentally discovered him in Lebanon at the home of Nabil Qaouk, the deputy head of Hezbollah, which is not what Voltaire had in mind.)
And yet the screw must be turned again: the anti-Israeli virulence of Henning Mankell and his maritime comrades does not make Israel’s assault on the Mavi Marmara more just or more wise. Now the Israeli government may find it impossible not to modify or even to lift the blockade of Gaza—an outcome that no decent person can decry, as long as Hamas does not exploit the respite to acquire weapons or what it needs to make them, and the past is not encouraging in this regard. Netanyahu will do what he can to get past the mess, hoping that the approach of the midterm elections in the United States will rescue him from the pressure, and the deadening hand of the status quo will be back. And Israel will be known to more and more people—in a wounding misrepresentation—mainly for cruelty.
Me:
A central part of Wieseltier’s argument is that Israel’s interdiction, gone terribly badly, exemplifies its currently incompetent politics under Netanyahu, which incompetence feeds the world’s hatred of Israel, based as that politics is--according to Wieseltier—on the overly binary, virtual conclusion “…that the whole world hates the Jews, and that is all there is to it.”
So, incompetent leadership, instanced by the interdiction, fails to make necessary distinctions amongst existential threats, the Free Gaza Movement, delegitimation, and the “Goldstone threat”. Wieseltier’s version of Israeli political reasoning appears to be: perilous Jewish pessimism washes away the need to discriminate amongst different kinds of threats and that, therefore, starting from this premise of perilousness, all threats are part of the same seamless anti Israeli whole:
“This was no Love Boat,” Netanyahu said yesterday. “It was a hate boat.” He is right, but so what? The threat of delegitimation is not a military problem and it does not have a military solution. And the attempt to give it a military solution has now had the awful consequence of making the threat still greater. The assault on the Mavi Marmara was a stupid gift to the delegitimators.”
A big problem with this argument—the argument that there are specific and different trees in the anti Israeli forest— as instanced at least by the interdiction is the inclination not to see the forest, for all its admittedly very different trees. Seeing the forest as context, Israel’s interdiction makes sense and Wieseltier’s tree-bound parsing does not. To try to test what I suggest, I’ll deal with a big brunt of Wieseltier’s argument as built out of the points he makes in his second and third paragraphs, which form the core of his argument from interdiction, and which he then expands outwards. In those paragraphs he says the following:
1. while the young Israeli soldiers intended no mayhem, those on board the Mavi Marmara had no expectation of that non-intention. Rather, they likely expected mayhem, even as the “activists” on board welcomed a confrontation;
2. and even though the “activists” welcomed a confrontation, Israel should not have obliged them;
3. what eventuated was a “tragic misunderstanding”; and its happening was inevitable;
4. beyond this inevitable tragic outcome, the “important point” is the civilian dead, albeit “‘armed’ with metal bars and a knife”;
5. neither self defence—neither Israel’s nor the young soldiers’—nor assymetricality can accommodate any justification for these dead civilians. After all, “This was not warfare, at least of the physical sort”;
6. the proposition that the Free Gaza Movement imperils Israel is absurd, even as it’s troublesome; and it is not what Israel likes to refer to as an existential threat; and, coup de grace,
7. “The extension of the definition of a security threat to include hostile activities that have little or no bearing upon security is an ominous development.”
But how do these points and the overarching argument that emerges from them stand up in context?
That context is this: Israel is at war with an Iranian backed Hamas, an Islamist group bent on Israel’s destruction; when Israel left Gaza and Gaza was under Fatah’s governance, such as it was, it employed no embargo; but after Hamas violently and murderously wrested control of Gaza from Fatah, it embarked on bombing and rocketing Israel, limited, in large part, by the limits of its weaponry; Israel then took steps to protect its citizenry, Jew and Arab alike, including the embargo to staunch the inflow of war materials, as did Egypt, with the embargo being legal under international law; to be functional the embargo at a minimum entails inspecting shipments and extracting war materials and then letting through non war materials; the Free Gaza Movement has no concern for the security threat to Israel, which the broken embargo makes real; and, so, with some succor from Turkey and operationally driven by a jihadist organization with ties to al-Qaeda, and with some useful idiots on board, the Mavi Marmara became the vessel with which either to break the embargo or, hopefully, die trying; Israeli attempts to forestall the sailing, and then its pleas, warnings, offers after inspection to deliver any humanitarian cargo, and threats fell on purposefully deaf ears as the jihadis had a twofold purpose, to which the delivery of humanitarian goods was sheer pretext:
1. run the embargo and thereby help lay a foundation for breaking it by breaking Israeli resolve; and / or
2. foment an incident leading to “civilian death”, world condemnation and increased international pressure, more Goldstoneism, and finally the imposition of terms on Israel in tandem with the intensification of its status as a pariah among nations.
Given this context, what do Wieseltier’s paragraphs two and three points, and the argument they raise, come to?
Following my numbering of Wieseltier’s points I say against them:
1. Those driving the embargo breaking operation calculated the young Israeli soldiers’ reaction to an attack on them of unexpected ferocity. The real point here is the opposite of Wieseltier’s. The jihadis baited the young soldiers’ reaction in expectation of it. It was the soldiers, armed with paint guns, and their command, who did not expect the ferocity of the attack. (The deaths of any useful idiots on board form another issue. But they put themselves in harm’s way by accompanying, and trying to facilitate, the war like act of breaking the embargo. And here again, as in Cast Lead, jihad was only too ready to use civilian shields and deaths for its own strategic and tactical purposes.)
2(a) The notion that Israel shouldn’t have obliged the “activists” is pious coming from a secluded literary editor with nothing more threatening him than the D.C. traffic, the occasional scuffle with Andrew Sullivan and other like perils. The corollary to the bromide of Wieseltier’s prescription was the maiming and death of Israel’s young soldiers and Israel's display of feckless weakness, both sacrifices on the altar of Wieseltier’s acontextual abstraction. On board, things were real, even without Andrew Sullivan. Without any fighting back, the “activists” and the “civilians”—about who, the “civilians”, more soon—would have maimed and murdered to any extent possible.
2(b) If by non-obliging, Wieseltier means the initial higher command decision to interdict in the first place, what would the consequences of not-obliging have been: allowing the ship to break the embargo with impunity; creating a kind of template for the further breaking of it; rendering the embargo dysfunctional; the unimpeded inflow of war material; the consequences of that for Israeli citizens, Jew and Arab alike; Hamas enabled to do its relatively unencumbered will?
3. So, stipulating for argument’s sake the operational failures of the interdiction, the locution “tragic misunderstanding” is precious. Putting to the analytical side the tragedy of the loss of life as a necessary condition of war, “tragic misunderstanding” as formulated here by Wieseltier isn’t only precious, it has the vice of smuggling in an implicit and inapposite moral equivalence, a tragedy of misunderstanding on both sides.
But against that implicit moral equivalence, there is in this incident, misunderstandings granted, a clear immoral hierarchy and an equally clear moral hierarchy. Those clarities ought not to be occluded. Paramount evil resided in the jihadist driven project only too willing to lay life—Israeli and Jihadist and “armed” civilian—to waste in furtherance of its ends. Morally, in context, Israel has nothing for which to apologize, whatever mistakes it operationally made. The leap from those mistakes to the railing against the justice and wisdom of the interdiction and the included issue of the young Israeli soldiers defending themselves against maiming and death, granting even possibly some disproportion in the immediate circumstances, trashes context and makes no case. The intended interdiction and included self defence were neither, to invert Wiesletier, unjust or unwise.
4. It is hard to understand both Wieseltier’s notion of civilians “‘armed’ with metal bars and a knife” and their deaths being the “important point”. The important point, I argue, is, rather, to understand how context informs where to draw the moral lines here. With those drawn lines understood, then one can go forward to deal with Wieseltier’s concern over “Operation Make the World Hate Us.” As to the "'armed' civilians”: not only are their deaths not the “important point”, but, more, I feel Wieseltier is uncharacteristically disingenuous in under describing them to argue his bad thesis for at least two reasons:
1. so armed, and with maiming and killing on their minds, these "civilians" lost their civilianality and became part of the machinery of a war like effort to break the embargo; and
2. more generally, Wieseltier makes a hash of any meaningful distinction between fighters and non fighters by assimilating these armed to civilians.
5. So, in precise antithesis to Wieseltier, in context, self defence—which is to say the young soldiers’ and Israel’s too—and asymmetricality provide an understanding of the deaths of those armed who attacked. The battle on board was, in context, warfare, or, at least, akin to warfare. And young Israeli soldiers being beaten, stabbed, thrown overboard, and shot at comes within my definition of “the physical sort.”
6. Acts furthering the Free Gaza Movement are not in themselves, obviously, existential threats to Israel. But, in context, they are more than “troublesome”. In context, these acts carry within them the seeds of breaking the embargo, allowing, I repeat, thereby the inflow of war material to Hamas who will use same to kill Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike. Interdiction was a proportionate response to the unrelenting determination of the Jihadists to run the embargo, for as wrong as the interdiction may have gone. Any possible stepping, by the young Israeli soldiers, over the line of proportionality is understandable in the circumstances and was done in pursuit of a lawful objective.
7. Finally, Wieseltier is just flat wrong when he concludes that the interdiction was not undertaken in relation to a threat to Israel’s security. In context, the attempt at running the Mavi Marmara through the embargo was nothing but. It may be that not seeing that, as Wieseltier does not, is an ominous development
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Souter, Scalia and Originalism
Blast at the Past
David Souter’s parting shot against Justice Scalia.
E.J. Dionne Jr. June 3, 2010 | 12:00 am
WASHINGTON — It should become the philosophical shot heard 'round the country. In a remarkable speech that received far too little attention, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter took direct aim at the conservatives' favorite theory of judging.
Souter's verdict: It "has only a tenuous connection to reality."
At issue is "originalism," an approach to reading the Constitution whose seeming precision has given conservatives a polemical advantage over the liberals' "Living Constitution" idea that appears to let judges say our founding document means whatever they want it to mean.
Justice Antonin Scalia, the court's leading orginalist, summarized his opponents' attitude toward the Constitution with four words: "You know, it morphs.
Now, thanks to Souter's commencement address at Harvard last week, Scalia's critics have fighting words of their own. Souter, who did not mention Scalia by name, underscored "how egregiously it misses the point to think of judges in constitutional cases as just sitting there reading constitutional phrases fairly and looking at reported facts objectively to produce their judgments."
The problem is not only that "constitutions have a lot of general language in them in order to be useful as constitutions," but also that the U.S. Constitution "contains values that may very well exist in tension with each other, not in harmony."
This means that "hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another."
Souter attacked the fatal flaw of originalism -- which he relabeled the "fair reading model"—by suggesting that it would have led the Supreme Court in 1954 not to its Brown v. Board of Education decision overturning legal segregation but to an affirmation of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling upholding "separate but equal" public facilities.
"For those whose exclusive norm of constitutional judging is merely fair reading of language applied to facts objectively viewed, Brown must either be flat-out wrong or a very mystifying decision," Souter said.
"The language of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws did not change between 1896 and 1954, and it would be very hard to say that the obvious facts on which Plessy was based had changed," Souter argued. "Actually, the best clue to the difference between the cases is the dates they were decided, which I think lead to the explanation for their divergent results."
Yes, the Supreme Court changed because the nation's understanding of race changed.
Souter notes that "the members of the court in the Plessy case remembered the day when human slavery was the law in much of the land. To that generation, the formal equality of an identical railroad car meant enormous progress. But the generation in power in 1954 looked at enforced separation without the revolting background of slavery. ..."
"Did the judges of 1954 cross some limit of legitimacy into lawmaking by stating a conclusion that you will not find written in the Constitution?" Souter asked rhetorically. "Was it activism to act based on the current meaning of facts that at a purely objective level were about the same as Plessy's facts 60 years before?"
Obviously, Souter doesn't think so. But while conservative scholars such as Michael McConnell have constructed ingenious arguments to show how originalism could accommodate Brown, it's hard to see judges guided by that doctrine reaching as boldly as the 1954 Warren court did.
Contrast Souter's view with Scalia's mocking reference to those who "think the Constitution is some exhortation to give effect to the most fundamental values of the society as those values change from year to year." Well, between 1896 and 1954, they did change.
The core problem with originalism is that it overlooks what the historian Gordon Wood has observed about the Founders' work: that it is exceedingly difficult to discern the "true meaning" of the Constitution since it is the product "not of closet philosophizing but of contentious political polemics."
As a result, "many of our most cherished principles of constitutionalism associated with the Founding were in fact created inadvertently."
Souter is right to say that "the Constitution embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways. We want order and security, and we also want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well."
Because these desires clash, courts are "forced to choose between them, between one constitutional good thing and another one." Souter's view admits that this is what judges do. Originalists pretend they're not choosing. Which approach is the more trustworthy?
David Souter’s parting shot against Justice Scalia.
E.J. Dionne Jr. June 3, 2010 | 12:00 am
WASHINGTON — It should become the philosophical shot heard 'round the country. In a remarkable speech that received far too little attention, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter took direct aim at the conservatives' favorite theory of judging.
Souter's verdict: It "has only a tenuous connection to reality."
At issue is "originalism," an approach to reading the Constitution whose seeming precision has given conservatives a polemical advantage over the liberals' "Living Constitution" idea that appears to let judges say our founding document means whatever they want it to mean.
Justice Antonin Scalia, the court's leading orginalist, summarized his opponents' attitude toward the Constitution with four words: "You know, it morphs.
Now, thanks to Souter's commencement address at Harvard last week, Scalia's critics have fighting words of their own. Souter, who did not mention Scalia by name, underscored "how egregiously it misses the point to think of judges in constitutional cases as just sitting there reading constitutional phrases fairly and looking at reported facts objectively to produce their judgments."
The problem is not only that "constitutions have a lot of general language in them in order to be useful as constitutions," but also that the U.S. Constitution "contains values that may very well exist in tension with each other, not in harmony."
This means that "hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another."
Souter attacked the fatal flaw of originalism -- which he relabeled the "fair reading model"—by suggesting that it would have led the Supreme Court in 1954 not to its Brown v. Board of Education decision overturning legal segregation but to an affirmation of the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling upholding "separate but equal" public facilities.
"For those whose exclusive norm of constitutional judging is merely fair reading of language applied to facts objectively viewed, Brown must either be flat-out wrong or a very mystifying decision," Souter said.
"The language of the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection of the laws did not change between 1896 and 1954, and it would be very hard to say that the obvious facts on which Plessy was based had changed," Souter argued. "Actually, the best clue to the difference between the cases is the dates they were decided, which I think lead to the explanation for their divergent results."
Yes, the Supreme Court changed because the nation's understanding of race changed.
Souter notes that "the members of the court in the Plessy case remembered the day when human slavery was the law in much of the land. To that generation, the formal equality of an identical railroad car meant enormous progress. But the generation in power in 1954 looked at enforced separation without the revolting background of slavery. ..."
"Did the judges of 1954 cross some limit of legitimacy into lawmaking by stating a conclusion that you will not find written in the Constitution?" Souter asked rhetorically. "Was it activism to act based on the current meaning of facts that at a purely objective level were about the same as Plessy's facts 60 years before?"
Obviously, Souter doesn't think so. But while conservative scholars such as Michael McConnell have constructed ingenious arguments to show how originalism could accommodate Brown, it's hard to see judges guided by that doctrine reaching as boldly as the 1954 Warren court did.
Contrast Souter's view with Scalia's mocking reference to those who "think the Constitution is some exhortation to give effect to the most fundamental values of the society as those values change from year to year." Well, between 1896 and 1954, they did change.
The core problem with originalism is that it overlooks what the historian Gordon Wood has observed about the Founders' work: that it is exceedingly difficult to discern the "true meaning" of the Constitution since it is the product "not of closet philosophizing but of contentious political polemics."
As a result, "many of our most cherished principles of constitutionalism associated with the Founding were in fact created inadvertently."
Souter is right to say that "the Constitution embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways. We want order and security, and we also want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well."
Because these desires clash, courts are "forced to choose between them, between one constitutional good thing and another one." Souter's view admits that this is what judges do. Originalists pretend they're not choosing. Which approach is the more trustworthy?
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